Showing posts with label drug prescriptions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drug prescriptions. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Prescription drug abuse exceeds heroin, cocaine and ecstasy combined

(NaturalNews) Rates of prescription drug abuse worldwide are higher than those for the use of cocaine, ecstasy and heroin, combined, according to a new report by the United Nations' International Narcotics Control Boards (INCB).

"Abuse of such drugs has been spreading over the world in recent years," said report co-author Hamid Ghodse of St. George's University in London. "It needs to be tackled urgently."

Ghodse said that prescription drug abuse is a "hidden problem," and it is difficult for authorities to get comprehensive data on the scale of the abuse. Recent high-profile celebrity deaths from prescription drug abuse, such as that of Michael Jackson, have brought more attention to the issue, however.

The INCB report notes that in the United States alone, an estimated 6.2 million people were addicted to prescription drugs in 2008, or roughly 2 percent of the population. Among illegal drugs, only cannabis use exceeds this figure.

The report further estimates that between 1 and 3 percent of Canadians abuse prescription opioids alone. Students in a number of European countries, including France, Italy, Lithuania and Poland, are estimated to abuse sedatives and tranquilizers at a rate of 10 to 18 percent.

The problem is fueled by the prevalence of poorly regulated online pharmacies, which often sell diverted, fake or stolen drugs without a prescription.

The INCB also warned that as governments and the pharmaceutical industry have cracked down on illicit distribution of the sedative Rohypnol (known generically as flunitrazepam and colloquially as "the date rape drug"), less tightly controlled drugs have begun to displace it among sexual predators. In particular, the use of ketamine and gamma-Butyrolactone (GBL) in sexual assaults has risen.

"Since in many countries these drugs are easily available, they frequently fall into criminal hands," Ghodse said.

Organized crime has stepped into the business of prescription drugs, using methods from theft to manufacture to secure their products, INCB president Sevil Atasoy said, and continually seeking out new ways to get these products to market.

Sources for this story include: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS....

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Why pharmaceuticals might be called Weapons of Mass Prescription

(NaturalNews) Most people are familiar with traditional weapons of mass destruction such biological weapons, nuclear weapons and chemical weapons. The point of all such weapons of mass destruction is to inflict a large number of casualties on civilian populations as a way to cripple a nation into political or military submission.

When it comes to actually deploying weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) against civilian populations, no country has murdered more innocent civilians than the United States of America through its bombing of two Japanese cities during World War II. (This isn't rhetoric, it's an historical fact.)

Atomic bombs were very visible WMDs deployed in World War II as a way to force the empire of Japan to surrender to western forces. Since that time, full-scale nuclear weapons have never again been used directly on civilian targets, meaning the United States of America maintains the distinction of being the only nation in the history of human civilization to have dropped atomic weapons on civilian populations.

It begs the question: If national leaders believe dropping atomic weapons on civilian populations is justified, what other weapons might they feel justified in unleashing upon civilian populations?

Weapons of Mass Prescription

What if a nation wanted to reduce its own civilian population but do it covertly? One way to accomplish that would be to slowly poison the civilian population through exposure to toxic chemicals, heavy metals, hormone-disrupting molecules and nerve toxins.

And as any terrorist can tell you, the most covert way to accomplish that would be to inject such chemicals into the everyday products that people routinely consume: Water, food, personal care products and medicines. I even published a cartoon with this theme a couple of years ago: http://www.naturalnews.com/021880_w...

Here's another interesting fact: If you examine what's in the water, food, products and medicines sold across North America, you'll discover a dangerous assortment of chemicals that, taken together, could quite reasonably be considered weapons of mass destruction.

Interestingly, the fluoride dumped into public water supplies was originally an offshoot of the enrichment processing facilities for uranium to be used in nuclear weapons. These days, however, fluoride is usually just the toxic waste from fertilizer manufacturing factories or the waste from smokestack scrubbers of coal-fired power plants. Either way, it's not good for your teeth: The entire fluoride agenda largely a convenient, low-cost way to dispose of industrial waste chemicals while calling it a public health program.

Antibacterial soaps derive their antibacterial properties from chemicals that are molecularly quite similar to the infamous Agent Orange used in the Vietnam War. And yet these products are openly marketed for use by children.

Similarly, children and adults continue to be poisoned by heavy metals like mercury thanks to the highly toxic practices of modern dentistry -- an industry which astoundingly has still failed to admit to the obvious toxicity of a heavy metal its practitioners continue to install in people's mouths as "silver fillings" (which actually contain more mercury than silver).

There are hormone-disrupting chemicals in most of the plastics used in the processed food industry -- especially canned soups which are often highly toxic for a variety of other reasons. MSG and other nervous system destroyers are used throughout the food supply in soups, snack foods, salad dressings, flavorings and dips.

