Corporate Corruption News Articles

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"I am not my brother's keeper," Howard "Cookie" Krongard, the State Department's inspector general, testified to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee yesterday. As Cookie surely must know, that excuse hasn't worked since Genesis. In this case, the players weren't Cain and Abel, but Cookie and his brother Buzzy. Cookie, under fire for allegedly quashing probes of the infamous Blackwater security contractor, began his testimony by angrily denying the "ugly rumors" that his brother, former CIA official Alvin "Buzzy" Krongard, is on Blackwater's advisory board. But during a recess, Cookie called Buzzy and learned that -- gulp -- the ugly rumors are true: His brother is on the board. When the lawmakers returned, Cookie revised and extended his testimony. "I had not been aware of that," Cookie told the congressmen. "I hereby recuse myself from any matters having to do with Blackwater." The lawmakers reacted with Old Testament fury. The swaggering Cookie -- he alternately addressed the lawmakers with his thumb in his waistband, slouching in his chair, rolling his eyes and making baffled glances -- had spent the morning aggressively denying the allegations lodged against him: that he had impeded investigations into contracting fraud, including weapons smuggling by Blackwater, and that he had abused his underlings. But then came Buzzy's bombshell -- and Cookie's credibility crumbled. Either he had lied to Congress, or his own brother had lied to him. It was only the latest bit of strangeness for the powerful but eccentric Brothers Krongard. Buzzy [is] known for his cigar chomping, martial arts and recreational workouts with SWAT teams. "Krongard once punched a great white shark in the jaw," his hometown Baltimore Sun reported when he took the No. 3 job at the CIA a decade ago. More recently, Buzzy joined the advisory board of Blackwater, the firm known for its ready trigger fingers in Iraq.

Note: Alvin "Buzzy" Krongard was the Executive Director (the third-highest position) at the CIA on 9/11, and had until 1998 been the head of the firm used to buy many of the "put" options on United Airlines stock made just prior to 9/11 that were never claimed, though this received little media coverage.

Pharmaceutical ingredients exported from China are often made by chemical companies that are neither certified nor inspected by Chinese drug regulators, The New York Times has found. Because the chemical companies are not required to meet even minimal drug-manufacturing standards, there is little to stop them from exporting unapproved, adulterated or counterfeit ingredients. The substandard formulations made from those ingredients often end up in pharmacies in developing countries and for sale on the Internet, where more Americans are turning for cheap medicine. [At a pharmaceutical trade show in Milan], the Times identified at least 82 Chinese chemical companies that said they made and exported pharmaceutical ingredients — yet not one was certified by the State Food and Drug Administration in China, records show. Nonetheless, the companies were negotiating deals at the pharmaceutical show, where suppliers wooed customers with live music, wine and vibrating chairs. In China, chemical manufacturers that sell drug ingredients fall into a regulatory hole. Pharmaceutical companies are regulated by the food and drug agency. Chemical companies that make products as varied as fertilizer and industrial solvents are overseen by other agencies. The problem arises when chemical companies cross over into drug ingredients. “We have never investigated a chemical company,” said Ms. Yan [Jiangying], deputy director of policy and regulation at the State Food and Drug Administration. “We don’t have jurisdiction.” China has an estimated 80,000 chemical companies, and the United States Food and Drug Administration does not know how many sell ingredients used in drugs consumed by Americans. The Times examined thousands of companies selling products on major business-to-business Internet trading sites and found more than 1,300 [Chinese] chemical companies offering pharmaceutical ingredients.

Note: For many other reliable reports concerning health, click here.

Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and a former subsidiary have agreed to pay more than $515 million to settle federal and state investigations into their drug marketing and pricing practices. The civil settlement ... resolves a broad array of allegations against Bristol-Myers Squibb, dating from 1994 through 2005. Among them was a charge that the ... company illegally promoted the sale of Abilify, an anti-psychotic drug, for pediatric use and to treat dementia-related psychoses. Neither use is approved by the U.S. [FDA]. Although physicians are permitted to prescribe drugs for off-label uses, drug companies are prohibited from marketing them for uses that have not been approved by the FDA. U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan said when pharmaceutical companies market drugs for unapproved uses, there is a potential risk that patients could be harmed, because the drugs have not been tested as rigorously as they are during the FDA approval process. The government also alleged the company paid illegal inducements in the form of consulting fees and trips to luxury resorts to influence doctors and other health care providers to buy and prescribe the company's drugs. The company's former generic drug subsidiary, Apothecon Inc., also was accused of giving illegal enticements to induce retail pharmacy and wholesale customers to buy its products. Bristol-Myers Squibb misreported its best price for the anti-depression drug Serzone, violating a law that requires drug companies to report their lowest price to Medicaid, prosecutors said. The company was selling Serzone to a larger commercial purchaser at a lower price, prosecutors said. Bristol-Myers Squibb and Apothecon also inflated prices for an assortment of oncology and generic drugs knowing that federal health care programs established reimbursement rates based on those prices, Sullivan said.

