Psychiatric Drugs: Chemical Warfare on Humans - interview with Robert Whitaker

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Psychiatric Drugs: Chemical Warfare on Humans

- interview with Robert Whitaker

http://www.newstarget.com/011353.html

 

The following is a Street Spirit interview with Robert Whitaker, author of

Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the

Mentally Ill. It is reprinted here with permission from the Street Spirit in

Oakland, California. The interview is conducted by Terry Messman, editor of

Street Spirit. Investigative reporter Robert Whitaker, author of the

groundbreaking book Mad In America, is now pursuing a fascinating line of

research into

how the mammoth psychiatric drug industry is endangering the American public by

covering up the untold cases of suffering, anguish and disease caused by the

most widely prescribed antidepressants and antipsychotic medications.

 

Whitaker exposes the massive lies and cover-ups that have corrupted the Food

and Drug Administration's drug review process, and co-opted research trials in

order to spin the results of drug tests and conceal the serious hazards and

even deadly side-effects of brand-name drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and

Zyprexa.

 

The story becomes even more frightening when we look at the aggressive

tactics these giant drug companies have used to silence prominent critics by

defaming them in the press, and by using their money and power to have widely

respected scientists and eminent medical researchers fired for daring to point

out

the hazards and risks of suicide and premature death caused by these drugs.

 

Whitaker starts by debunking the effectiveness of these massively hyped

wonder drugs -- antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, and the new

atypical

antipsychotic drugs like Zyprexa. His research shows how they often are

barely more effective than placebos in treating mental disorder and depression,

despite the glowing adulation they have received in the mainstream media.

 

But he goes on to make the startling claim that these new psychiatric drugs

have directly contributed to an alarming new epidemic of drug-induced mental

illness. The very drugs prescribed by physicians to stabilize mental disorders

in fact are inducing pathological changes in brain chemistry and triggering

suicide, manic and psychotic episodes, convulsions, violence, diabetes,

pancreatic failure, metabolic diseases, and premature death.

 

Whitaker originally was a highly regarded medical reporter at the Albany

Times Union and also wrote off and on for the Boston Globe. A series he co-wrote

for the Boston Globe on harmful psychiatric research was a finalist for the

Pulitzer Prize in 1998. When he began his investigative research into

psychiatric

issues, Whitaker was still a believer in the story of progress that

psychiatry has been telling the public for decades.

 

He said, " I absolutely believed the common wisdom that these antipsychotic

drugs actually had improved things and that they had totally revolutionized how

we treated schizophrenia. People used to be locked away forever, and now maybe

things weren't great, but they were a lot better. It was a story of

progress. "

 

That story of progress was fraudulent, as Whitaker soon found out when he

gained new insight from his research into torturous psychiatric practices such

as

electroshock, lobotomy, insulin coma, and neuroleptic drugs. Psychiatrists

told the public that these techniques " cured " psychosis or balanced the

chemistry of the brain.

 

But, in reality, the common thread in all these different treatments was the

attempt to suppress " mental illness " by deliberately damaging the higher

functions of the brain. The stunning truth is that, behind closed doors, the

psychiatric establishment itself labeled these treatments as " brain-damaging

therapeutics. "

 

The first generation of antipsychotic drugs created a drug-induced brain

pathology by blocking the neurotransmitter dopamine and essentially shutting

down

many higher brain functions. In fact, when antipsychotics such as Thorazine

and Haldol were first introduced, psychiatrists themselves said that these

neuroleptic drugs were virtually indistinguishable from a " chemical lobotomy. "

 

In recent years, the media have heralded the arrival of so-called designer

drugs like Prozac, Paxil and Zyprexa that are supposed to be superior and have

fewer side effects than the old tricyclic antidepressants and the first

antipsychotics. Millions of Americans have believed this story and have enriched

drug

companies like Eli Lilly by spending billions of dollars annually to purchase

these new medications.

 

Whitaker's research into the tragic cases of disease, suffering and early

deaths caused by these drugs shows that millions of consumers have been misled

by

a massive campaign of lies, distortions, and bought-and-paid-for drug trials.

Eminent medical researchers who have tried to warn us of the perils of these

drugs have been silenced, intimidated and defamed. In the process, the Food

and Drug Administration has become the lapdog of the giant pharmaceutical

industry, not its watchdog.

 

Street Spirit interviewed Robert Whitaker about this new " epidemic " of mental

disorders, and how the giant drug companies have profited from selling drugs

that make us sicker.

