Scariest drugs are legal ones.

[GDxCAT]

Scariest drugs are legal ones

By Denis Hamill, New York Daily News

January 9, 2004



In 1969, as a hippie kid at Woodstock, I sat in the mud with a score of
Brooklyn pilgrims from Prospect Park's Hippie Hill listening to
festival organizers shouting over the loudspeakers to the 400,000
zonked-out druggies, "Beware of the brown acid, man! If you've dropped
the bad brown acid, report immediately to the medical tent, man!"



And the stampede was on.



Judging by recent events, you get more truth from drug culture than
pharmaceutical companies and the Food and Drug Administration.



On three separate holiday-related occasions, I was sitting around
gabbing with friends in Brooklyn and Queens and one of the first topics
to arise was the reluctant revelations by the FDA and the
pharmaceutical companies that they are literally killing us by the tens
of thousands with these deadly prescription drugs they are hawking with
less conscience than streetcorner dope pushers.



One young woman had taken Accutane, which we now learn may cause liver
damage and birth defects as well as promoting suicide. But, hey, it
gets rid of acne!



I spoke with one guy who has been on Prozac for years for his
depression, only to learn that Prozac promotes violence toward others
and suicidal tendencies - an anti-depressant that sends people to roof
ledges to ask, "To be or not to be?"



Eli Lilly and Co. had data to this effect for 15 pill-pushing years,
told the FDA, and they both kept it as secret as the books of a
Colombian cocaine cartel.



When the tsunami body count in Asia reached about 140,000, it was
revealed that Vioxx had caused some 139,000 heart attacks. It also was
revealed that Celebrex and Bextra might make the ticker stop, but hey,
your corpse might have fewer colon polyps.



Nice.



We're trying to locate some 4,000 American missing in the aftermath of
the tsunami, but we might find just as many in the parking lots of
drugstores.



When I hung out on Hippie Hill in the late 1960s, the drug dealers of
that open-air pharmacy had more honor. Goofballs went for three for a
buck. Last week, it cost me $50 to renew my prescription for 30
anti-allergy Zyrtec pills. That's about a buck and a half a pill to
keep me from sneezing around my cats. And I didn't even get a buzz out
of it to ease the pain.



And speaking of pain, if you've been gobbling painkillers to treat the
headache all this deadly news is causing, be warned that more than 70%
of patients who take painkillers such as ibuprofen damage their small
intestines.



And if this gives you insomnia, and you're taking Ambien, the most
popular legal goofball on the market, fuhgeddaboudit! It causes
amnesia. It's been reported that people who take Ambien at night can't
remember their final waking hours the next morning, and so we've
created a nation of zombies, like Ed Norton sleepwalking into Ralph
Kramden's apartment at night to raid the fridge.



I'm telling you, drug dealers like Tony Montana, as portrayed by Al
Pacino in "Scarface," have more honor. It's not an unfair comparison.
Listen, under pressure from the all-powerful pharmaceutical lobby that
spends about $150 million a year in Washington, the FDA accelerated the
crystal meth "speed" epidemic in the country by deregulating two
chemicals - pseudoephedrine and ephedrine - that are crucial to brewing
this poison.



But what the hell do you expect when that lobby, called Pharmaceutical
Research and Manufacturers of America, hires retiring Louisiana
Republican U.S. Congressman Billy Tauzin as its new $2-million-a-year
president? In his last election, this good ole boy took $91,500 in
campaign contributions from drug companies, then authored the new
Medicare bill that is a windfall to the pharmaceutical industry. A
cynic might even suspect that the untold thousands of old people killed
by these deadly prescription drugs under this plan might be just what
the doctor ordered to save Social Security.



Tauzin is barred from lobbying Congress for a year, but he can legally
tell underlings who to see and what to say on Capitol Hill, and he can
make campaign contributions, attend fund-raisers and schmooze with old
congressional cronies. Part of his job is to push new and dangerous
drugs for FDA approval and downplay the killer side effects of drugs
like Vioxx, Accutane, Prozac, Celebrex. He also will be leading the
charge in favor of tort reform so that the estates of people who are
killed by these legal dope dealers in the pharmaceutical industry
cannot sue.



