Drugs firms 'creating ills for every pill'

UK: Expensive new medicines are oversold when cheaper therapies or prevention would work better, say MPs

The power of Britain's multi-billion-pound drugs industry has turned this country into an over-medicalised society that believes in a pill for every ill, a Commons inquiry will claim this week.

The report will say that the billions of pounds poured into researching and promoting new drugs have fuelled an over-emphasis on medicinal cures at the expense of cheaper and better therapies, or simple prevention.

The MPs heard evidence of 'disease-mongering' drugs firms effectively inventing diseases for which they could then sell treatments, with relatively normal behaviour - from mild depression to low female sex drive - re-labelled as conditions for which drugs were supposedly necessary.

Lord Warner, the health minister responsible for medicines, admitted to the inquiry: 'I have some concerns that sometimes we do, as a society, wish to put labels on things which are just part and parcel of the human condition.'

The report from the Commons health select committee is also expected to criticise the secretive process of licensing medicines in Britain, following several safety scares in which so-called 'wonder drugs' have turned out to have serious side effects.

The common anti-depressant Seroxat was recently linked to an increased risk of suicide in teenagers, while the widely prescribed arthritis drug Vioxx was withdrawn last year over links to fatal heart attacks and strokes.

Labour's election manifesto is now expected to include a pledge to overhaul the drug licensing regime. Expert members of the government's medicines regulator will be banned from holding financial interests in drug firms to avoid potential conflicts of interest.

The seven-month inquiry follows complaints from patients' groups and senior doctors that the interests of the industry are distorting health care priorities.

Prescriptions for Seroxat tripled after it was licensed for mild depression, while it was revealed earlier this year that it was being marketed to doctors as a treatment for ill-defined 'social anxiety disorders'.

Drug firms are banned from advertising directly to patients in Britain, or offering bribes to doctors to prescribe a certain brand. However campaigners say the industry has discovered ways of 'guerrilla' promotion, including generously funding medical charities - which, the inquiry heard, raises the risk of them becoming its 'unwitting foot soldiers'.

One mental health charity, Depression Alliance, receives almost 80 per cent of its funding from drugs companies, while Arthritis Care received money from Merck Sharp and Dohme, maker of Vioxx.

Paul Flynn, the Labour MP who has campaigned to expose the influence of the industry and gave evidence to the committee, said it deserved an 'absolute hammering' for its practices. 'The whole of society has been conditioned to believe that we are dependent on medicines. I have had arthritis all my life and I haven't taken anything for it - I believe in exercise, swimming and walking.'

The inquiry heard of drugs marketed to doctors in papers written for medical journals ostensibly by independent experts which are, in fact, ghostwritten by the firms, which pay academics to lend their names to the reports.

Dr Richard Horton, editor of leading journal, the Lancet, disclosed he had been effectively offered bribes to publish papers showing drugs in a favourable light. He said firms offered to buy 'hundreds of thousands of reprints' - which could be worth up to half a million pounds to his magazine - if their paper went in.

However, a spokesman for the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry denied fuelling dependence on drugs: 'I don't think we have ever suggested that medicines are the only answer to health problems.

'It is always down to the doctor to determine whether there is a real medical condition. It is right we should be informing prescribers of what medicines can be relevant.'

When the solution becomes the problem

Reclassification of the cholesterol-lowering drug simvastatin as an over-the-counter medicine for preventing heart disease is a classic example of the pharmaceutical industry's worrying influence, experts warned.

The editor of The Drug and Therapeutic Bulletin , Dr Ike Iheanacho, said long-term trials had not been carried out to test the drug's efficacy or risks in those considered to be in moderate danger of having heart problems. As people could be sold Zocor Heart-Pro, the drug by its brand name, without detailed assessment of their health, there was also a danger that those at high risk of having heart attacks were getting inadequate treatment.

'The absence of any long-term efficacy trails for Zocor Heart-Pro in the target group means that people are, in effect, being used as guinea pigs,' Iheanacho said.

Another example is provided by the anti-depressant Seroxat. In November, Seroxat's manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) was trying to market it as a cure for relatively mild forms of depression, despite the fact that the drug has been linked to suicide. 'The thrust was to move sales beyond the $1 billion to the $2bn mark by pushing it to people who were not clinically depressed,' Professor David Healy told the select committee, while Richard Brook, chief executive of Mind, the mental health charity, told the MPs that the plan was 'all about developing new conditions for that drug'.