 

Street Spirit: Your new line of research indicates that there has been an

enormous rise in the incidence of mental illness in the United States, despite

the seeming advances in a new generation of psychiatric drugs. Why do you refer

to this increase as an epidemic?

 

Robert Whitaker: Even people like the psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey wrote a

book recently in which he said it looks like we're having an epidemic of mental

illness. When the National Institute of Mental Health publishes its figures

on the incidence of mental illness, you see these rising numbers of mentally

ill people. Some recent reports even say that 20 percent of Americans now are

mentally ill.

 

So what I wanted to do was two-fold. I wanted to look into exactly how

dramatic is this increase in mental illness, and particularly severe mental

illness.

Part of this rise in the number of people said to be mentally ill is just

definitional. We draw a big wide boundary today and we throw all sorts of people

into that category of mentally ill. So children who are not sitting neatly

enough in their school rooms are said to have attention deficit hyperactivity

disorder (ADHD), and we created a new disorder called social anxiety disorder.

 

SS: So what used to be called simply shyness or anxiety in relating to people

is now labeled a mental disorder and you supposedly need an antidepressant

like Paxil for social anxiety disorder.

 

RW: Exactly. And you need a stimulant like Ritalin for ADHD.

 

SS: This increases psychiatry's clients, but doesn't it also increase the

number of people that giant pharmaceutical companies can sell their psychiatric

drugs to?

 

RW: Absolutely. So part of what we're seeing is nothing more than the

creation of a larger market for drugs. If you think about it, as long as we draw

as

big a circle as possible, and expand the boundaries of mental illness,

psychiatry can have more clients and sell more drugs. So there's a built-in

economic

incentive to define mental illness in as broad terms as possible, and to find

ordinary, distressing emotions or behaviors that some people may not like and

label them as mental illness.

 

SS: Your research also shows that there is a real increase in people who have

a severe mental disorder. Now, this seems counterintuitive, but is it true

that you believe much of this increase is caused by the overuse of some of the

new generations of psychiatric drugs?

 

RW: Yes, exactly. I looked at the number of the so-called severely disabled

mentally ill -- people who aren't working or who are somehow dysfunctional

because of mental illness. So I wanted to chart through history the percentage

of

the population who are considered the disabled mentally ill.

 

Now, by 1903, we see that roughly 1 out of every 500 people in the United

States is hospitalized for mental illness. By 1955, at the start of the modern

era of psychiatric drugs, roughly one out of every 300 people was disabled by

mental illness. Now, let's go to 1987, the end of the first generation of

antipsychotic drugs; and from 1987 forward we get the modern psychiatric drugs.

From

1955 to 1987, during this first era of psychiatric drugs -- the antipsychotic

drugs Thorazine and Haldol and the tricyclic antidepressants (such as Elavil

and Anafranil) -- we saw the number of disabled mentally ill increase

four-fold, to the point where roughly one out of every 75 persons are deemed

disabled

mentally ill.

 

Now, there was a shift in how we cared for the disabled mentally ill between

1955 and 1987. In 1955, we were hospitalizing them. Then, by 1987, we had gone

through social change, and we were now placing people in shelters, nursing

homes, and some sort of community care, and gave them either SSI or SSDI

payments for mental disability. In 1987, we started getting these supposedly

better,

second-generation psychiatric drugs like Prozac and the other selective

serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants. Shortly after that, we get

the

new, atypical antipsychotic drugs like Zyprexa (olanzapine), Clozaril and

Risperdal.

 

What's happened since 1987? Well, the disability rate has continued to

increase until it's now one in every 50 Americans. Think about that: One in

every 50

Americans disabled by mental illness today. And it's still increasing. The

number of mentally disabled people in the United States has been increasing at

the rate of 150,000 people per year since 1987. That's an increase every day

over the last 17 years of 410 people per day newly disabled by mental illness.

 

SS: So that leads to the obvious question. If psychiatry has introduced these

so-called wonder drugs like Prozac and Zoloft and Zyprexa, why is the

incidence of mental illness going up dramatically?

 

RW: That's exactly it. This is a scientific question. We have a form of care

where we're using these drugs in an ever more expansive manner, and supposedly

we have better drugs and they're the cornerstone of our care, so we should

see decreasing disability rates. That's what your expectation would be.

