FROM THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
FROM THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
EDITED BY SAM SMITH
Since 1964, Washington's most unofficial source
E-MAIL: mailto:news@prorev.com
WORD
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future. - Albert Camus
POLITICS
2004 WASN'T NADER'S FAULT, EITHER
CLINTON'S MIDNIGHT PARDON PAL BEHIND OIL DEALS
http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/37665.htm
NILES LATHEM, NY POST - New details of billionaire trader Marc Rich's shady oil deals under the U.N. oil-for-food program are emerging, The Post has learned. These include deals with front companies that have connections to Saddam Hussein's underground financial network.
In particular, prosecutors are probing four suspicious deals that took place in February through April 2001. In these cases, Rich was listed as a secondary buyer of oil contracts originally allocated by Saddam to mysterious French and Egyptian companies. The questionable deals began a month after sanctions-buster Rich, a convicted tax dodger, received his midnight pardon from then-President Bill Clinton. . .
Rich, who lives in Switzerland and has not returned to the United States despite the pardon, denied in a statement issued by his company last week that he was involved in any illegal activities.
HEALTH & SCIENCE
RHODE ISLAND SHOWS THE WAY ON DRUG IMPORTS
PROGRESS REPORT - "Rhode Island has become what is believed to be the first state in the nation to approve regulations that allow its residents to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada," the Associated Press reports. "Barring a legal challenge, the new rules will permit residents to import through the mail or by private shipper prescription medications from Canada." Last month, a White House task force released a 130-page report on prescription medicines that acknowledged that commercial imports from Canada are safe, and President Bush has promised the American people that he was awaiting the conclusions of the task force to make a decision on importing drugs from Canada, saying, "If they're safe, they're coming." But in a December 2004 letter to Congressional leaders, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tommy Thompson and Commerce Secretary Donald Evans said that if Congress were to pass a drug reimportation bill that didn't meet a detailed set of requirements designed to protect the pharmaceutical industry, the president would likely veto the bill.
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/pp.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=124597
THE MEDIACRACY
CLUE
THIS MAY HELP TO EXPLAIN some of last fall's results. A study of TV airtime between 7 and 9 am found that while the campaign got three times as much coverage as the Iraq war, the covering of the Laci Peterson murder and Michael Jackson together got more coverage than Iraq. Martha Stewart, by the way, bested the 9/1l Commission by 17 minutes.
DRUG BUSTS
KEITH STROUP LEAVES POT LOBBY
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46033-2005Jan3.html
PETER CARLSON WASHINGTON POST - [Keith Stroup] pulls a black-and-white photo off the wall. It shows him in jeans and a jacket addressing a crowd of hippies in front of the White House in the '70s. "We used to have a July 4 smoke-in every year in Lafayette Park," he says. "I like this just as a period piece. Look at those ragtag folks! Look at the guys without their shirts on!" He points to a poster on the wall and reads its message aloud: "It's only a weed that turns to a flower in your mind." He laughs. "That's a period piece, too." . . .
Back in Washington, he was lobbying for a bill to ban federal funding of a controversial program that sprayed Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat, shown to cause lung damage in people who smoked the tainted weed. Stroup asked [Peter] Bourne, Carter's drug adviser, to support the bill. Bourne refused. Stroup was outraged. To him, it was a moral issue: The feds were deliberately poisoning pot smokers! Seeking revenge, Stroup leaked a secret to newspaper columnist Jack Anderson in July 1978: Bourne had snorted cocaine at NORML's 1977 Christmas party. And Stroup revealed the names of a couple of witnesses.