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The Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that telecommunications companies assisted the government's warrantless surveillance program and were being sued as a result, an admission some legal experts say could complicate the government's bid to halt numerous lawsuits challenging the program's legality. "[U]nder the president's program, the terrorist surveillance program, the private sector had assisted us," Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said in an interview with the El Paso Times. His statement could help plaintiffs in dozens of lawsuits against the telecom companies, which allege that the companies participated in a wiretapping program that violated Americans' privacy rights. David Kris, a former Justice Department official, ... said McConnell's admission makes it difficult to argue that the phone companies' cooperation with the government is a state secret. "It's going to be tough to continue to call it 'alleged' when he's just admitted it," Kris said. McConnell has just added to "the list of publicly available facts that are no longer state secrets," increasing the plaintiffs' chances that their cases can proceed, Kris said. McConnell's statement "does serious damage to the government's state secrets claims that are at the heart of its defenses," said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Bruce Fein, an associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration, said that McConnell's disclosure shows that "an important element of a program can be discussed publicly and openly without endangering the nation. These Cassandran cries that the earth is going to fall every time you have a discussion simply are not borne out by the facts," he said.

Nearly two dozen gas station owners in California [have] sued Shell Oil, Chevron (CVX) and Saudi Refining ... claiming the companies conspired to fix prices for 23,000 franchise owners nationwide. The plaintiffs ... say chairmen of the three oil companies met privately nearly every month starting in March 1996 for the "purpose of forming and organizing a combination." The lawsuit alleges executives destroyed documents from the meetings, and a defunct joint venture violated U.S. antitrust laws and caused artificially high wholesale gas prices in nearly every state from 1999 to 2001. The lawsuit hinges on a marketing deal that, plaintiffs say, allowed former rivals to collude on prices starting in 1998, when Shell and Texaco formed Equilon Enterprises [and] Motiva Enterprises LLC. Equilon and Motiva began operating when ... crude oil prices hit their lowest levels since the Great Depression, according to ... lawyer Joseph M. Alioto, who [represents] the plaintiffs. Yet gas prices soared for franchise owners, forcing them to pass on the cost to consumers or cut profit margins. "These executives get together and say, 'OK, we're going to raise Texaco's price to Shell's price, then we're going to raise both of them 50 to 75%, and we're going to do it after we've already had all these cost savings,'" Alioto said. [He] argues wholesale prices were higher by at least 20 cents a gallon and possibly as much as 40 cents per gallon from 1999 to 2001. Station owners had little choice but to pay higher prices. Franchises typically sign long-term contracts with oil suppliers, making it tough to switch to another brand or an independent supplier.

Ken Silverstein says he lied, deceived and fabricated to get the story. But it was worth it, he insists. Those on the receiving end don't agree. As Washington editor of Harper's magazine, Silverstein posed as Kenneth Case, a London-based executive with the fictional Maldon Group, claiming to represent the government of Turkmenistan. He had fake business cards printed, bought a London cellphone number and created a bogus Web site -- all to persuade Beltway lobbying firms to pitch him on representing Turkmenistan. "For me to deny, or try to shade the fact that I tricked them would be stupid," Silverstein says. "Obviously we did. If our readers feel uncomfortable, they're free to dismiss the findings of the story." Says Harper's Editor Roger Hodge: "The big question in our mind was whether anybody was going to fall for it." They did. According to Harper's, executives at the Washington firm APCO Worldwide laid out a communications plan that included lobbying policymakers -- possibly including a trip for members of Congress -- and generating "news items." Senior Vice President Barry Schumacher told Silverstein the firm could drum up positive op-ed pieces by utilizing certain think tank experts. The proposed fee: $40,000 a month. Another Washington firm, Cassidy & Associates, asked for at least $1.2 million a year and touted a proposed trip to Turkmenistan for journalists and think tank analysts. Hodge says the caper is part of "a long history of sting operations" by journalists. But that undercover tradition has faded in recent years. No newspaper today would do what the Chicago Sun-Times did in the 1970s, setting up a bar to entrap crooked politicians. Fewer television programs are doing what ABC did in the 1990s, having producers lie to get jobs at a supermarket chain to expose unsanitary practices.