 

Instead, from 1987 until the present, we saw an increase in the number of

mentally disabled people from 3.3 million people to 5.7 million people in the

United States. In that time, our spending on psychiatric drugs increased to an

amazing degree. Combined spending on antipsychotic drugs and antidepressants

jumped from around $500 million in 1986 to nearly $20 billion in 2004. So we

raise the question: Is the use of these drugs somehow actually fueling this

increase in the number of the disabled mentally ill?

 

When you look at the research literature, you find a clear pattern of

outcomes with all these drugs -- you see it with the antipsychotics, the

antidepressants, the anti-anxiety drugs and the stimulants like Ritalin used to

treat

ADHD. All these drugs may curb a target symptom slightly more effectively than a

placebo does for a short period of time, say six weeks. An antidepressant may

ameliorate the symptoms of depression better than a placebo over the short

term.

 

What you find with every class of these psychiatric drugs is a worsening of

the target symptom of depression or psychosis or anxiety over the long term,

compared to placebo-treated patients. So even on the target symptoms, there's

greater chronicity and greater severity of symptoms. And you see a fairly

significant percentage of patients where new and more severe psychiatric

symptoms

are triggered by the drug itself.

 

SS: New psychiatric symptoms created by the very drugs people are told will

help them recover?

 

RW: Absolutely. The most obvious case is with the antidepressants. A certain

percentage of people placed on the SSRIs because they have some form of

depression will suffer either a manic or psychotic attack -- drug-induced. This

is

well recognized. So now, instead of just dealing with depression, they're

dealing with mania or psychotic symptoms. And once they have a drug-induced

manic

episode, what happens? They go to an emergency room, and at that point they're

newly diagnosed. They're now said to be bipolar and they're given an

antipsychotic to go along with the antidepressant; and, at that point, they're

moving

down the path to chronic disability.

 

SS: Modern psychiatry claims that these psychiatric drugs correct

pathological brain chemistry. Is there any evidence to back up their claim that

abnormal

brain chemistry is the culprit in schizophrenia and depression?

 

RW: This is the key thing everyone needs to understand. It really is the

answer that unlocks this mystery of why the drugs would have this long-term

problematic effect. Start with schizophrenia. They hypothesize that these drugs

work

by correcting an imbalance of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain.

 

The theory was that people with schizophrenia had overactive dopamine

systems; and these drugs, by blocking dopamine in the brain, fixed that chemical

imbalance. Therefore, you get the metaphor that they're like insulin is for

diabetes; they're fixing an abnormality. With the antidepressants, the theory

was

that people with depression had too low levels of serotonin; the drugs upped the

levels of serotonin in the brain and therefore they're balancing the brain

chemistry.

 

First of all, those theories never arose from investigations into what was

actually happening to people. Rather, they would find out that antipsychotics

blocked dopamine and so they theorized that people had overactive dopamine

systems. Same with the antidepressants. They found that antidepressants upped

the

levels of serotonin; therefore, they theorized that people with depression must

have low levels of serotonin.

 

But here is the thing that one wishes all of America would know and wishes

psychiatry would come clean on: They've never been able to find that people with

schizophrenia have overactive dopamine systems. They've never been able to

find that people with depression have underactive serotonin systems. They've

never found consistently that any of these disorders are associated with any

chemical imbalance in the brain. The story that people with mental disorders

have

known chemical imbalances -- that's a lie. We don't know that at all. It's

just something that they say to help sell the drugs and help sell the biological

model of mental disorders.

 

But the kicker is this. We do know, in fact, that these drugs perturb how

these chemical messengers work in the brain. The real paradigm is: People

diagnosed with mental disorders have no known problem with their

neurotransmitter

systems; and these drugs perturb the normal function of neurotransmitters.

 

SS: So rather than fixing a chemical imbalance, these widely prescribed drugs

distort the brain chemistry and make it pathological.

 