At the same time, other options are ignored. Britain's GPs have largely ignored the advice of the Chief Medical Office that many depressed patients should be prescribed exercise programmes rather than pills.

By Gaby Hinsliff posted 4 April 05

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All antidepressant drugs must carry the strongest possible public warning that they could cause children to harm themselves or commit suicide, US authorities said yesterday in a landmark ruling which has repercussions for the whole class of drugs.

Nitschke says he is target of new laws

Euthanasia advocate Doctor Phillip Nitschke has singled himself out as the target of proposed federal laws on suicide.

Under the legislation to be introduced this week, individuals and corporations would be fined up to $500,000 for using the Internet to incite or promote suicide.

Dr Nitschke says that the website produced by his organisation could face fines if the legislation is passed.

"The electronic frontier, who put a submission into this piece of legislation, when it was first brought forward last year suggested that it was only being brought forward because of the activities of one particular group and one particular Australian," Dr Nischke said.

"I took that to mean me."

Dr Nitschke has vowed to continue providing information about euthanasia on the Internet.

He says he will lobby the Government to stop the legislation being passed.

Dr Nitschke fears that the new laws will inhibit freedom of speech in Australia.

"But I'll go down to Canberra again and point out why this is a backward step," Dr Nitschke said.

"Censoring this information is not an Australian thing to do.

"We're going back into the years of book burning."

By Euthanasia 10 March 05

Hazy logic dictates a painful prohibition
If we do more to ease the pain of the terminally ill, it may take much of the heat out of the euthanasia debate. That too is a good thing. In the end, Remy dies at home surrounded by those who love him most, and free from pain. My father was less fortunate. His family was there. But so was that unwelcome intruder, pain. With an ounce of common sense, compassion and political pluck, perhaps it need not have ended that way.

A corrupt way to treat the community?

Detective Sergeant Steve Leach: Suicide

NSW: CH/9 Sunday: "The suicide of one of NSW's most senior investigators in August has underlined a crisis gripping the state's police service" [? police force.]

I seen the police bleeding on Nine's Sunday program arguing that promotion should depend on how many crimes police have solved and not how many brains they have and that was coming from police commissioner Ken Moroney and Police Minister John Watkins?

Because solving crime then becomes a reason to get a promotion? As had been the case prior the Wood Commission into police corruption that led to all the changes in the first place.

That means more noble cause corruption, verbals and load ups as well as lots of innocent people being framed.

Then those who have solved crime? get promoted and lead the police force at the highest levels of corruption? [Clive Small].

Sunday: "Detective Sergeant Steve Leach was one of New South Wales' finest detectives, having helped collar the notorious serial killer Ivan Milat"

[? But Milat was Framed for the Tourist Industry.]

FIRM Friends of Ivan Robert Milat

Sunday: "He also cracked the 15-year old mystery of the disappearance and murder of Sydney schoolgirl Samantha Knight. Later he worked as a war crimes investigator in the former Yugoslavia.

Yet when he returned to Sydney, he was unable to gain a promotion to end his career as a commissioned officer.

He gave no reason for his suicide, but many of his peers in the police force identified with the shabby treatment meted out to him by his superiors."

[He never got promoted! Get the violin out?]

Sunday: "New South Wales, like many states and provinces in western nations, has reformed the fundamental principles of management and supervision of its police service. In the mid-1990s, the Wood Royal Commission highlighted corruption among the state's detectives and a lack of adequate supervision of police.

2,500 crooked detectives? Or a corrupt Government?

The Wood Royal Commission into police corruption. Where did the police learn their trade skills? Led by example perhaps?

Sunday: "The result saw sweeping changes to the structure of policing in NSW. In 1997, a new promotion system was established which no longer recognised the "primacy of experience" when assessing applicants."

[And no longer recognised noble cause corruption as in assessing applicants for a promotion based on skills they said they had!]

Sunday: "Detectives of Steve Leach's era found they had little chance of promotion against a new breed of tertiary-educated cops, who understood and exploited the system" [Clive Small?]

"Sunday spoke with a number of Leach's colleagues who talked of their own bitter experience of trying to adapt to the new system. They told of the despair they felt at competing with younger, less experienced colleagues and failing to secure even an interview for positions up for grabs."

The headkicker!

"Former NSW detective Mick Kennedy is now researching trends in modern policing for a PhD. He believes the root of the crisis facing Steve Leach's generation is a lack of support for field officers. "...all of the time that you're dealing with those murky, dirty-hands areas of work, what you're doing at the back of your mind ... it needs to be constantly reinforced that you're dependent upon your organisation to support you in times of crisis or when things go bad."