There is not yet a pill to correct these governmental ills. And this
being Washington, not Woodstock, do not expect Tauzin to warn American
citizens who took the brown acid to report to the medical tent.



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[sunyata]

And that's one of the reasons I don't want drugs legalized, try to imagine what those motherfuckers would cut your shit with. I'm rarely nervous when I'm about to take an illegal drug I bought on the street, unless it's a psychedelic, but every time I'm going to take something that's legal and bought at a pharmacy I get nervous.I take look at the list of side effects anddiscover that one of the side effects is the very symptom I'm trying to ease. Like head-ache pills that may cause head-ache, anti-depressants that may cause depressionand sucidal tendencies. What the fuck is that about? I had a friend who got anti-depressivesfrom his shrink, when he came to schoolevry day he looked more stoned than me, and even worse, he seemed like he wasn't even there. After a month of use he tried to kill himself, ate30 of those pills andlay down in bed.The only reason I think he survived this was because he didn't really want to die, and somewhere beneath all the pills he knew this.Needless to say he stops using these pills(Xanor, I think they were called). One year later he decides to see a shrink again, this time he says he doesn't want drugs, he just wants therapy, he wants totalk to someone.He tells the shrink about how he's had problems with both legal and illegal drugs, and how he tried to kill himself while on anti-depressants. But the shrink keeps insisting, despite that he made it perfectly clear he won't under any circumstance do these drugs again, the shrink says "but we have this new product, it's much better than what you used to take".Luckily, my friend still had a decent number of braincells left and told the shrink to go fuck herself. I don't think he's been to a shrink since then.


Realize that they are testing these products on us, they give them to rats to make sure they're not pure poison, but then they release them on the market. We probably won't knowall the side-effectsuntil a generation has passed, and by then it will be to late fora lot of people.


I guess the moralof all this is don't trust your doctor, he doesn't necessarily have your health as a priority, he just wants to get paid like everyone else.

[Dualpower]

This article is, in short, crap.





The point (pharmaceutical companies are out to make money,
not safe drugs) is one I tentatively agree with, but the examples are
ridiculous and over exaggerated.

they are literally killing us by the tens of
thousands with these deadly prescription drugs

People will die by the tens of thousands without medications
and research developed by big pharmaceutical companies.

One young woman had taken Accutane, which we now
learn may cause liver damage and birth defects as well as promoting suicide.
But, hey, it gets rid of acne!

These effects were known of when it was introduced in the 50’s.
They aren’t new or recently discovered as the author suggests (except for the
suicide link which effects very very few people in a small way). They do
extensive trials of drugs before they’re released on the market. I’ve used Accutane,
and was warned of all of these possibilities. If any of a list of symptoms
appeared, I was to discontinue use immediately and contact my doctor. I
experienced no bad symptoms, and got rid of acne that didn’t respond to any
other treatment. Do some people experience bad effects? Yes. Is injury from
this drug likely if you use it as directed by a physician? No. How is it bad?

I spoke with one guy who has been on Prozac for years
for his depression, only to learn that Prozac promotes violence toward others
and suicidal tendencies - an anti-depressant that sends people to roof ledges
to ask, "To be or not to be?"

Millions of people take Prozac. Some people do have an
elevated risk of suicide as assessed by certain studies. Millions of people
aren’t committing suicide because of it, the incidence is very low, meaning it
is safe. This is especially the case when you consider how many people are
helped by the drug.

it cost me $50 to renew my prescription for 30
anti-allergy Zyrtec pills. That's about a buck and a half a pill to keep me
from sneezing around my cats. And I didn't even get a buzz out of it to ease
the pain.

This is a pointless jab in developing his argument. Sure, drugs
cost a lot. But no one is forcing this guy to take said allergy medication.
Without big pharmacy, new products wouldn’t exist.

And speaking of pain, if you've been gobbling painkillers to treat the
headache all this deadly news is causing, be warned that more than 70% of
patients who take painkillers such as ibuprofen damage their small intestines

Any money says most people exceed the recommended dosage, or
other usage instructions on painkiller packaging. How is this the fault of the
drug, or drug policy makers?