RELIGION & ITS ALTERNATIVES
THE AMERICAN TRADITION: HARMONY BETWEEN FAITH AND REASON
WELD HENSHAW - Is reason incompatible with faith? Do those who say science has immutable rules have any religious harbors? Indeed they do. There are faiths proud to call themselves "liberal," faiths at one with science and its method, faiths committed also to tolerance and acceptance of all. People forget, or never knew, that the divinity of Jesus and the doctrine of a triune God came more than 300 years after Jesus' birth. Before Constantine made Christianity the state religion of his empire, many Christians regarded Jesus as a human being with human strengths and weaknesses. This view of Jesus is preserved in Islam, whose adherents revere him as a great teacher, second only to The Prophet, who, too, is "only" human. In Sixteenth Century England, no sooner did Henry VIII break with Roman Catholic Church, than many of his subjects agitated for the abolition of bishops, the pomp and the religious images that remained in their churches. These Puritans were persecuted; some emigrated to a new life in a new world. In New England, each Puritan and Pilgrim congregation was autonomous, free to hire and fire its minister. Soon some Puritans came to despise all miracles and unprovable doctrines, even the Trinity, the Virgin birth and miracles in Christian lore not scientifically possible. This led to a split in the Puritan family. Some congregations, conservative and traditional, kept many aspects of their earlier belief systems. Others, boldly monotheistic, ceased to proclaim the divinity of Jesus or the realty of a Holy Ghost. These "Unitarians" quickly came to be the leaders of their communities. There were also the Quakers, dominant in Pennsylvania. In the south were the Deists, who saw a creator who made our universe but exercised no control over our existences. By the time of our Revolution, most of our leaders were largely drawn from these and similar sects, including all our early presidents and the authors of our founding documents. These religions all fostered beliefs that a faith, to be worthy and true, must be in close harmony with science and reason. Their adherents also demanded a complete separation of church and state, having seen the grotesque histories of Rome, the Church of England and their own Cromwell. One looks in vain for any early leader of American thought or politics who accepted the "razor" of William of Ockham, who, with a clean stroke classified issues as "religious"- exempt from nature's laws or "secular," bound to science and logic. Rational religion received a boost with the emergence of brilliant intellectuals. Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, the Alcotts, Channing, Whitman, Dickinson and a Sunday school teacher named Longfellow articulated a secular scripture for an America not hobbled by superstition nor hierarchical clergy interposed between individuals and their Creator. Rational religion was the wave of America's future. Alas, there was a hitch. Attendance at services ceased to be legally or socially obligatory. Religions whose freethinkers scoffed at notions of hell, at post-mortem trials and judgments, at purgatories and a divine scorekeeper, well, they could just as easily stay home. The powerful ideas of Deists, Unitarians, Quakers, and Universalists (who found divine essence in everything and believed in salvation for all) live on and perhaps are still the strongest strain in our national character. The other descendants of the Puritans, the Congregationalists, together with the Church of Christ fused a Christian faith that was fully open to tolerance and science. The Unitarians merged with the Universalists nearly a half century ago and the Congregationalists merged with the Church of Christ more recently. Surely, a majority of Americans believe with practitioners of liberal religion in the inherent worth of every individual, in justice, equality and compassion in relationships, in acceptance of others and encouragement of personal growth in our communities, in a free search for truth and meaning, in the right of conscience and democracy, in fostering a world community of peace, liberty and justice and a profound awareness and respect that we humans are parts of a vast interdependent web of existence. So how can this worthy though silent majority play a more influential role? By meeting with one another, by "congregating" on a weekly basis, by discovering how strong we are and how truly good is the American character, and, above all, how there can be a harmony between faith and reason.
WELD HENSHAWmailto:fanm@suscom-maine.net
POST CONSTITUTIONAL AMERICA .
.
BRINGING PEACE AND FREEDOM TO AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOLS
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0103-02.htm
BALTIMORE SUN - A few days before her holiday break, South River High School junior Emily Hawse took a three-hour standardized test offered by military officials that suggests possible careers for students while helping to identify promising recruits. Hawse, 16, of Davidsonville said she did not realize until the day of the exam that it had a military link. She said students were told not to go to the Edgewater school that morning if they didn't want to take the test, called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. . .
At a time of heightened awareness of military recruitment, the aptitude test offered free by the Defense Department is drawing criticism. Although Baltimore area school districts have made the test available for years, some Anne Arundel County students and their parents complained recently when the test was scheduled during class time at some schools, and it was unclear to some students that they could opt out.
The tests have also raised concerns in other places. In a Buffalo, N.Y., suburb, a high school junior refused to take the exam. And critics of the program say they field inquiries from all over the country. They say military recruiters use the test to identify students with skills that would be useful in the armed forces. . .
OTHER NEWS
CLICHE CHALLENGE
OUR EVER WATCHFUL reader, Hank Chapot in Berkeley CA, has broken the bank with the Cliche Challenge. Not only did he come up with seven new cliches, three of them made the top ten list. Most disturbing to this journal, the number one cliche in English at the moment is 'feedback,' a term we have long used for our letters column. It is dead for that purpose as of this moment.