RW: Absolutely. Stephen Hyman, a well-known neuroscientist and the former

director of the National Institute of Mental Health, wrote a paper in 1996 that

looked at how psychiatric drugs affect the brain. He wrote that all these drugs

create perturbations in neurotransmitter functions. And he notes that the

brain, in response to this drug from the outside, alters its normal functions

and

goes through a series of compensatory adaptations. In other words, it tries

to adapt to the fact that an antipsychotic drug is blocking normal dopamine

functions. Or in the case of antidepressants, it tries to compensate for the

fact

that you're blocking a normal reuptake of serotonin. The way it does this is

to adapt in the opposite way. So, if you're blocking dopamine in the brain,

the brain tries to put out more dopamine and it actually increases the number of

dopamine receptors. So a person placed on antipsychotic drugs will end up

with an abnormally high number of dopamine receptors in the brain. If you give

someone an antidepressant, and that tries to keep serotonin levels too high in

the brain, it does exactly the opposite. It stops producing as much serotonin

as it normally does and it reduces the number of serotonin receptors in the

brain. So someone who is on an antidepressant, after a time ends up with an

abnormally low level of serotonin receptors in the brain. And here's what Hyman

concluded about this: After these changes happened, the patient's brain is

functioning in a way that is " qualitatively as well as quantitatively different

from

the normal state. " So what Stephen Hyman, former head of the NIMH, has done

is present a paradigm for how these drugs affect the brain that shows that

they're inducing a pathological state.

 

SS: So the paradox is there's no evidence for modern psychiatry's claim that

there is any pathological biochemical imbalance in the brain that causes

mental illness, but if you treat people with these new wonder drugs, that is

what

creates a pathological imbalance?

 

RW: Yes, these drugs disrupt normal brain chemistry. That's the real paradox

here. And the real tragedy is, that even as we peddle these drugs as chemical

balancers, chemical fixers, in truth we're doing precisely the opposite. We're

taking a brain that has no known abnormal brain chemistry, and by placing

people on the drugs, we're perturbing that normal chemistry. Here's how Barry

Jacobs, a Princeton neuroscientist, describes what happens to a person given an

SSRI antidepressant. " These drugs, " he said, " alter the level of synaptic

transmission beyond the physiologic range achieved under normal environmental

biological conditions. Thus, any behavioral or physiologic change produced under

these conditions might more appropriately be considered pathologic rather than

reflective of the normal biological role of serotonin. "

 

SS: One of the SSRI antidepressants that's widely believed to be a wonder

drug is Prozac. Yet your research found that the Food and Drug Administration

(FDA) received more adverse reports about Prozac than any other drug. What sort

of ill effects were people reporting?

 

RW: First of all, with Prozac and the SSRIs that followed, their level of

efficacy was always of a very minor sort. In all the clinical trials of the

antidepressants, roughly 41 percent of the patients got better in the short term

versus 31 percent of the patients on placebo. Now just one other caveat on that.

If you use an active placebo in these trials -- an active placebo causes a

physiologic change with no benefit, like a dry mouth -- any difference in

outcome between the antidepressant and placebo virtually disappears.

 

SS: Weren't the early drug tests of Prozac so unpromising that they had to

manipulate test results to get FDA approval at all?

 

RW: What happened with Prozac is a fascinating story. Right from the

beginning, they noticed only very marginal efficacy over placebo; and they

noticed

that they had some problems with suicide. There were increased suicidal

responses

compared to placebo. In other words, the drugs was agitating people and

making people suicidal who hadn't been suicidal before. They were getting manic

responses in people who hadn't been manic before. They were getting psychotic

episodes in people who hadn't been psychotic before. So you were seeing these

very problematic side effects even at the same time that you were seeing very

modest efficacy, if any, over placebo in ameliorating depression.

 

Basically, what Eli Lilly (Prozac's manufacturer) had to do was cover up the

psychosis, cover up the mania; and, in that manner, it was able to get these

drugs approved. One FDA reviewer even warned that Prozac appeared to be a

dangerous drug, but it was approved anyway. We're seemingly finding all this out

only now: " Oh, Prozac can cause suicidal impulses and all these SSRIs may

increase the risk of suicide. " The point is, that wasn't anything new. That data

was

there from the very first trial. You had people in Germany saying, " I think

this is a dangerous drug. "

 

SS: Even back in the late 1980s, they already knew?

 

RW: Before the late 1980s -- in the early '80s, before Prozac gets approved.

Basically what Eli Lilly had to do was cover up that risk of mania and

psychosis, cover up that some people were becoming suicidal because they were

getting

this nervous agitation from Prozac. That's the only way it got approved.

 

There were various ways they did the cover-up. One was just to simply remove

reports of psychosis from some of the data. They also went back and recoded

some of the trial results. Let's say someone had a manic episode or a psychotic

episode; instead of putting that down, they would just put down a return of

depression, and that sort of thing. So there was a basic need to hide these

risks right from the beginning, and that's what was done.

 

So Prozac gets approved in 1987, and it's launched in this amazing PR

campaign. The pill itself is featured on the cover of several magazines! It's

like

the Pill of the Year [laughs]. And it's said to be so much safer: a wonder drug.

