reportedly to provoke a civil war no one has yet admitted the violence but local qaeda linked militants have become tour use for such bombings around two thousand people have died in six terry violence in iraq since april. and coming your way here in our team is peter lavelle and he is guests who are ready to raise the temperature is of the. six san diego residents were thrown off of an airplane not for what they said but how they said it because they said it in another language russian in fact a paranoid and cowardly steward on the plane told them that they had to clear out just for speaking another language to be here yes of some group of people were to

commit a terrorist act then speaking in a foreign language would be a good tactic i can't deny that and for those who come to america better get on the ball and learn to speak english adequately but there is a problem about fifty million tourists visit america every year according to the u.s. department of commerce and trust me not all of them are canadians if the u.s. is going to have millions of tourists arriving in traveling by air that don't be surprised when they speak their own languages if you're going to throw foreigners off of airplanes just for speaking their native languages then you're going to have to basically throw people off of half of the planes flying over the united states but that's just my opinion.

hello and welcome to crossfire all things considered i'm peter lavelle the age of pill popping to what degree as big pharma hijacking captured the western medical establishment what is the real aim of the pharmaceutical industry to make people healthy or to generate healthy profits for themselves and is there anything we can do to break this unhealthy addiction. to cross-talk big pharma i'm joined by david healy in bangor he is a professor of psychiatry at cardiff university and author of the book farmageddon we also have martha rosenberg in chicago she's an investigative health reporter in author of born with a junk food deficiency and in new york we cross to josh blum he's director of

chemical and pharmaceutical sciences at the american council on science and health all right cross talk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want david if i go to you first is the western world over pharmac aided if i can use that term. yes it is what you see more and more drugs for conditions that we don't need to read treatments for what we need are our drugs to work well for conditions we do need treatment for and the pharmaceutical industry is less and less able to produce the kind of treatments that we need at the moment for the country though if you and if you hoed shares in any of the promises of companies you're doing quite well because they've been making massive profits out of selling treatments that aren't particularly needed to us recently josh how do you respond to that it sounds like it's for the pharmaceutical industry and not for health. mostly disagree. but is some of both but keep in mind that i don't represent the pharmaceutical

company in fairness i was laid off by the farmers out of coal i gave the story i have no i have no dog in this fight i'm just speaking from my experiences as a researcher. my impressions following the the history of the last two decades or so and the major accomplishments that we've seen ok but then our major ok but josh is it really a profit driven business like it is in focus on health care everything is for profit driven business and it is also focused on health care the two are not mutually exclusive the profit is necessary to do research for the next series of drugs and. there's no way around it no one else will pay to do it and no one else is capable of doing it ok martha do you want to weigh in on that. let's go to mark the first well thank you peter yeah i certainly agree with dr healy and i think that what we're seeing in the united states is

a lot of selling of diseases that didn't used to exist that now are telling pills through the t.v. ads and the direct to consumer advertising in the last fifteen years has really increased hypochondria and people who say well i can't sleep i'm depressed i have five castor reflux disease and all these things that we never thought before the t.v. ads selling the diseases to sell the pill ok you know david when i was growing up no but nobody took these pills in my generation made it more or less ok but so many children are medicated right now this i find it perfectly extraordinary. yes i agree and part of the issue here is that i think about the wrong to blame the for. their own we're not there just doing what we would hope they would do which is to make profits well we've got as a system put in place which means that making profits out of the wrong things but

not producing pills for the things we need to become largely marketing companies rather than super companies part of the marketing is to get children on pills in a way that they. before and in particular it extends to the elderly the elderly otoh the got respect for problems and stroke and diabetes and this stuff and the other with the result that many people over the age of fifty five or six or more pills and treatment didn't choose death has become ability in its own right it's one of the leading causes of death and this wasn't the case fifty years ago john should be and that's a very interesting point to learn react to that i mean it's leading to death itself . that's nonsense. there are so i made a quick list of some of the breakthrough products the last ten or twenty years and these are real therapies that are really necessary and