We have reviewed 14 cliches and found their usage increasing an average of nine million times. This is not a good sign and further proof of the collapse of American culture. Many of these cliches - such as world class, credibility, proactive, and sustainable development - actually describe qualities or actions in decline in our society, supporting the assumption that the more a cliche is used, the less likely it is to be relevant.
Particularly disturbing is the rise of 'intellectual property' since this is a term foisted upon the culture by greedy lawyers and corporations. While not a cliche, another example of this despicable influence is the growing use of abbreviations after a name in a news story, i.e.'the Society for the Proliferation of Pederasty (SPP).' There is no journalistic precedent for this practice and stems from the evil influence of lawyers and bureaucrats upon the press. Any self-respecting journalist should refuse to engage in this reprehensible habit.
TOP TEN CLICHES
[Number of Google hits in past three months]
Feedback - 196,000,000
Impact - 71,500,000
Prior to 48,000,000 up 36,500,000
Focused - 32,900,000
Empire, imperialism, or imperial - 31,300,000 UP 16,400
Real time - 28,000,000 UP 14,100,000
Context - 42,400,000 UP 28,600
Intellectual property - 13,400,000
Prior to - 11,500,000
Inappropriate - 11,500,000 up 6,500,000
http://prorev.com/cliche.htm
INDICATORS
GUN OWNERSHIP
EDITOR & PUBLISHER - A Gallup Poll released this morning reveals that the average American owns 1.7 guns, with the average gun owner possessing 4.4 of them. . . One out of three American women say they own a gun. That's not much below the overall mark of 40% for all American adults. . . More than half (53%) of Republicans own guns, compared with 36% of political independents and 31% of Democrats. Whites are more likely than nonwhites to own (44% and 24%, respectively), according to Gallup. Residents of the South are significantly more likely than those living in other regions to report owning a gun. More than half of those living in rural areas (56%) own a gun, compared with 40% of suburbanites and 29% of those living in urban areas. From 1959 through 1993, an average of 47% of Americans reported having a gun in their homes. Since that time, household gun ownership has dropped to an average of 40%.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000745373
BOOKSHELF
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DRUG COMPANIES: How They Deceive Us and What to do About it Marcia Angell M.D
OVERDOSED AMERICA:The Broken Promise of American MedicineJohn Abramson, M.D.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jan2005/drug-j03.shtml
JOANNE LAURIER, WORLD SOCIALIST - Major pharmaceutical companies have been hit recently by an array of scandals regarding the safety of certain “ blockbuster” drugs. . . Other drugs, including over-the-counter remedies, are also being scrutinized for severe, unwanted side-effects. On December 18 the Detroit Free Press released its own analysis concluding that many thousands of Americans are getting sick and dying from prescription drugs prematurely entering the market.
Two recently-published books provide valuable insights and describe in devastating detail the operations of the pharmaceutical industry - the consequences of its domination of government agencies and the medical establishment.
A former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, [Marcia] Angell witnessed the work of that prestigious journal come increasingly under the influence of the drug industry. She claims in the volume’s introduction that the pharmaceuticals began exercising “a level of control over the way research is done that was unheard of when I first came to the journal, and the aim was clearly to load the dice to make sure their drugs looked good.”
The author of Overdosed America, Abramson, is a family doctor on the clinical faculty of Harvard Medical School. He was prompted to write his book because of what he perceived as the corporate takeover of medical research. Trained as a statistician, he “ researched the research,” and found that “even the most respected medical journals seemed more like infomercials whose purpose was to promote their sponsors’ products rather than to search for the best ways to improve people’s health.” . . .
Angell cites some of the more egregious examples of direct-to-consumer advertising. DTC was made legal in 1981 and extended in 1997 by allowing that only major side effects and contraindications had to be included in the media ads. The sky was then the limit: Glaxo Smith Kline and its co-marketer Bayer signed a deal with the National Football League to promote Levitra, the me-too erectile dysfunction competitor of Viagra. Angell quips: “In fact, to watch the 2004 Super Bowl was to wonder whether football causes erectile dysfunction.” Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, then phased out its old and tired promoter Bob Dole in favor of baseball star Rafael Palmeiro. The company also sponsors a Viagra car on the NASCAR circuit.
FURTHERMORE. . .