These are all chemical assaults of one kind or another, but the greatest assault on the minds and bodies of western consumers comes in the form of pharmaceutical chemicals. That's why I call them 'Weapons of Mass Prescription.'

Destroy any nation by destroying the health of its citizens

If you want to destroy any nation, simply unleash Big Pharma into its medical system. Within just two generations, its people will suffer widespread organ damage, sharp decline in cognitive function and rampant degenerative disease brought on by the side effects of everyday pharmaceuticals.

Antidepressants, for example, cause diabetes and obesity. Cancer drugs cause neurological disorders. Some arthritis drugs actually promote arthritis! And don't even get me started with the neurotoxicity of the chemicals used in vaccines...

Virtually all pharmaceuticals cause nutritional deficiencies. Most of them also contribute to long-term organ damage that affects the liver, heart, brain and kidneys. Pharmaceuticals are synthetic chemicals which are inherently incompatible with human biology. Whatever "therapeutic effects" appear to be present from pharmaceuticals are really just poisoning side effects that temporarily appear to be therapeutic but are actually disruptive to human biology.

Many pharmaceuticals are, in fact, blatant poisons to begin with. Popular blood-thinning drugs, which are usually just rebranded warfarin chemicals, are molecularly identical to rat poison. (Warfarin is actually used as rat poison. It's true. This is not an urban legend.)

Chemotherapy chemicals are extremely poisonous, and cancer patients frequently die from the toxicity of these drugs. Those who don't die often suffer from "chemo brain" -- a severe loss of cognitive function routinely experienced by victims of chemotherapy.

Poisoning the environment with chemical weapons

Meanwhile, the sheer quantity of prescription medications being used on civilian populations is resulting in the mass contamination of public water supplies with HRT drugs, painkiller drugs, cholesterol medications and other Big Pharma chemicals. (http://www.naturalnews.com/025994.html) It's so bad now that even the fish that swim near major cities are contaminated with medications. (http://www.naturalnews.com/025933_p...)

At some point, all the chemical contamination with pharmaceuticals brings the obvious question to mind: Are Big Pharma's drugs actually Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Is the U.S. civilian population being targeted in a covert chemical war that accomplishes the same thing as dropping bombs on Hiroshima, only more slowly and quietly?

And if so, what would be the purpose of such a chemical war on the American people?

Reshaping the human gene pool -- clever!

Population control is the obvious answer... not only because pharmaceuticals kill so many people but also because pharmaceuticals cause widespread infertility. By dumping so many chemicals onto civilian populations, the population can be reduced in the long term through chemically-induced infertility.

Now here's an interesting aspect of this: If all these mainstream consumer chemicals cause infertility, they're only causing it among those mainstream consumers who are careless enough with their own health to keep eating, drinking and swallowing all these synthetic chemicals in the first place. And that means this "population control" measure, if it actually does exist, is theoretically causing the greatest infertility in those who have the least ability to make good decisions about their own genetic health. It's potentially a way to achieve a significant shift in the gene pool of the human race by eliminating the genetic futures of those who are stupid enough to poison their own bodies (and therefore compromise their own genetic code) through mass exposure to synthetic chemicals.

As I've often said, there are a huge number of people in western nations right now (such as the USA, Canada, UK, etc.) who are collectively winning the Darwin Award by removing themselves from the human gene pool. And pharmaceuticals, it turns out, are the perfect WMDs to allow those who most deserve to be removed from the human gene pool to accomplish exactly that.

The future of the human race belongs solely to those who can protect the integrity of their genetic code.

People who eat, drink and consume large quantities of synthetic chemicals and dangerous prescription medications are demonstrating that they are not qualified to participate in the gene pool of the human race.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Most hospital patients are unaware of what drugs they are given

(NaturalNews) A recent study published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine has revealed that nearly all hospital patients do not know what drugs are being administered to them. The research revealed that nearly half think thought they were receiving one type of medication when they were actually receiving another and only four percent were able to identify at least one drug they received during their time there.

Researchers from the University of Colorado at Denver's School of Medicine conducted the study to evaluate whether or not hospital patients understood what treatments they were receiving while under professional medical care. Each participant claimed to be aware of his or her outpatient medications and all were coherent and reasonably informed. What the study revealed was that most patients do not know what drugs they are being given and the few that care to or believe they know are often misinformed.

About one in five hospital medication treatments was also found to be wrong, with either an improper dosage or an incorrect drug being administered. Since the patient is the last stop before a drug is administered, researchers are stressing the importance of patient awareness concerning drug therapies in order to avoid grave errors that could inflict serious harm.

Once out of the hospital, less than 15 percent of patients over age 65 could identify the medications they were told to take. Only 40 percent of those under 65 could properly identify theirs.

Study authors believe that increased patient responsibility and awareness about given and prescribed treatments is necessary in order to prevent medical errors and their potential for serious injury.