We have doctors saying, " Oh, the real problem with this drug is that we can

now create whatever personality we want. We're just so skilled with these drugs

that if you want to be happy all the time, take your pill! "

 

That was complete nonsense. The drugs were barely better than placebo at

alleviating depressive symptoms over the short term. You had all these problems;

yet we were touting these drugs, saying, " Oh, the powers of psychiatry are such

that we can give you the mind you want -- a designer personality! " It was

absolutely obscene. Meanwhile, which drug, after being launched, quickly became

the most complained about drug in America? Prozac!

 

SS: What were the level of complaints when Prozac hit the market?

 

RW: In this county, we have Medwatch, a reporting system in which we report

adverse events about psychiatric drugs to the FDA. By the way, the FDA tries to

keep these adverse reports from the public. So, instead of the FDA making

these easily available to the public. so you can know about the dangers of the

drugs, it's very hard to get these reports.

 

Within one decade, there were 39,000 adverse reports about Prozac that were

sent to Medwatch. The number of adverse events sent to Medwatch is thought to

represent only one percent of the actual number of such events. So, if we get

39,000 adverse event reports about Prozac, the number of people who have

actually suffered such problems is estimated to be 100 times as many, or roughly

four million people. This makes Prozac the most complained about drug in

America,

by far. There were more adverse event reports received about Prozac in its

first two years on the market than had been reported on the leading tricyclic

antidepressant in 20 years.

 

Remember, Prozac is pitched to the American public as this wonderfully safe

drug, and yet what are people complaining about? Mania, psychotic depression,

nervousness, anxiety, agitation, hostility, hallucinations, memory loss,

tremors, impotence, convulsions, insomnia, nausea, suicidal impulses. It's a

wide

range of serious symptoms.

 

And here's the kicker. It wasn't just Prozac. Once we got the other SSRIs on

the market, like Zoloft and Paxil, by 1994, four SSRI antidepressants were

among the top 20 most complained about drugs on the FDA's Medwatch list. In

other

words, every one of these drugs brought to market started triggering this

range of adverse events. And these were not minor things. When you talk about

mania, hallucinations, psychotic depression, these are serious adverse events.

 

Prozac was pitched to the American public as a wonder drug. It was featured

on the covers of magazines as so safe, and as a sign of our wonderful ability

to effect the brain just as we want it. In truth, the reports were showing it

could trigger a lot of dangerous events, including suicide and psychosis.

 

The FDA was being warned about this. They were getting a flood of adverse

event reports, and the public was never told about this for the longest period

of

time. It took a decade for the FDA to begin to acknowledge the increased

suicides and the violence it can trigger in some people. It just shows how the

FDA

betrayed the American people. This is a classic example. They betrayed their

responsibility to act as a watchdog for the American people. Instead they

acted as an agency that covered up harm and risk with these drugs.

 

SS: In light of the FDA's failure to warn us about Prozac, what about their

recent negligence on the issue of the risk of suicide in children given

antidepressants like Paxil? Weren't England's mental health officials far better

than

their American counterparts in the FDA in warning about the dangers of

suicidal attempts when antidepressants are given to youth?

 

RW: Yes. The children's story is unbelievably tragic. It's also a really

sordid story. Let's go back a little to see what happened to children and

antidepressants. Prozac comes to market in 1987. By the early 1990s, the

pharmaceutical companies making these drugs are saying, " How do we expand the

market for

antidepressants? " Because that's what drug companies do -- they want to get to

an ever-larger number of people. They saw they had an untapped market in kids.

So let's start peddling the drugs to kids. And they were successful. Since

1990, the use of antidepressants in kids went up something like seven-fold. They

began prescribing them willy-nilly.

 

Now, whenever they did pediatric trials of antidepressants, they found that

the drugs were no more effective on the target symptom of depression than

placebo. This happened again and again in the pediatric drug trials of

antidepressants. So, what that tells you is there is no real therapeutic

rationale for the

drugs because in this population of kids, the drugs don't even curb the

target symptoms over the short term any better than placebo; and yet they were

causing all sorts of adverse events.

 

For example, in one trial, 75 percent of youth treated with antidepressants

suffered an adverse event of some kind. In one study by the University of

Pittsburgh, 23 percent of children treated with an SSRI developed mania or

manic-like symptoms; an additional 19 percent developed drug-induced hostility.