It causes amnesia. It's been reported that people who
take Ambien at night can't remember their final waking hours the next morning,
and so we've created a nation of zombies, like Ed Norton sleepwalking into
Ralph Kramden's apartment at night to raid the fridge.

Ambien is prescribed as a short term solution to
sleeplessness. (i.e. 7-10 days) If it is prescribed for longer, this is an
issue with doctors, not the drug developers. Ambien has less next-day
side-effects compared to benzodiazepines, and thus is a better drug for certain
types of use. If people are walking around like zombies for extended periods of
time it is because doctors are mis-prescribing it.





This article is full of ridiculous exaggerations. The author
seems to feel that the facts aren’t exciting enough on their own, and require extensive
elabouration in order to make a convincing point.





Drug makers are inherently limited to understanding the
short-term effects of drugs. They do a lot of work to attempt to tease out
likely long-term effects through animal studies (since animals share many
physiological features to people, but have shorter lifespans). Sometimes,
however, the translation from simulations and animal studies does not pan out,
and there are negative long-term side effects of drugs in humans. This does
happen, but whose fault is it? If you are dieing from cancer and there is a new
experimental drug that could help you, you demand to have access to it! People
want these things, and fast! The only way to know for sure what the long term
effects of a drug are is to give them to people. It is an unavoidable necessity
in the advancement of medical science, and human wellbeing.





It doesn’t seem like the author has any idea how much
science goes into developing new drugs. Between the lines, he seems to advance
the idea that drug companies are releasing products en mass to make money,
ignoring or hiding the side effects. Despite the commercial nature of the pharmaceutical
industry, there are still stringent scientific guidelines and ethical
procedures that have to be followed to minimize the possibility of a bad drug
being released.

And that's one of the reasons I don't want drugs
legalized, try to imagine what those motherfuckers would cut your shit with.
I'm rarely nervous when I'm about to take an illegal drug I bought on the
street, unless it's a psychedelic, but every time I'm going to take something
that's legal and bought at a pharmacy I get nervous.

This is silly.


When you take a drug from a pharmacy in <st1:State><st1lace>New
York</st1lace></st1:State>, or <st1:country-region><st1lace>Thailand</st1lace></st1:country-region>,
it’s the same thing. Because of that, you have access to a wealth of
information about the risks involved in taking it, as well as professionally
assessed statistics for negative side effects.


The same cannot be said for street drugs. Where the pharmaceutical
industry is held accountable for mistakes, illegal drug makers are not. Why
should illegal drug producers act benevolently, while big pharmacy doesn’t? The
answer is they don’t. Style and implementation of management has more in common
with how much money is being made, than whether the thing is illegal or not.
And illegal drugs make people lots and lots of money. If the pharmaceutical industry
is polluted by deceit and cover-ups, then the illegal market must be worse. And
it is.

The only reason I think he survived this was because
he didn't really want to die, and somewhere beneath all the pills he knew this.

The incidence of suicide as a result of antidepressants
is likely very low. Did you ever consider the more plausible possibility
that your friend tried to kill himself because he was depressed?

We probably won't knowall the
side-effectsuntil a generation has passed, and by then it will be to late
fora lot of people.

How do you find long term effects in people without having
people take the fucking drugs? Do you have a better way? People in pharmaceutical
research have to devote the better half of their life studying to provide
lame-assed ignoramus’ like yourself a way out of debilitating conditions.
Perhaps if you could see past your vision of the immoral mad scientist in a
white lab coat bent on your pain and suffering, you could approach the level of
a realistic interpretation of what’s really going on.

I guess the moralof all this is don't trust your doctor, he
doesn't necessarily have your health as a priority, he just wants to get paid
like everyone else.

I’ll take the advice of someone with a PhD over the ignorant
rant of a spooked luddite any day, thankyou very much.

[noeticbuzz]

It is fucked up to the extremem!


I was on pills for depression and I started feeling even shittier on the stuff. It didn't clue in to me until I missed a dose a couple of days and started feeling better.


There is definatly some scary shit that they give you