a preventive lots of death and in no particular order certainly the aids cocktails come to the top of the list it's changed the entire world and the same thing is happening now with hepatitis c. where cures are starting to come out the two of which have two hundred fifty million people infected worldwide so don't be telling me that there isn't a medical need for that or that this is a some kind of profit making chemical i should also just mention some of the my personal favorite breakthroughs in the last ten or twenty years advair has put as much under control where is it wasn't before. there's a drug called sophron which controls chemotherapy induced nausea and vomiting which is revolutionized chemotherapy entirely. there are drugs for migraine headaches. osteoporosis and heart

disease including local and i think we should they get hurt we just we should to get by as well martha do you want to weigh in there because i mean people are taking more and more pills. so ok and opiates well i would like to weigh in peter on what josh just said because first of all as there is a very controversial. that the physicians have asked to have that withdrawn because of very negative side effects that are not necessarily well publicized and the prospects of bone drugs are likely to be withdrawn because of the host of side effects that emerged after it was approved and after a lot of money with made on it i think it's really. just referred to the vaccines which big pharma has produced and ignore all the poor and risky drugs that it's made billions and billions by convincing people who are at risk of us your prose or

convincing people who are already taking to asthma drugs to take a third one ok it's just you want to reply to that before i go today i'd like you to suggest an alternative for advair for it's withdrawn i happen to have asthma and when i started on advair twenty years ago i threw my inhaler away and i haven't carried it since david are people taking too many drugs let me let me go to david now. we need all these drugs so that peter no no we don't and just about those two three points about the list just gave you one is that the aids drugs for instance didn't come out of the pharmaceutical company the breakthrough drugs we've come and come from university you are and i funded research they have not come from sort of companies if we take the drugs that the companies are making money out of the antidepressants the stuff the mood stabilisers drugs like this there's an excess of deaths on these drugs in the clinical trials of just these drugs on their own

compared to placebo and not true for their also can be helpful for people it leads to more deaths you would otherwise expect the treatment of as a part of the problem in. here is that industry a terribly good at producing drugs and other drugs might be useful for people who are severely over the first strict to just people who are severely oh that wouldn't be a big problem but in the marketing of these drugs to make money they extend the use of these drugs to people who have got very mild conditions where the chances that the person is going to benefit from the drug is almost zero and the chances that they're going to be home by the drug is fairly substantial josh want to react to that and i get it but it's excessive get used to it leads to. first of all i'm in agreement with with pretty much everyone about the direct to consumer advertising i think it's awful. i think it shows the worst side of the drug industry rather than the best and maybe they're making some money out of it but it's

a pyrrhic victory and i think many of my fellow former researchers agree with this. with regard to your statement david statement about the where the drugs originate that is technically true but it's completely misleading because academia and government are good at developing screens and underlying biology that can be then used to screen for drugs into then spur the drug discovery process that is about one percent of the process. that's when things get difficult anybody can run a screen anybody can under under cover an underlying mechanism and no one can do anything with it because that's when the drug companies know what

they're doing and they can take a screen or a compound that was found by a screen which is completely useless and turn it into a drug over a process of fifteen years ten thousand compounds and. hundreds of chemistry people have no idea how difficult this is not my life in the middle of it and it's almost impossible david. yeah i know i'd like to come back on two or three points here first of all i think josh is skirting the issues which is back in the one nine hundred sixty s. when industry would actually developing drugs in a completely different way we had much better life saving drugs than we have now and at that point in time the united states had the best health care in the world in terms of life expectancy and now the united states is full of the way down the list it's neat in terms of life expectancy on the other hand what's happening is the major problem companies now are running clinical trials in countries like

russia and it's not clear about the ethics of the trials that they run the recruiting patients russian patients to western trials where the patients don't always exist it seems where the rest of us can't get access to the data from these clinical trials to find out what has actually happened and it's because of this because companies can write goes right up to goes about trials where they hide the data and then market these drugs extremely heavily that the rest of us are being put on drugs we don't need and ending up dead as a result and i'm going to jump in here folks we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on big pharma stay with our.