"Former Assistant Commissioner Geoff Schuberg, who compiled a report for the NSW Government on the promotions system, told Sunday that the new approach had destroyed morale amongst police. He and other former police warned that many senior officers were not qualified for the roles they had been given. The handling of riots in Redfern this year highlighted a lack of experienced decision makers among the new breed of commanders"?

"Meanwhile in Victoria, detectives are also feeling the wind of change as Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon tries to rid the force of corrupt police. Those she cannot charge with criminal offences, she is prepared to name and shame through parliament or sack using discretionary powers.

Legendary former detective Brian Murphy, believes that some officers are being used as political pawns as the top brass tries to reassure the public of the integrity of the force. [?]

[When Nine's Sunday program aired this story it's not surprising either. Corporations back more corruption in the community, so they too, can get their own way by being let off or not named, like the case or the Bulldogs Football Players pack rape for example!

But let me tell you that you haven't broken from the chain unless you see the reality that's behind this cry from the heart that would only encourage more police corruption.

There may have been a time when police had responsibility but they let themselves down.

The reality is what you have perceived in front of you all that time is what was actually projected from behind you and that monster is sinister. Some of us have 'seen the light' even more than once!

Now the police want to get a promotion for solving crime or loading someone up? Opposed to the Wood Royal Commissions recommendations that promotion should depend on academic skills that have been "attained" as well as "police skills" not just when some cop "claims he solved a crime" and now because of that should be promoted?

I have a reference from the Director General of this state that puts him in bed with the devil and I guess it all starts from there, considering he's behind the scenes no matter what party is in power.

And if Bob Carr is a crook what about the alternative John Brogden the Neo- Liberal slayer? Makes me puke!]

No link provided to the Sunday program because it doesn't rate!

By Propaganda Monster 15 November 04

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Clive Small, NSW Inspector Gadget
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Drunks propel rise in violent crimes! But who promotes drinking really?

Every day NSW police deal with more than 300 violent offences committed by people who are drunk and they say the number is rising. But they don't say because the government promotes alcohol and only alcohol.

Governments, who promote only alcohol as a legal social drug are narrow-minded greedy people with a shallow ideology in terms of the variety of substances that could be available to prevent binge drinking. Having more choices is what prevents people taking the same substance over and over again.

Taking the same substance over and over again only promotes abuse of the same substance. We have one heavily taxed and promoted (drug) substance and a government who maintains that: social drinking is the only legal drug to escape life's bitterness?

But the Australian Government the same people who take the tax has an interest in it and now you have a problem with it and so do they!

Many violent offences are occurring around pubs, bars and clubs a factor that has contributed to assaults doubling in the past 10 years, according to Bureau of Crime Statistics figures.

The Police Commissioner, Ken Moroney, yesterday announced police were making alcohol-related crime a priority ahead of the Premier's Alcohol Summit planned for later this year.

Pubs and clubs say they are already doing the right thing when serving alcohol and would be working closely with police.

But the head of the National Drug Research Institute, Tim Stockwell, said licensees could do much to reduce the chances of violence because of alcohol, although he agreed their strategies had improved in recent years.

Management in licensed venues could reduce crowding and "sexually permissive behaviour", ensure bouncers were trained in defusing violence, and insist bar staff did not serve those who were intoxicated, he said.

"In places where anything goes, there is a high risk of violence," Professor Stockwell said.

A recent survey had shown drinkers are rarely refused another drink even if they show signs of intoxication.

But the head of the Australian Hotels Association, John Thorpe, said hoteliers were "leading the way in responsible service of alcohol". They had also embraced measures to deal with unsociable behaviour, such as lock-outs and liquor accords. He suggested bar staff should have to take courses about serving alcohol every three years to keep up to date.

According to figures from the Department of Gaming and Racing, 67 cases related to intoxication were prosecuted in the licensing court in the past year.

A spokeswoman for Mr Moroney said that in the year to February, police dealt with almost 120,000 cases of assault, sexual assault, malicious damage and domestic violence related to alcohol abuse.

More than two-thirds of all incidents attended by police - and an even higher percentage in cases of domestic violence and street offences - were related to alcohol. Operation Vikings had shown that alcohol-related crime had risen in the past 12 months. Newcastle had been identified as a hot spot. Recent research had shown alcohol was a factor in 31 per cent of road deaths. Last year 72,000 people nationwide were admitted to hospital because of alcohol.

By Mad Mans Broth 1 April 03

THE DRUNK: Just one more for the road?

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