Note: To read the hard-hitting, in-depth article in Harper's magazine, click here.

The revelation that the diabetes drug Avandia can potentially cause heart disease is the latest in a string of pharmaceutical disappointments. Vioxx was pulled from the market in 2004 because it doubled the risks for heart attacks and strokes. Eli Lilly recently paid $750 million to settle lawsuits alleging that Zyprexa causes diabetes. Many have criticized the Food and Drug Administration as being too lax about monitoring drug safety. While those criticisms have merit, there is another culprit: the transformation of continuing medical education into an enterprise for drug marketing. The chore of teaching doctors how to practice medicine has been handed to the pharmaceutical industry. As a result, dangerous side effects are rarely on the curriculum. Most states require that doctors obtain a minimum number of credit hours of continuing medical education each year to maintain their medical licenses. Not so long ago, most of these courses were produced and paid for by universities and medical associations. But this has changed drastically over the past decade. Drug-industry financing of continuing medical education has nearly quadrupled since 1998, from $302 million to $1.12 billion. Half of all continuing medical education courses in the United States are now paid for by drug companies, up from a third a decade ago. Because pharmaceutical companies now set much of the agenda for what doctors learn about drugs, crucial information about potential drug dangers is played down, to the detriment of patient care. For example, GlaxoSmithKline footed the bill for dozens of educational courses intended to emphasize the benefits of Avandia over other drugs.

Note: For a concise, reliable overview of medical corruption, click here.

By Dr. Michael Wilkes. When is a disease really a disease? Young doctors in training work hard, and so do lots of other people. When people work 24 hours in a row ... the body feels tired. Is this fatigue an abnormal physiologic state requiring medication and treatment, or is it a normal part of belonging to the human race? If abnormal, then doctors and pharmaceutical companies argue that the fatigue requires treatment. If it is normal -- despite a movement to label it as an illness -- then post-work fatigue belongs to the growing phenomenon of disease-mongering. "Disease-mongering" ... is the process of trying to convince healthy people that they are sick, or people with minor problems that they have extremely worrisome symptoms. This is all in an attempt to sell treatments. Countless examples of disease-mongering are driven by the pharmaceutical industry's drive to sell drugs. Conditions such as female sexual dysfunction syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, toenail fungus, baldness and social anxiety disorder (a.k.a. shyness) are a few places where the medical community has stepped in, thereby turning normal or mild conditions into diseases for which medication is the treatment. Most pharmaceutical companies devote huge amounts of money to prevent, control and cure diseases. When their profits don't match corporate expectations, they invent "new" diseases to be cured by existing drugs. What happens to real diseases when [the media] are filled with information promoting disease mongering? Government funding for public health campaigns pales by comparison with the billions spent by pharmaceutical companies on disease mongering intended to increase the markets for their products.

Note: For more reliable information about major corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, click here.

Who's afraid of Big Oil? Apparently, California's elected officials. Gasoline prices are stuck well above last year's record highs and about 50 cents above the national average. Yet state politicians are not saying or doing a thing, except for raking in political cash from the oil companies and flying around the world on their dime. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ... once claimed that he was so rich he did not need anyone else's money. Yet as gasoline prices were breaking last year's record of $3.38 a gallon, Schwarzenegger collected a $100,000 check May 1 from Chevron, the West's largest refiner. Just three days earlier, it reported a $4.7-billion first-quarter profit, up 18% over the same period last year. The contribution brought Schwarzenegger's take from Chevron to $665,000 (making it his 15th largest donor) since 2003, and his total political tribute from the energy industry is now $4 million. According to a recent Schwarzenegger fundraising solicitation, Chevron's $100,000 buys the company special briefings with the governor. Refiners such as Chevron have discovered that they can make more money by producing less gasoline. So they do. They have, over more than 20 years, deliberately reduced their capacity. Chevron refined 22% less oil in the U.S. during the first quarter of this year than in the same quarter of 2006. Yet its total profit on U.S. refining increased 66%. Making less gasoline, it made much more money. Oil companies poured $90 million into California political campaigns during the 2006 election cycle. This display of sheer political muscle deters even well-meaning politicians from clashing with Big Oil. Democrats take Big Oil's millions too. The state Democratic Party accepted $50,000 from Chevron just last week.