well into the. science technology innovation hall the list of elements from around russia we've got the future covered. i would rather ask questions for people in positions of power instead of speaking

on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on r.t. question more. told me my language as well but i will only react to situations as i have read the reports so i'm likely to push the no i will leave them to the state department to comment on your latter point of the month to say that it's secure yet a car is on the docket notes on. the radio no more weasel words. when you have a direct question be prepared for a change when you throw a punch be ready for

a battle freedom of speech means little down the freedoms of caution. welcome to cross talk we're all things are considered i'm peter lavelle to remind you we're discussing big fun. david who runs the medical establishment in the west as a doctor's physicians professors pharmaceuticals the driver. i think back in there that i did sixty's medicine had control of the pharmaceutical industry in a way that it doesn't have and back then the folks who come to a relatively small since then they've become global multinational corporations the

most profitable corporations are nerds and medicine has shrunk the capacity of doctors to control the pharmaceutical industry he's not what it once was so industry these days because actually one of the curious things here is that drugs are available on prescription only and this means that unlike what most people think when they take a pill that they're the consumers of the pill they aren't your doctor is the consumer of the pill and industry in essence target marketing on a very small number of people and they you know they deploy at least twenty to thirty thousand dollars per doctor per year understanding doctors better than they understand themselves six nurses what leads doctors security to people who are so liberal at handing out pills compared with the situation to that i could sixty's he's if they only talk if he only treated teachers that way josh how do you react

to that. i have a little. trouble hearing could just first address david's previous argument which is a fallacy and it's also a disingenuous argument and that's about life span in the united states. it's an easy argument to make and you can use it is an indictment of our health care system and the pharmaceutical industry but in fact multiple papers that if you factor in violence automobile accidents suicides and you normalize it across the industrialized company countries the united states has the highest life expectancy it's not seventy that's number well josh what is the correlation between taking antidepressants and suicide for example and murder antidepressants definitely have their place in medicine they're not perfect they're far from perfect i think on the

whole they've probably helped more people by far than they've hurt and they've probably hurt some people also but. you know that that is medicine and those are drugs there are various in their benefits and there are not always clear answers for which is which ok we're talking about lives martha would you like to jump in well i would like to jump in on the end of the press and the world leader how many negative parts of and i depressant is probably dr healy but what i would like to add because my background is advertising and marketing and i'm a reporter and i'm i'm seeing over the last decade or more that and i depressants are given for things that used to be treated transcendently in other words they used to say well you have anxiety take this when you go to the dentist you get on the plane and now it's like you have major anxiety disorder you need to be on this drug all the time because if it doubles and triples their profits and

the overall business model. mentioned is it's. the kids the wife lifetime drugs is where the profits come in so this is why in the united states we have no we have a real lack of operative antibiotic because people will take them for ten days so there's no profit for big pharma to create lifesaving antibiotics where if help push things are needed to out. people who don't need them ok let's go to david first of all go to josh but i use depressants and i use most of the pills that we have my concern as a doctor is that the quality of the pill is improving it is not improving compared with the pills available to me to the nine hundred fifty s. we have less effective bills now but specifically on the antidepressants it's just six to eight trials it's an excess deaths depressants and there are in the placebo

arm of these trials so josh simply some of the evidence to say that these pills have helped more people than not but the evidence points the other way around josh would you like to react to that if you could find it to a sixty if you can find it to a six to eight week trial that may or may not be true but it's largely irrelevant. these things don't work for six to eight weeks so i think you need to take a look at five years out and and see there i don't know the answer i suspect you'd get a slightly different result so josh josh we've had a look at this issue because five years out if you look at patients who got sick it's a free and you're taking anti psychotic drugs five years out most of the patients who got schizophrenia these days who are on the drugs go on to commit suicide i mean the most of the loss of life comes from people committing suicide one hundred