WASH POST: THE FIGHT WITHIN THE AFL-CIO
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45642-2005Jan3.html
EDITED BY SAM SMITH
Since 1964, Washington's most unofficial source
E-MAIL: mailto:news@prorev.com
WORD
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future. - Albert Camus
POLITICS
2004 WASN'T NADER'S FAULT, EITHER
CLINTON'S MIDNIGHT PARDON PAL BEHIND OIL DEALS
http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/37665.htm
NILES LATHEM, NY POST - New details of billionaire trader Marc Rich's shady oil deals under the U.N. oil-for-food program are emerging, The Post has learned. These include deals with front companies that have connections to Saddam Hussein's underground financial network.
In particular, prosecutors are probing four suspicious deals that took place in February through April 2001. In these cases, Rich was listed as a secondary buyer of oil contracts originally allocated by Saddam to mysterious French and Egyptian companies. The questionable deals began a month after sanctions-buster Rich, a convicted tax dodger, received his midnight pardon from then-President Bill Clinton. . .
Rich, who lives in Switzerland and has not returned to the United States despite the pardon, denied in a statement issued by his company last week that he was involved in any illegal activities.
HEALTH & SCIENCE
RHODE ISLAND SHOWS THE WAY ON DRUG IMPORTS
PROGRESS REPORT - "Rhode Island has become what is believed to be the first state in the nation to approve regulations that allow its residents to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada," the Associated Press reports. "Barring a legal challenge, the new rules will permit residents to import through the mail or by private shipper prescription medications from Canada." Last month, a White House task force released a 130-page report on prescription medicines that acknowledged that commercial imports from Canada are safe, and President Bush has promised the American people that he was awaiting the conclusions of the task force to make a decision on importing drugs from Canada, saying, "If they're safe, they're coming." But in a December 2004 letter to Congressional leaders, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tommy Thompson and Commerce Secretary Donald Evans said that if Congress were to pass a drug reimportation bill that didn't meet a detailed set of requirements designed to protect the pharmaceutical industry, the president would likely veto the bill.
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/pp.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=124597
THE MEDIACRACY
CLUE
THIS MAY HELP TO EXPLAIN some of last fall's results. A study of TV airtime between 7 and 9 am found that while the campaign got three times as much coverage as the Iraq war, the covering of the Laci Peterson murder and Michael Jackson together got more coverage than Iraq. Martha Stewart, by the way, bested the 9/1l Commission by 17 minutes.
DRUG BUSTS
KEITH STROUP LEAVES POT LOBBY
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46033-2005Jan3.html
PETER CARLSON WASHINGTON POST - [Keith Stroup] pulls a black-and-white photo off the wall. It shows him in jeans and a jacket addressing a crowd of hippies in front of the White House in the '70s. "We used to have a July 4 smoke-in every year in Lafayette Park," he says. "I like this just as a period piece. Look at those ragtag folks! Look at the guys without their shirts on!" He points to a poster on the wall and reads its message aloud: "It's only a weed that turns to a flower in your mind." He laughs. "That's a period piece, too." . . .
Back in Washington, he was lobbying for a bill to ban federal funding of a controversial program that sprayed Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat, shown to cause lung damage in people who smoked the tainted weed. Stroup asked [Peter] Bourne, Carter's drug adviser, to support the bill. Bourne refused. Stroup was outraged. To him, it was a moral issue: The feds were deliberately poisoning pot smokers! Seeking revenge, Stroup leaked a secret to newspaper columnist Jack Anderson in July 1978: Bourne had snorted cocaine at NORML's 1977 Christmas party. And Stroup revealed the names of a couple of witnesses.