Note: If above link fails, click here. So is it one person equals one vote in elections or one dollar one vote?

The ties between doctors and drug manufacturers are close indeed. Most physicians (94 percent) reported some type of relationship with the pharmaceutical industry ... according to [a] study, published in the April 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Most of these relationships involved receiving food in the workplace (83 percent) or receiving drug samples (78 percent). More than one-third of the respondents (35 percent) were reimbursed for costs associated with professional meetings or continuing medical education, while more than one-quarter (28 percent) were paid for consulting, delivering lectures or enrolling patients in clinical trials. Over the past two decades, physician-industry relationships have attracted increasing scrutiny. One review found that, on average, physicians meet with industry representatives four times a month, and medical residents accept six gifts annually from industry representatives. "We know that these relationships have benefits and risks, and we know that they benefit the companies that are involved, and we know from our data that they benefit doctors," said study author Eric G. Campbell, an assistant professor of health care policy at the Institute for Health Policy at Harvard Medical School. "The real question is to what extent do these relationships benefit patients, and the answer is, we don't know." Campbell said that he found it hard to believe that free football tickets for a doctor would trickle down to benefit patients.

Note: For an excellent article by one of the foremost doctors in the nation on how the pharmaceutical industry has corrupted politics and damaged our health, click here.

Venture capitalists are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into [Silicon] Valley solar startups pursuing technological breakthroughs to make sun power as cheap as fossil fuel. Three of the largest tech IPOs of 2005 were for solar companies. The world's largest chip-equipment maker will begin producing machines to manufacture solar wafers, laying the groundwork for an industrial infrastructure that should lower the cost of producing solar cells. Solar energy has just the sort of oversize potential that the titans of tech saw in computing: a free and practically inexhaustible power source. California is also committing $3.2 billion to fund a drive to install solar panels on a million rooftops by 2018, and a November ballot initiative ... would tax Big Oil to provide $4 billion in funding for alternative-energy research, programs, and startups. Perhaps no startup has benefited more from the solar gold rush than Nanosolar. The Palo Alto company ... has racked up more than $100 million in funding so far. Nanosolar is pursuing a technology that produces solar cells on a film that's a 100th the thickness of conventional silicon wafers. Its ultimate goal: integrating thin-film cells directly into building materials. A skyscraper's glass windows, for instance, could be embedded with thin-film cells, giving them energy-producing capabilities. Nanosolar plans to build a manufacturing facility next year ... that will eventually produce 430 megawatts' worth of solar cells per year. That would nearly triple the nation's manufacturing capacity and make Nanosolar one of the world's largest solar producers. Thanks to aggressive government subsidies, Germany and Japan are currently the global leaders in solar production.

Note: With all of its talk about energy independence, why isn't the U.S. aggressively supporting research into solar power like Japan and Germany? For reliable, verifiable information which answers this question, click here.

The gulf between rich and poor in the United States is yawning wider than ever, and the number of extremely impoverished is at a three-decade high. Based on the latest available U.S. census data from 2005, [a] McClatchy Newspapers analysis found that almost 16 million Americans live in "deep or severe poverty" defined as a family of four with two children earning less than 9,903 dollars — one half the federal poverty line figure. For individuals the "deep poverty" threshold was an income under 5,080 dollars a year. The number of severely poor Americans grew by 26% from 2000 to 2005. The surge in poverty comes alongside an unusual economic expansion. "Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income for working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years. These and other factors have helped push 43% of the nation's 37 million poor people into deep poverty — the highest rate since at least 1975," the report said. Since 2000, the number of severely poor — far below basic poverty terms — in the United States has grown "more than any other segment of the population. That was the exact opposite of what we anticipated when we began," said Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, a study co-author. U.S. social programs are minimal compared to those of western Europe and Canada.

Gov. Rick Perry on Thursday angrily defended his relationship with Merck & Co. and his executive order requiring that schoolgirls receive the drugmaker's vaccine against the sexually transmitted cervical-cancer virus. The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Perry's chief of staff had met with key aides about the vaccine on Oct. 16, the same day Merck's political action committee donated $5,000 to the governor's campaign. In issuing the order, the governor made Texas the first state to require the vaccine Gardasil for all schoolgirls. But many lawmakers have complained about his bypassing the Legislature altogether. The executive order has inflamed conservatives, who said it contradicts Texas' abstinence-only sexual education policies and intrudes into families' lives. Critics have previously questioned Perry's ties to Merck. Mike Toomey, Perry's former chief of staff, now lobbies for the drug company. And the governor accepted a total of $6,000 from Merck during his re-election campaign. Merck has waged a behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign to get state legislatures to require girls to get the three-dose vaccine to enroll in school. But on Tuesday the pharmaceutical company announced it was suspending the effort because of pressure from parents and medical groups. The Kentucky House on Thurday passed a bill that would require the vaccination for middle school girls unless their parents sign a form opposing it. Virginia lawmakers have also passed legislation requiring the vaccine, but the governor has not decided if he will sign it.

