"PRESCRIPTION FOR DISASTER"

Forty-six percent of Americans take at least one prescription drug daily.  That’s more than 128 million people.  Most of these people are taking medications long-term, so their exposures aren’t brief.  Twenty-five percent of Americans take multiple prescription drugs every day. In 1999, Americans purchased 2,587,575,000 prescriptions—that’s nine prescription drugs for every person in America every day.  Americans paid $125 billion for these prescriptions—$50 per prescription on average.

The public likes to believe that our hospitals and medications are safe and that our doctors are taking every reasonable precaution.  However, prescription drugs pose one of the greatest human-created dangers outside of war and pose a major peril to public health.  Fifty-one percent of approved drugs have serious adverse side effects not detected prior to approval.  More than half of our drugs, after being deemed “safe” by the FDA and then prescribed to millions of people, are subsequently detected to have previously unrecognized, medically serious side effects.

To rely on the drug companies for unbiased evaluations of their products makes about as much sense as relying on beer companies to teach us about alcoholism.  Taking prescription drugs ranks as one of the most hazardous activities of modern society.  Because so many millions are exposed, drugs have a potential for disaster that dwarfs most other risks of modern society.

In a prescription drug disaster, tens of thousands of people may die and literally millions are placed at risk.  In the hospital environment, multiple drugs are used in aggressive treatment–with a patient typically getting ten to fifteen drugs during a hospital stay.  The intravenous route of administration of many of these drugs makes adverse effects occur more rapidly and with greater severity.  Street drugs kill only 10% as many people every year, as legal, prescription drugs (6 times more than those Americans killed in the Vietnam War).  Americans are dying, one every three to five minutes, from the effects of FDA-approved pharmaceutical drugs, used as directed!

Poisoning from prescription drugs has risen to become the second-largest cause of unintentional deaths in the United States, according to the private corporation the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, February 9, 2007, researchers found that deaths from prescription drugs rose from 4.4 per 100,000 people in 1999 to 7.1 per 100,000 in 2004. This increase represents a jump from 11,000 people to almost 20,000 in the span of five years.

Among the 20,000 that died, more than 8,500—double the number from 1999—were from “other and unspecified drugs.” Psychotherapeutic drugs, like antidepressants and sedatives, nearly doubled from 671 deaths to 1,300.

Age-wise, the biggest jump was among people aged 15 to 24, which the CDC report says relates to recreational prescription drug use and a jump in cocaine use. However, all other age groups except the elderly over-75 group saw increases of more than 35 percent on a per 100,000 scale in prescription drug deaths—including a nearly 90 percent jump for the late Baby Boomer generation (ages 45 to 54) and a more than 90 percent for people aged 55 to 64.

The entire drug industry, including the monopolistic drug giants and their FDA co-conspirator, has clearly become the single greatest threat to the health and safety of the American people.

And yet the FDA continues to push more drugs onto more Americans than ever before, all while pretending these drugs are safe and effective when, in reality, they are neither. Today’s pharmaceutical industry is a massive fraud being perpetrated against the American people, propped up by illegal trade practices, monopolistic behavior and outright criminal behavior on the part of the FDA.

Deaths from all major airline crashes in the United States average less than 300 annually, but one airplane crash gets more media attention and governmental scrutiny than the 300 medication-related deaths that occurred not only the same day as the crash, but also every day before and after for decades.

Of the 30 million individuals admitted to hospitals each year, approximately 10 percent or 3 million are admitted specifically because of adverse drug reactions.  Patricia Harris, past secretary of Health and Human Services, stated that 6 million people in the U.S. are affected by adverse drug reactions each year.  The FDA’s estimates are the same at 6 million per year.  In one large hospital, 25% of the deaths recorded came from adverse drug reactions...