What's good for pharmaceutical companies is good for you. Drugs benefit everyone. They lower your cholesterol, cure your arthritis, fix your heart, make you happy and, most importantly, allow the historically unprecedented five hour hard-on.
Never before have drugs been so benevolent. They owe their benevolence to the fact that they are made by American corporations with standards and compassion to cure your lifetime of bad karma. Be young, have fun, be _yourself_ again.
Just don't use those _illegal_ drugs. Don't smoke marijuana to ease your arthritis with ZERO side effects. Take your life to the brink of destruction with Vioxx. Don't take cocaine to get through your 96 hour term paper marathon. Bring your nervous system into an irreversible collapse with 20 pills of Vivarin. Don't take heroin to escape from it all for awhile. Take some Zoloft because when you know what's wrong, you can start to make it right.
And, sure as hell, you better not go mixing household chemicals to make your drugs. That act is trademarked by the pharmaceutical industry. Leave household chemical mixing to the professionals.
Powerful drugs are legal if you cannot make them yourself. If you “ask your doctor” for any of the myriad collection of powerful prescription drugs, you'll get them. Drug makers and insurance companies have put the squeeze on doctors hard enough that they have no choice. If you grow poppies, cannabis or cocoa then you can count on three square meals per day in jail for a long time.
Money going to poor people in Columbia, Afghanistan or Laos is technically acceptable but the Bush Administration is trying hard to make sure you buy American to save America. That's not a random pot shot at the President. That's a serious indictment.
For most of Bush's first term and continuing into today's Senate hearings, the FDA has been without a commissioner. The Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, the Office of New Drugs and the Office of Drug Safety have no directors. These are important offices in the FDA that are essentially dead. Pharmaceutical companies are free to screw people over because acting directors have no power.
Nobody is pulling an Alexander Haig “I'm in charge” stunt because, as far as the pharmaceutical industry is concerned, the FDA is better off dead. The agency dynamics are such that anyone who dares to rock the boat and put some justice in the industry by doing wacky, idealistic stuff like “protecting American consumers” can expect not just mere character assassination, but destruction of their offspring lives as well. If there's one thing the neocons excel in, it's retribution.
Today, David J. Graham, associate director of the Office of Drug Safety, told a Senate Committee that the FDA's role in reviewing and approving new drugs sometimes conflicts with its duty to address safety issues. That's putting it mildly. Graham went on to say that Crestor (cholesterol), Meridia (obesity), Bextra (pain killer), Accutane (acne) and Serevent (asthma) all have serious issues that should keep them off the market. Corruption in the FDA allows them to move forward. Rest assured, Mr. Graham will not be nominated to fill the Director position for this administration.
Your body is an expanding market. Unless you are wearing a tinfoil hat while watching TV and knock it off with your aerosol cheese obsession, you'll eventually come down with any one of these invented diseases. If purple pills are strong enough to force Eminem to change a soundtrack title to “Purple Hills”, who do you think is in charge?
It's not you.
