well they come but crosstalk whether america's just too drugged up to take on the pharmaceutical giants. 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 the us

department of commerce and trust me not all of them are canadians if the us is going to have millions of tourists arriving in traveling by air then 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 where 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. cross-talk a 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 we're using 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 proper sort 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 fact and i was laid off by the farmer sort of call it a victory i have no i have no dog in this fight i'm just speaking. from my

experiences as a researcher and 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 it's it isn't focused 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 martin 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 have 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 and the t.v. ads selling the diseases to fell the pill ok you know david when i was growing up no but nobody took these pills you know my generation made it more or less ok but so many children are medicated right now this i find that perfectly extraordinary. yes i agree and part of the issue here is that i think about the wrong to blame the . their own in that they're just doing what we would hope they would do which is to make profits what we've got is 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 companies part of the marketing is. to get children on pills in

a way that they hadn't been on pills before and in particular it extends to the elderly the elderly otoh the risk factors for heart 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 of preventing 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 chemicals i should also just mention some of the my personal favorite breakthroughs in the last ten or twenty years advair has put asthma under control where is it wasn't before. there's a drug called sophron which controls the therapy induced nausea and vomiting which is revolutionized chemotherapy entirely. there are drugs for migraine headaches. osteoporosis and heart disease including local and i guess we should we should they get hurt we just we shouldn't forget niagara is well marked that you will. because i mean people are

taking more and more. and it's well i would like to weigh in peter on what josh just said because first of all as there is a very controversial as much drug the physicians have asked to have that withdrawn because of very negative side effects that are not necessarily well publicized and the phosphates 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 was made on it i think it's really sleazy it should just refer 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 they're at risk of us your pro says or convincing people who are already taking two asthma drugs to take a third one. ok that's it just you want to reply to that before i go today 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 sense david are people taking too many drugs let me let me go to david now. we need all the stuff for this peter no no we don't and just about this to three points about the lists josh gave you one is that the aids drugs for instance didn't come out of the problem should accompany you the breakthrough drugs we've come in come from university are and i funded research they have not come for the problems of the 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 very also can be helpful for people it leads to more deaths than you would otherwise expect the treatment of as

a part of the problem here is that industry a terribly good at producing drugs and other drugs might be useful for people who are severely ill in the first two 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 if you want to react to that 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. 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 chemist people

have no idea how difficult this is not my wife in the middle of it and it's almost impossible david. yeah you 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 i thought put into the united states 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 beneath cuba 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 russians. sions to western trials where the patients don't always exist it

seems where the rest of us comicon 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 off the gold about trials where they hide the data and then market these drugs extremely happily that the rest of us are being put on drugs we don't need and ending up dead as a result all right 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 and big pharma stay with r.t. . this if. i don't. find. anything.

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is that was for the show to. get in the six pm get out six feet six. they want. to be the class people. they were against. it's hard to think about. and to know many may not have only been the last two. never. but they're also due to for closure never should at. least.

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 who's the driver. well i think back in the ninety's sixty's madsen had control of the problems. industry in a way that it doesn't have. the folks who come into a relatively small boat since then they become global multinational corporations the most profitable corporations on earth 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 but they're the consumers of the pill they aren't your doctor is the consumer of the pill and industry in essence talk of marketing on a very small number of people and they use they 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 that's a keyboard be the people who are so liberal out hunting out pills compared with the situation you're going to can sixty's he's if they only talk if they only treated teachers that way josh how do you react to that. i have a little trouble hearing just first address david's previous argument which is

a fallacy and it's also a disingenuous argument and that's about lifespan the united states. it's an easy argument to make and you can use it as an indictment of our health care system and the pharmaceutical industry but in fact i've read 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 is not seventeenth it's number well josh what is the correlation between taking antidepressants and suicide for example in 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 met. sinan those are drugs there are various 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 and the negative parts of it and i depressants 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 it doubles and triples their profits and the overall business model you've mentioned is start to kids the life 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 antibiotics because people will take them for ten days so there's no profit for big pharma to create lifesaving antibiotics whereas push these are needed to rugs people who don't need them ok let's go to david first of all go to josh but i use the presence and i use most of the pills that we have but i could serve as a doctor is 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 weaker and less effective pills now but specifically on the antidepressants it's just six to eight week trials so it's an excess deaths to depress and some there are in the placebo arm of these trials so josh simply from the evidence to say that these pills have helped more people than not 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 josh josh we've had a look at this issue that's five years if you look at patients who. gets a premium taking psychotic drugs five years. most of the patients who got schizophrenia these days who are on the drugs 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 didn't commit suicide but we've got five years is a hundred didn't create the risk of death from suicide that's linked to the anti psychotics these patients. that we didn't have before. josh would you like to reply

to that david i can't be expert on this i can't argue with you i don't know the data ok mark i do agree with the view you could just be sure that are in your face every night. really you know they're very poor taste and i wish they would just go away. 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 suicide of side effects something and i depressants and i think kind of are exhibit a in the united states are afghanistan and iraq. troop the suicide rate and the military is. actually one person a day and a large percentage of the suicide did 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 three side going to especially for their age group and to me it's astounding that our government allows big pharma to make it a cash cow and sell many of the soldiers around drug cartels 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 haven't realized what prescription only arrangements for drugs do it means that compared to a pilot for instance if you took 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 won't get there alive doctors on the other hand when they put you on pills 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 that 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 josh would you like to respond to

that. because when you go to a doctor you're actually going to 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 greatest 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 was in and i h screening library it was there because it was put in by burros 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 in various on the market and that became the basis of the h.r.t. cocktails and you saw the death where the death rates drop. in on the job 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 that we have to change the system another involves changing the pot to the status

of drugs we may need to look at whether to be available on prescription only. but we certainly should insist that the pharmaceutical companies kind of do clinical trials and hide the data from those trials for the rest of us these data need to be openly accessible to experts who can scrutinize the claims that are being made about whether these pills are helpful are not all right many thanks my guest say this is a fascinating discussion and many thanks to my guest today in bangkok chicano and in new york and thanks to our viewers for watching us here are see you next time remember across top schools. the only thing.

i would rather i asked questions for people in positions of instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on our t.v. question more. you know see a story. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything is ok. i'm tom harpur

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this is the truth this is what's happening you should decide whether we need to be doing this. the source of the n.s.a. leaks reveals himself to the world edward snowden is now in hong kong with plans to seek asylum in iceland we'll tell you more about this n.s.a. whistleblower and the latest developments in this explosive story and edward snowden supporters are out in the streets of new york they rallied today for the n.s.a. whistleblower to show their support over the growing surveillance state over you sights and sounds from the rally ahead and the milestone in congress representative john dingell becomes america's longest serving congressman but that raises the question should there be limits on how long a person can serve will look into that issue later in the show.