[SSRI-Research] Scariest drugs are the legal ones

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Mon, 17 Jan 2005 00:03:15 -0500

[sSRI-Research] Scariest drugs are the legal ones

 

 

http://www.nydailynews.com/boroughs/story/269362p-230748c.html

 

Scariest drugs are legal ones

 

 

 

In 1969, as a hippie kid at Woodstock, I sat in the mud with a score

of Brooklyn pilgrims from Prospect Park's Hippie Hill listening to

festival organizers shouting over the loudspeakers to the 400,000

zonked-out druggies, " Beware of the brown acid, man! If you've dropped

the bad brown acid, report immediately to the medical tent, man! "

And the stampede was on.

 

Judging by recent events, you get more truth from drug culture than

pharmaceutical companies and the Food and Drug Administration.

 

On three separate holiday-related occasions, I was sitting around

gabbing with friends in Brooklyn and Queens and one of the first

topics to arise was the reluctant revelations by the FDA and the

pharmaceutical companies that they are literally killing us by the

tens of thousands with these deadly prescription drugs they are

hawking with less conscience than streetcorner dope pushers.

 

One young woman had taken Accutane, which we now learn may cause liver

damage and birth defects as well as promoting suicide. But, hey, it

gets rid of acne!

 

I spoke with one guy who has been on Prozac for years for his

depression, only to learn that Prozac promotes violence toward others

and suicidal tendencies - an anti-depressant that sends people to roof

ledges to ask, " To be or not to be? "

 

Eli Lilly and Co. had data to this effect for 15 pill-pushing years,

told the FDA, and they both kept it as secret as the books of a

Colombian cocaine cartel.

 

When the tsunami body count in Asia reached about 140,000, it was

revealed that Vioxx had caused some 139,000 heart attacks. It also was

revealed that Celebrex and Bextra might make the ticker stop, but hey,

your corpse might have fewer colon polyps.

 

Nice.

 

We're trying to locate some 4,000 American missing in the aftermath of

the tsunami, but we might find just as many in the parking lots of

drugstores.

 

When I hung out on Hippie Hill in the late 1960s, the drug dealers of

that open-air pharmacy had more honor. Goofballs went for three for a

buck. Last week, it cost me $50 to renew my prescription for 30

anti-allergy Zyrtec pills. That's about a buck and a half a pill to

keep me from sneezing around my cats. And I didn't even get a buzz out

of it to ease the pain.

 

And speaking of pain, if you've been gobbling painkillers to treat the

headache all this deadly news is causing, be warned that more than 70%

of patients who take painkillers such as ibuprofen damage their small

intestines.

 

And if this gives you insomnia, and you're taking Ambien, the most

popular legal goofball on the market, fuhgeddaboudit! It causes amnesia.

It's been reported that people who take Ambien at night can't remember

their final waking hours the next morning, and so we've created a

nation of zombies, like Ed Norton sleepwalking into Ralph Kramden's

apartment at night to raid the fridge.

 

I'm telling you, drug dealers like Tony Montana, as portrayed by Al

Pacino in " Scarface, " have more honor. It's not an unfair comparison.

Listen, under pressure from the all-powerful pharmaceutical lobby that

spends about $150 million a year in Washington, the FDA accelerated

the crystal meth " speed " epidemic in the country by deregulating two

chemicals - pseudoephedrine and ephedrine - that are crucial to

brewing this poison.

 

But what the hell do you expect when that lobby, called Pharmaceutical

Research and Manufacturers of America, hires retiring Louisiana

Republican U.S. Congressman Billy Tauzin as its new $2-million-a-year

president? In his last election, this good ole boy took $91,500 in

campaign contributions from drug companies, then authored the new

Medicare bill that is a windfall to the pharmaceutical industry. A

cynic might even suspect that the untold thousands of old people

killed by these deadly prescription drugs under this plan might be

just what the doctor ordered to save Social Security.

 

Tauzin is barred from lobbying Congress for a year, but he can legally

tell underlings who to see and what to say on Capitol Hill, and he can

make campaign contributions, attend fund-raisers and schmooze with old

congressional cronies. Part of his job is to push new and dangerous

drugs for FDA approval and downplay the killer side effects of drugs

like Vioxx, Accutane, Prozac, Celebrex. He also will be leading the

charge in favor of tort reform so that the estates of people who are

killed by these legal dope dealers in the pharmaceutical industry

cannot sue.

 

There is not yet a pill to correct these governmental ills. And this

being Washington, not Woodstock, do not expect Tauzin to warn American

citizens who took the brown acid to report to the medical tent.

 

Originally published on January 9, 2005