the age of pill popping to what degree is 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 one toby flood dictions. the worst journalist. the white house of the day the radio guy and columbo minestrone they all want to watch closely to do good you've never seen anything like this i'm cold.

oh and welcome to crossfire for all things considered i'm peter all about 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 hold shares in any of the probably two 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. produce. both but keep in mind that i don't represent the pharmaceutical company and i was laid off by the former sort of coal saver mistry so now 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 you are 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 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 selling 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 gastro reflux disease and all these things that we never saw before in the t.v. ads selling the diseases to fell the pill. 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 because of 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 folks who clean so you know not they're just doing what we would hope they would do which is to make profits what we've got is a sister. put in place which means to making profits out of the wrong things not producing pills for the things we need but they become largely marketing companies rather than companies and 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 something 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 that cells. 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 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 the. migraine headaches. osteoporosis and heart disease including ok all right i guess we should take it if 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 aspect was that physicians have asked to have that withdrawn because of very negative side effects that are not necessarily well publicized and the prospects of bone drug 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 refer to the vaccines

which big pharma has produced and ignore all the poor whiskey 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 people are going to do like you to suggest an alternative for advair for its withdrawal 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 you know no we don't and just go back to two three points what 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 here 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 mood stabilisers drugs like this there's an excess of deaths on these drugs in the clinical trial. 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 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 if you want to react to that and i get it but it's excessive get used 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 chemist people have no idea how difficult this is i spent my life 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 at that point in time the united states had the best health care in the world in terms of life expectancy now the united states is for 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 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 that 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 our.

legal. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harman welcome to the big picture. i would rather ask questions to 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. the worst was a. white house. radio guy. what . did you never think anything like that i'm telling.

you. that. you knew and i think. you knew. not to cause. you. actually to be.

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 is a doctors physicians professors pharmaceuticals a driver. i think back in there that i did sixty's medicine had control over from a secluded 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 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 that 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 they they deploy at least twenty to thirty thousand dollars per doctor per year understanding doctors better than they understand themselves six know this is what leads doctors. the people who are so liberal at handing out pills compared with the situation during the nine hundred 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. 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. 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 benefits and there are not always clear answers for which is which ok look talking about lives martha would you like to jump in well i would like to jump in on the i'm depressed and the world leader how many negative parts have 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 saying over the last decade or more that and i depressants are given for things that used to be true to transplant way 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 it's helped 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 weaker and less effective pills now but specifically on the antidepressants it's just six to eight trials it's an excess of deaths depressants and there are in the placebo arm of these trials so josh simply hasn't the evidence to say that these pills have helped more people than all the evidence points the other way

around just would you like to react to that if you could find it to a six to 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 as five years out if you look at patients who have got 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 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 hear 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 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 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 king was talking about the suicidal side effects of being and i depressive 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 did not see combat and some did not even deploy

the variable the only difference between this population and others of that age is that these are very doped up psychiatric cocktails. anchored by the s.s.r.i. antidepressants which are suicide going to especially for that age group and to me it's astounding that our government allows big pharma 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 them 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. yes i think peter part of the problem here is that doctors have agree 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 environments to 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 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 by burroughs wellcome which is now part of glaxo. nothing worked on a until one thousand nine hundred four when roche after many many years of incredibly sophisticated drug design put 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 that we have to change the system another involves changing the patent status of drugs we may need to look at whether drugs should be available on prescription only but we certainly should insist that the public school 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 how full on off many thanks might get say this is a fascinating discussion and many thanks to my guest today and banker chicago and in new york and thanks to our viewers for watching us here are see you next time remember. this is.

well good. science technology innovation all the latest developments from around russia we've got the future covered. here's mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that we americans call a dog. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares enough about my country music stars are you know that is my self he doesn't want to be listening to feature isn't he a liberal a christian. can secure beliefs about it's. going to suffer to distract us from what you and i should care about because their profit driven

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to live on one hundred thirty three bucks a month for food because you know how fabulous. any i mean. i know that as i'm sitting there seems to. really messy. and we're all very so personally. worse if you're going to. lie down to the. radio guy and for a minute. what we're about to give you've never seen anything like this i'm telling. you. guys i'm having money and this is breaking the side so guys despite u.s. troops.