The

clinical results were telling you that you didn't get any benefit on depression;

and you could cause all sorts of real problems in kids -- mania, hostility,

psychosis, and you may even stir suicide. In other words, don't use these

drugs, right? It was absolutely covered up.

 

 

SS: How was it covered up?

 

RW: We had psychiatrists -- some of those obviously getting money from the

drug companies -- saying the kids are under-treated and they're at risk of

suicide and how could we possibly treat kids without these pills and what a

tragedy

it would be if we couldn't use these antidepressants.

 

Finally, a prominent researcher in England, David Healy, started doing his

own research on the ability of these drugs to stir suicide. He also managed to

get access to some of the trial results and he blew the whistle. He first blew

the whistle in England and he presented this data to the review authorities

there. And they saw that it looks like these drugs are increasing the risk of

suicide and there are really no signs of benefits on the target symptoms of

depression. So they began to move there to warn doctors not to prescribe these

drugs to youth.

 

What happens in the United States? Well, it's only after there's a lot of

pressure put on the FDA that they even hold a hearing. The FDA sort of downplays

the risk of these drugs. They're slow to even put black box warnings on them.

Why? Aren't kids lives worth protecting? If we know that we have a

scientifically shown risk that these drugs increase suicide, shouldn't you at

least warn

about it? But the FDA was even digging in its heels about putting that black

box warning on the drugs.

 

SS: If Prozac is the nation's most complained about drug, if Paxil is shown

to be a suicide risk for youth, how do these antidepressants continue to have a

reputation as near-magic cures for depression? And why did the FDA failed to

warn us about Paxil and Prozac for such a long time?

 

RW: There's a couple reasons for that. The FDA's funding changed in the

1990s. An act was passed in which a lot of the FDA's funding came from the drug

industry: the PDUFA Act, or Prescription Drug User Fee Act. Basically, when drug

companies applied for FDA approval they had to pay a fee. Those fees became

what is funding a large portion of the FDA's review of drug applications.

 

So all of a sudden, the funding is coming from the drug industry; it's no

longer coming from the people. As that act comes up for renewal, basically the

drug lobbyists are telling the FDA that their job is no longer to be critically

analyzing drugs, but to approve drugs quickly. And that was part of Newt

Gingrich's thing: Your job is to get these drugs to market. Start partnering

with

the drug industry and facilitating drug development. We lost this idea that the

FDA had a watchdog role.

 

Also, in a human way, a lot of people who work for the FDA leave there and

end up going to work for the drug companies. The old joke is that the FDA is

sort of like a showcase for a future job in the drug industry. You go there, you

work awhile, then you go off into the drug industry. Well, if that's the

progression that people make, in essence they're making good old boy network

connections, so they're not going to be so harsh on the drug companies. So,

that's

what really happened in the 1990s. The FDA was given new marching orders. The

orders were: " Facilitate getting drugs to market. Don't be too critical. And,

in fact, if you want to keep your funding, which was coming now from the drug

industry, make sure you take these lessons to heart. "

 

SS: So the giant pharmaceutical companies have a vast amount of power to cook

the results of drug tests and make researchers and even the FDA itself bow to

their will?

 

RW: The FDA, in essence, was kneecapped in the early 1990s, and we really saw

it with the psychiatric drugs. The FDA became a lapdog for the pharmaceutical

industry, not a watchdog. It's only now that this has become common

knowledge. We have Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal

of

Medicine, write a book in which she says that the FDA became a lapdog. It's

basically now well recognized that you had this decline and fall. As the editor

of

the New England Journal of Medicine, the most prestigious medical journal we

have, Marcia Angell is someone who was at the very heart of American medicine,

and she concluded that the FDA let down the American people. And she lost her

job at the New England Journal of Medicine for starting to criticize

pharmaceutical companies.

 

She was the editor of the journal in the late 1990s and there was a corresp

onding doctor named Thomas Bodenheimer who decided to write an article about how

you couldn't even trust what was published in the medical journals anymore

because of all the spinning of results. So they did an investigation about how

the pharmaceutical companies are funding all the research and spinning the

trial results, so you can no longer really trust what you read in scientific

journals. They pointed out that when they tried to get an expert to review the

scientific literature related to antidepressants, they basically couldn't find

someone who hadn't taken money from the drug companies.

 

Now, the New England Journal of Medicine is published by the Massachusetts

Medical Society which publishes a lot of other journals, and they get a lot of

pharmaceutical advertising. So what happens