Note: The drug company lobby is the most powerful in the U.S., as reported by the former editor-in-chief of one of the most respected medical journals in the U.S. Click here for more.

ExxonMobil Corp. gave $16 million to 43 ideological groups between 1998 and 2005 in an effort to mislead the public by discrediting the science behind global warming, the Union of Concerned Scientists asserted yesterday. The report by the advocacy group mirrors similar claims by Britain's leading scientific academy. Last September, The Royal Society wrote the oil company asking it to halt support for groups that "misrepresented the science of climate change." Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists' strategy and policy director, said in a teleconference that ExxonMobil based its tactics on those of tobacco companies, spreading uncertainty by misrepresenting peer-reviewed scientific studies or emphasizing only selected facts. James McCarthy, a professor at Harvard University, said the company has sought to "create the illusion of a vigorous debate" about global warming.

At hundreds of screenings this year of "An Inconvenient Truth," the first thing many viewers said after the lights came up was that every student in every school in the United States needed to see this movie. The producers of former vice president Al Gore's film about global warming ... certainly agreed. So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA). It seemed like a no-brainer. In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that ... they didn't want to offer "political" endorsement of the film; and they saw "little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members" in accepting the free DVDs. As for classroom benefits, the movie has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading climate scientists worldwide, and is required viewing for all students in Norway and Sweden. But there was one more curious argument in the e-mail: Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp. That's the same Exxon Mobil that for more than a decade has done everything possible to muddle public understanding of global warming and stifle any serious effort to solve it. It has run ads in leading newspapers ... questioning the role of manmade emissions in global warming, and financed the work of a small band of scientific skeptics who have tried to challenge the consensus that heat-trapping pollution is drastically altering our atmosphere. NSTA says it has received $6 million from the company since 1996. Exxon Mobil has a representative on the group's corporate advisory board.

Several government doctors say drug maker Eli Lilly & Co. subtly orchestrated medical guidelines for treatment of an often lethal blood infection, hoping to boost sales of a drug whose value is being debated. “This company is trying to insinuate its drug into many aspects of patient care that industry really shouldn’t be involved in,” said Dr. Naomi O’Grady, a critical care specialist at the National Institutes of Health. Three of her NIH colleagues claim in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine that Lilly worked through medical societies to influence standards for treating the blood infection, sepsis. Ultimately, Xigris was incorporated into the guidelines. Both the guidelines committee and a larger information campaign on sepsis were heavily funded by [Lilly]. Dr. Phil Dellinger, who helped lead the guidelines committee, said...“We’ve been catching grief because we’ve been taking a lot of Lilly money — and we’re appreciative of Lilly giving it.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Xigris in 2001, despite an evenly split vote by its advisory committee. The lead author of Thursday’s journal article, Dr. Peter Q. Eichacker, voted against approval. Some critics are unhappy that the drug, which works only for the sickest patients, was approved on the basis of a single experiment. Academic officials acknowledged in the published guidelines that Lilly gave more than 90 percent of $861,000 in grants for the campaign and medical recommendations. O’Grady, of NIH, said a panel of disease experts that she headed refused to endorse the sepsis guidelines largely because Lilly “convened the whole panel.”

Note: For lots more on how the powerful pharmaceutical industry endangers our lives, click here.

A poignant new documentary asks who killed GM's promising electric car project? A new documentary released June 28 in New York and Los Angeles, appropriately titled Who Killed The Electric Car? tries in Clue-like fashion to figure out why GM pulled the plug on its EV1 electric vehicle program, which by most accounts was approaching success when the first prototype was introduced in the mid-1990s. "It was a revolutionary, modern car, requiring no gas, no oil changes, no mufflers, and rare brake maintenance," according to a synopsis of the film. In the 1990s a strict clean-air mandate introduced in California that called for zero-emission vehicles was what led GM to introduce the EV1. Eventually that California mandate got watered down from "zero" to "low" emissions, and the automakers decided to literally blow up their EV programs. GM, which leased out the EV1 cars it produced, called them all back after California changed its policy. The cars were crushed and shredded. Who were the people leasing these vehicles? Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson and Ted Danson, among others, many of whom appear in the movie and talk favourably about their electric cars. If the implications of an advance means loss of future business to a paradigm, the key players of that paradigm will lobby to kill it. The paradigm? Big oil. Similarly, the auto industry has an interest in perpetuating the manufacture of vehicles that require routine, costly maintenance.