RELIGION & ITS ALTERNATIVES
THE AMERICAN TRADITION: HARMONY BETWEEN FAITH AND REASON
WELD HENSHAW - Is reason incompatible with faith? Do those who say science has immutable rules have any religious harbors? Indeed they do. There are faiths proud to call themselves "liberal," faiths at one with science and its method, faiths committed also to tolerance and acceptance of all. People forget, or never knew, that the divinity of Jesus and the doctrine of a triune God came more than 300 years after Jesus' birth. Before Constantine made Christianity the state religion of his empire, many Christians regarded Jesus as a human being with human strengths and weaknesses. This view of Jesus is preserved in Islam, whose adherents revere him as a great teacher, second only to The Prophet, who, too, is "only" human. In Sixteenth Century England, no sooner did Henry VIII break with Roman Catholic Church, than many of his subjects agitated for the abolition of bishops, the pomp and the religious images that remained in their churches. These Puritans were persecuted; some emigrated to a new life in a new world. In New England, each Puritan and Pilgrim congregation was autonomous, free to hire and fire its minister. Soon some Puritans came to despise all miracles and unprovable doctrines, even the Trinity, the Virgin birth and miracles in Christian lore not scientifically possible. This led to a split in the Puritan family. Some congregations, conservative and traditional, kept many aspects of their earlier belief systems. Others, boldly monotheistic, ceased to proclaim the divinity of Jesus or the realty of a Holy Ghost. These "Unitarians" quickly came to be the leaders of their communities. There were also the Quakers, dominant in Pennsylvania. In the south were the Deists, who saw a creator who made our universe but exercised no control over our existences. By the time of our Revolution, most of our leaders were largely drawn from these and similar sects, including all our early presidents and the authors of our founding documents. These religions all fostered beliefs that a faith, to be worthy and true, must be in close harmony with science and reason. Their adherents also demanded a complete separation of church and state, having seen the grotesque histories of Rome, the Church of England and their own Cromwell. One looks in vain for any early leader of American thought or politics who accepted the "razor" of William of Ockham, who, with a clean stroke classified issues as "religious"- exempt from nature's laws or "secular," bound to science and logic. Rational religion received a boost with the emergence of brilliant intellectuals. Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, the Alcotts, Channing, Whitman, Dickinson and a Sunday school teacher named Longfellow articulated a secular scripture for an America not hobbled by superstition nor hierarchical clergy interposed between individuals and their Creator. Rational religion was the wave of America's future. Alas, there was a hitch. Attendance at services ceased to be legally or socially obligatory. Religions whose freethinkers scoffed at notions of hell, at post-mortem trials and judgments, at purgatories and a divine scorekeeper, well, they could just as easily stay home. The powerful ideas of Deists, Unitarians, Quakers, and Universalists (who found divine essence in everything and believed in salvation for all) live on and perhaps are still the strongest strain in our national character. The other descendants of the Puritans, the Congregationalists, together with the Church of Christ fused a Christian faith that was fully open to tolerance and science. The Unitarians merged with the Universalists nearly a half century ago and the Congregationalists merged with the Church of Christ more recently. Surely, a majority of Americans believe with practitioners of liberal religion in the inherent worth of every individual, in justice, equality and compassion in relationships, in acceptance of others and encouragement of personal growth in our communities, in a free search for truth and meaning, in the right of conscience and democracy, in fostering a world community of peace, liberty and justice and a profound awareness and respect that we humans are parts of a vast interdependent web of existence. So how can this worthy though silent majority play a more influential role? By meeting with one another, by "congregating" on a weekly basis, by discovering how strong we are and how truly good is the American character, and, above all, how there can be a harmony between faith and reason.
WELD HENSHAWmailto:fanm@suscom-maine.net
POST CONSTITUTIONAL AMERICA .
.
BRINGING PEACE AND FREEDOM TO AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOLS
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0103-02.htm
BALTIMORE SUN - A few days before her holiday break, South River High School junior Emily Hawse took a three-hour standardized test offered by military officials that suggests possible careers for students while helping to identify promising recruits. Hawse, 16, of Davidsonville said she did not realize until the day of the exam that it had a military link. She said students were told not to go to the Edgewater school that morning if they didn't want to take the test, called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. . .
At a time of heightened awareness of military recruitment, the aptitude test offered free by the Defense Department is drawing criticism. Although Baltimore area school districts have made the test available for years, some Anne Arundel County students and their parents complained recently when the test was scheduled during class time at some schools, and it was unclear to some students that they could opt out.
The tests have also raised concerns in other places. In a Buffalo, N.Y., suburb, a high school junior refused to take the exam. And critics of the program say they field inquiries from all over the country. They say military recruiters use the test to identify students with skills that would be useful in the armed forces. . .
OTHER NEWS
CLICHE CHALLENGE
OUR EVER WATCHFUL reader, Hank Chapot in Berkeley CA, has broken the bank with the Cliche Challenge. Not only did he come up with seven new cliches, three of them made the top ten list. Most disturbing to this journal, the number one cliche in English at the moment is 'feedback,' a term we have long used for our letters column. It is dead for that purpose as of this moment.