years ago patients who had schizophrenia did not commit suicide but we've got five years that is. hundreds. at the risk of death from suicide that's linked to the anti psychotics these patients are on that we didn't talk before. josh would you like to reply to that david i can't you're the expert on this i can't argue with you i don't know the data ok mark i do agree with those of you. that are in your face every night. really you know they're in poor taste and i wish they would just go away but i certainly agree with both of you on that one thing you want to jump in and go ahead. yes i would like to jump in now you know dr healy talking about the suicidal side effects of being and i depressant so they and i psychotic are exhibit a in the united states are afghanistan and iraq. troops the suicide rate in the military is often actually one person

a day and a large percentage of the suicides to not see combat and some did not even deploy the variable the only difference between this population and others of their age is that these are very doped up psychiatric cocktails and anchored by the s.s.r.i. antidepressants which are suicide linked especially for that age group and to me it's astounding that the government allows big pharma to to make it a cash cow and so many of the soldiers are on drug cocktails with four and five and six drugs and so many of that killing themselves and that's why and i think that the data shows as well as you would watch you know david i want to go back to something you said earlier because you made it so my doctors are pill dispensers now that's about it. i think yes i think peter part of the problem

here is that doctors have agreed allies who are prescription only arrangements for drug. do it means that compared to a pilot for instance if you take a flight from moscow to new york the pilot has a real incentive to make sure that you get there alive because if you don't get there alive she will get there alive doctors on the other hand when they put you on pills and we both think we all think that doctors are just as much in the business of keeping us safe as pilots but in fact when a doctor puts you on a pill if you don't get to where she wants you to go she does get there and she can put the fact that you didn't get there down to the fact that you had an illness to no cost to the doctor here and partly because of the pills have become an answer to the stress that you're turning up the doctor poses the doctor if she gives you a pill it means you go away and it's meant that doctors have transformed from people who are cautious about using pills people who regarded pills as poisons

which could do good if used with judgment into people who regard pills as fertilizers to be sprinkled as widely as possible see josh you know would you like to respond to that. because when you go to a doctor you actually go into a violent pseudocode find it interesting go ahead. i find it interesting that everyone is focusing on pharmaceuticals and a.d.h. drugs for instance i mean that's an easy area to criticize because it's murky. and. you know it is what it is and i cannot address the marketing of pharmaceuticals. you know as an expert because i was in discovery research but let me just turn it around a little bit and get away from this one area where there is seems to be

such an emotional component and i want to talk about the probably the two great. contributions of the drug industry. in the last fifty years and that would be aids and hepatitis c. someone said before that hiv therapies started with the government that's partly true because a.z.t. which was the first aids drug and didn't work wise and i h screening library it was there because it was put in by glass welcome which is now part of glaxo. nothing worked on aids until one thousand nine hundred four when roche after many many years of incredibly sophisticated drug design put injuries on the market and that became the basis of. the cocktails and you saw the death where the death rates drop. in oregon which i would want to finish with david how would you

like to see this scenario change with the pharmaceutical sorry you got thirty seconds ok i think what we've got to is we have to change the system another involves changing the patent status of drugs we may need to look at whether drug should be available on prescription only but we certainly should insist that the promise to companies kind of do clinical trials and hide the data from those trials for the rest of us these data need to be to be openly accessible to experts who can scrutinize the claims that are being made about whether these pills are helpful are not many thanks to my guess that this was a fascinating discussion and many thanks to my guests today in bangor chicago and in new york and thanks to our viewers for watching us here are see you next time remember. this is.

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you. can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk the man who exposed washington's all seeing spy network justifies his actions saying you'd rather lose his freedom and watch his government destroyed privacy. the us is the only one pledging no mercy for those who speak out its goal friends of taking internet crackdowns to much greater levels we report on that to this. ballance in mali threatens to destabilize the whole of north africa according to the united nations even as international business vultures seek to get all the gold they can from the countries winds. and assume over syria assad's military advances speeds up the debate in washington arming the rebels.