Note: For more information and showing times on the highly revealing Who Killed The Electric Car, visit www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com. For even deeper information www.WantToKnow.info/newenergysources

The American Diabetes Association...privately enlisted an Eli Lilly & Co. executive to chart its growth strategy. The National Alliance on Mental Illness...lobbies for treatment programs that also benefit its drug-company donors. The National Gaucher Foundation...gets nearly all its revenue from one drugmaker, Genzyme Corp. Many patient groups and drug companies maintain close, multimillion-dollar relationships while disclosing limited or no details about the ties. An Inquirer examination of six groups, each a leading advocate for patients in a disease area, found that the groups rarely disclose such ties when commenting or lobbying about donors' drugs. Combined, the six received at least $29 million from drug companies last year. The amount ranged from 2 percent to 7 percent of revenue at the Arthritis Foundation, to 89 percent to 91 percent at the much smaller National Gaucher Foundation. The funding usually comes from the companies' marketing or sales divisions, not charity offices. Grants often rise with promotional spending as a drug hits the market and fall when sales ebb. Donations from Merck and Pfizer Inc. to the Arthritis Foundation more than doubled, to at least $1.65 million combined, in 2000 as they launched Vioxx and Celebrex. Merck explicitly wove the foundation into sales strategies. In 2000-2001, the American Diabetes Association did not disclose an unusual gift from Lilly: a lent executive, Emerson "Randy" Hall Jr., who moved into its Alexandria, Va., headquarters and coached it on growth strategies, all paid by Lilly.

Note: If you want to understand how the huge pharmaceutical industry influences what you know about their drugs, this article is a must read. You may first want to read a riveting two-page summary of an exposé by the former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, who details major collusion and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry at http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup

Beginning in 1997, Pharmacia, currently a subsidiary of Pfizer, sought to boost its sales of the drug Genotropin. To that end, the company illegally marketed the drug to spur growth in short children and as an anti-aging drug for adults looking for the fountain of youth. In a nutshell, the off-label marketing scheme included direct payments to doctors, all-expense paid junkets for doctors, financial incentives to distributors and phony consultant contracts to funnel payments for the off-label promotion. As a result of the scheme's success, sales of the Genotropin sky-rocketed and over the years, Medicaid and other public healthcare programs paid millions of dollars for its improper use. The full amount of damage to health care programs is not yet known. "But this much is certain," former Pfizer Vice President turned whistleblower, Dr Peter Rost, says, "Pharmacia turned Genotropin into a cash cow by illegally peddling a dangerous drug to make short kids tall and their grandparents young." Genotropin is a man made human growth hormone approved to treat a limited range of hormonal deficiencies. The FDA has never approved the drug to spur growth for children without hormonal deficiencies or to prevent aging. Dr Rost joined Pharmacia in June of 2001 as a VP of Marketing. On May 22, 2003, Dr Rost became aware of the pervasive nature of ongoing illegal activity. [He then] decided to file a lawsuit ... alleging fraud relating to the off-label marketing of Genotropin and delivered a copy of the complaint to the US Attorney's Office on June 4, 2003.

Note: Read an excellent article on Dr. Rost and other major whistleblowers from the pharmaceutical industry.

According to reports published today...healthy people are being turned into patients by drug firms which publicise mental and sexual problems and promote little-known conditions only then to reveal the medicines they say will treat them.The studies, published in a respected medical journal, accuse the pharmaceutical industry of "disease mongering" - a practice in which the market for a drug is inflated by convincing people they are sick and in need of medical treatment. The "corporate-sponsored creation of disease" wastes resources and may even harm people because of the medication they turn to, the researchers add. In 11 papers in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine, experts from Britain, the US and elsewhere argue that new diseases are being defined by specialists who are often funded by the drug industry.According to the researchers, the campaigns boost drug sales by medicalising aspects of normal life.

Note: For more on how the pharmaceutical companies can negatively impact your health and your wallet:
http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup

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