We have reviewed 14 cliches and found their usage increasing an average of nine million times. This is not a good sign and further proof of the collapse of American culture. Many of these cliches - such as world class, credibility, proactive, and sustainable development - actually describe qualities or actions in decline in our society, supporting the assumption that the more a cliche is used, the less likely it is to be relevant.
Particularly disturbing is the rise of 'intellectual property' since this is a term foisted upon the culture by greedy lawyers and corporations. While not a cliche, another example of this despicable influence is the growing use of abbreviations after a name in a news story, i.e.'the Society for the Proliferation of Pederasty (SPP).' There is no journalistic precedent for this practice and stems from the evil influence of lawyers and bureaucrats upon the press. Any self-respecting journalist should refuse to engage in this reprehensible habit.
TOP TEN CLICHES
[Number of Google hits in past three months]
Feedback - 196,000,000
Impact - 71,500,000
Prior to 48,000,000 up 36,500,000
Focused - 32,900,000
Empire, imperialism, or imperial - 31,300,000 UP 16,400
Real time - 28,000,000 UP 14,100,000
Context - 42,400,000 UP 28,600
Intellectual property - 13,400,000
Prior to - 11,500,000
Inappropriate - 11,500,000 up 6,500,000
http://prorev.com/cliche.htm
INDICATORS
GUN OWNERSHIP
EDITOR & PUBLISHER - A Gallup Poll released this morning reveals that the average American owns 1.7 guns, with the average gun owner possessing 4.4 of them. . . One out of three American women say they own a gun. That's not much below the overall mark of 40% for all American adults. . . More than half (53%) of Republicans own guns, compared with 36% of political independents and 31% of Democrats. Whites are more likely than nonwhites to own (44% and 24%, respectively), according to Gallup. Residents of the South are significantly more likely than those living in other regions to report owning a gun. More than half of those living in rural areas (56%) own a gun, compared with 40% of suburbanites and 29% of those living in urban areas. From 1959 through 1993, an average of 47% of Americans reported having a gun in their homes. Since that time, household gun ownership has dropped to an average of 40%.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000745373
BOOKSHELF
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DRUG COMPANIES: How They Deceive Us and What to do About it Marcia Angell M.D
OVERDOSED AMERICA:The Broken Promise of American MedicineJohn Abramson, M.D.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jan2005/drug-j03.shtml
JOANNE LAURIER, WORLD SOCIALIST - Major pharmaceutical companies have been hit recently by an array of scandals regarding the safety of certain “ blockbuster” drugs. . . Other drugs, including over-the-counter remedies, are also being scrutinized for severe, unwanted side-effects. On December 18 the Detroit Free Press released its own analysis concluding that many thousands of Americans are getting sick and dying from prescription drugs prematurely entering the market.
Two recently-published books provide valuable insights and describe in devastating detail the operations of the pharmaceutical industry - the consequences of its domination of government agencies and the medical establishment.
A former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, [Marcia] Angell witnessed the work of that prestigious journal come increasingly under the influence of the drug industry. She claims in the volume’s introduction that the pharmaceuticals began exercising “a level of control over the way research is done that was unheard of when I first came to the journal, and the aim was clearly to load the dice to make sure their drugs looked good.”
The author of Overdosed America, Abramson, is a family doctor on the clinical faculty of Harvard Medical School. He was prompted to write his book because of what he perceived as the corporate takeover of medical research. Trained as a statistician, he “ researched the research,” and found that “even the most respected medical journals seemed more like infomercials whose purpose was to promote their sponsors’ products rather than to search for the best ways to improve people’s health.” . . .
Angell cites some of the more egregious examples of direct-to-consumer advertising. DTC was made legal in 1981 and extended in 1997 by allowing that only major side effects and contraindications had to be included in the media ads. The sky was then the limit: Glaxo Smith Kline and its co-marketer Bayer signed a deal with the National Football League to promote Levitra, the me-too erectile dysfunction competitor of Viagra. Angell quips: “In fact, to watch the 2004 Super Bowl was to wonder whether football causes erectile dysfunction.” Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, then phased out its old and tired promoter Bob Dole in favor of baseball star Rafael Palmeiro. The company also sponsors a Viagra car on the NASCAR circuit.
FURTHERMORE. . .
WASH POST: THE FIGHT WITHIN THE AFL-CIO
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45642-2005Jan3.html
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