Do you use drugs? The issue with US health policy on legal drugs.

Prescriptions vs Profit

Do you use drugs? Most likely yes. 

There are about 75% of Americans being prescribed a drug from hospitals or their doctors. Nancy Reagan states say that all drugs are bad, so anything you are currently taking is bad.

You see an issue here?

The US drug war, specifically here with "Just Say No" is failing because we (DEA/DOJ) label and educate that all drugs are bad.That is just not the case, with a legal drug market in the United States topping 85 billion dollars in profit. This is just an element of the over 1 trillion dollar worldwide industry. Yet there are over 100,000 Americans dying from prescription drugs from known side-effects, with tens of thousands of people dying from taking drugs as per their doctors orders.

The ironic part? No one has ever died from taking marijuana (the most widely abused illegal drug in the US)

(Source: Sherry L. Murphy, BS; Jiaquan Xu, MD; and Kenneth D. Kochanek, MA, Division of Vital Statistics, "Deaths: Final Data for 2010," (Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control), Vol. 61, Number 4, May 8, 2013, Tables 9 and 10. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_04.pdf - See more at: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Causes_of_Death#sthash.1sVJ8ESn.1XN4ggvl.dpuf)

So where has the medical industry gone wrong?

First we need to redefine what we are talking about here. Pharmaceutical drugs, or simply pharmaceuticals according to Princeton University is something that treats or prevents or alleviates the symptoms of disease. This definition takes into account both naturally derived products as well as products created in a lab. So what makes a certain drug illegal or legal to distribute? Its in the hands of one industry, and I'll give you a clue- its not the government.

Legal drugs are controlled by major multi-billion dollar companies.  Essentially this means that the corporate world actually controls our health and well-being. Wait what about all the government policies put into effect to look out for our best interests? FDA? DEA? Well…

From Michael Moore's SiCKO

How can we trust anyone with our intake of something to treat or alleviate our issues when facts and real data are not the most influential factor in our health but rather money? Big Pharma is a term critics of the corrupt industry coined for companies such as Pfizer and Merck. Physician Ben Goldacre has altered this in his book Bad Pharma. In his book he defends the following statement.

"Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug’s life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works ad hoc, from sales reps, colleagues and journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are, too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it’s not in anyone’s financial interest to conduct any trials at all. These are ongoing problems, and although people have claimed to fix many of them, for the most party they have failed; so all of these programs persist, but worse than ever, because now people can pretend that everything is fine after all."

To be clear, this is work done on legal drugs, getting financial backing by governments and inflated prices put on to the consumer by government action. If this is the way legal drugs are evaluated, created, and considered good or bad what happens with drugs that have been illegalized? They get blacklisted through United Nations treaties from 1961, 1988 and 1971. These treaties not only reduce the potential power of care for our health, it eliminates well-needed research for those drugs. Countries like the US have little power in changing their views on illicit drugs on a Federal level due to the treaties. The DOJ as well as the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy hide behind the immutable UN treaties instead of realizing what is most needed in our drug war, research. If you are interested in how the DOJ describes this, check out the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on State vs. Federal marijuana laws.

As we try to find truth in our world through science, we need to be able to perform as many tests as we possibly can, on as much as we possibly can, to get anywhere closer to this truth. This truth is what has been lacking from the entire drug industry, legal and illegal, is unbiased- reasonable evidence behind it. Lets all stop acting like all illegal drugs are bad and all legal ones are good. That's just not the case and policy needs to change if we are going to do anything about strengthening our personal health.

I wonder how it all got so messed up? To be continued...


Along with the above links, check out this topic more in depth with the following.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/11/qa-ben-goldacre
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/its-time-for-true-transparency-of-clinical-trials-data/
http://www.wanttoknow.info/truthaboutdrugcompanies
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/jul/15/the-truth-about-the-drug-companies/?pagination=false
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12014&page=13
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/category/pharmaceuticals/
http://suewidemark.freeservers.com/naturalsupplements.htm
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/?q=node/35#sthash.heAlHAB0.ybVuqPvW.dpbs
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359644608002651
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/np040106y
http://www.michaelmoore.com/books-films/facts/sicko/facts
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2206236/
http://www.naturalnews.com/041768_Big_Pharma_death_epidemic_deadly_medications.html
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6101a3.htm
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-plant-vs-pharmaceutical-false-dichotomy/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicinal_product
http://www.economist.com/node/3429205