Comments by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

This research reveals the sad, sad state of western health care. The statistic that one in five medication treatments were incorrect is nothing short of astounding. That means 20% of the drugs patients are given in the hospital are either the wrong drugs or the wrong doses.

Astonishing. No wonder so many people die in hospitals!

The other part of this research is just as startling: Most patients didn't even know what drugs they were being given! This speaks to the incredible dis-empowerment of patients in a western medical setting. When patients don't even know what medicines they're being given, it puts all the power in the hands of doctors and medical staff. And this study demonstrates that even medical staff all too frequently make mistakes that can be deadly.

The bottom line is obvious: Don't go to a hospital except as a last resort. Hospitals are dangerous places where frequent mistakes can easily lead to you being harmed or killed by carelessly-administered pharmaceuticals.

And don't expect to be kept informed of what's happening to you at the hospital, either. Real communication between doctors and patients is virtually nonexistent (because they're too busy to spend more than about two minutes with each patient).

Sources for this story include:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea...

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

FDA approves Crestor for people who have no health problem to correct

(NaturalNews) Big Pharma has been trending this direction for a long time: marketing medicines to people who don't need them and who have nothing wrong with their health. It's all part of a ploy to position prescription drugs as nutrients -- things you need to take on a regular basis in order to prevent disease.

The FDA recently gave its nod of approval on the matter, announcing that Crestor can now be advertised and prescribed as a "preventive" medicine. No longer does a patient need to have anything wrong with them to warrant this expensive prescription medication: They only need to remember the brand name of the drug from television ads.

This FDA approval for the marketing of Crestor to healthy people is a breakthrough for wealthy drug companies. Selling drugs only to people who are sick is, by definition, a limited market. Expanding drug revenues requires reaching people who have nothing wrong with them and convincing them that taking a cocktail of daily pharmaceuticals will somehow keep them healthy.

All this is, of course, the greatest quackery we've yet seen from Big Pharma, because once this floodgate of "preventive pharmaceuticals" is unleashed, the drug companies will be positioned to promote a bewildering array of other preventive chemicals you're supposed to take at the same time. Did you take your anti-cancer pill today? How about your anti-diabetes pill? Anti-cholesterol pill? Don't forget your anti-Alzheimer's pill, too.

Medications are not vitamins

The very idea that these drugs can somehow prevent a person from becoming sick in the future strains the boundaries of scientific credibility. Only natural therapies like nutrition can prevent the onset of disease, not patented chemicals that don't belong in the human body in the first place.

The logical argument of the drug companies who push these "preventive" prescriptions is essentially that the human body is deficient in pharmaceuticals, and that deficiency can only be corrected by taking whatever brand-name drugs they show you on television. Forget about deficiencies in zinc, or vitamin D, or living enzymes; what your body really needs is more synthetic chemicals!

The FDA agrees with this loopy logic. And why wouldn't it? Subscribing to this pharmaceutical delusion is an easy way to instantly expand Big Pharma's customer base by tens of millions. Overnight, the market for Crestor ballooned from a few million people with high cholesterol to the entire U.S. population of 300 million people.

If Crestor can help healthy people be healthier (which it can't, but let's play along with this delusion for the sake of argument), then it's only a matter of time before they start adding Crestor to infant formula. I mean, why not? If it's so good for healthy people, then it must make babies healthier, too, right?

So let's add Crestor to sports drinks. Let's sprinkle it into the iodized salt supply. Let's drip it into the municipal water! (Don't laugh: This idea of dripping cholesterol drugs into the water supply has already been suggested by more than one doctor.) Let's merge the pharmaceutical supply with the food supply and charge people prescription drugs prices for "functional" foods laced with these chemicals!

Pharmaceutical deficiency

That's really where all this is headed. When medicines are approved as preventive "nutrients" for the human body, it's only a matter of time before the industry starts talking about your "pharmaceutical deficiency."

Not taking any medications? You have a pharmaceutical deficiency, and it needs to be corrected by taking more prescription drugs. But don't bother with actual nutrition, because nutrients have absolutely no role in preventing disease, the FDA claims. No nutrient has ever been approved by the FDA for the prevention or treatment of any disease whatsoever.

The message from the FDA is quite clear on this: Nutrients are useless, and you should eat medications as if they were vitamins.

Patented Big Pharma chemicals, after all, provide all the nutrition you'll ever need!

Acute Pharmaceutical Toxicity killed Brittany Murphy - Could it be killing millions more?

(NaturalNews) The entire pharmaceutical industry is based on the idea that for whatever's wrong with you, there's a patented chemical pill that can make it better. Feeling some anxiety? There's a pill for that. Have high blood pressure? There's a pill for that, too. Suffering from sleepless nights? There's yet another pill for that, too.

Importantly, modern medicine and the pharmaceutical industry both believe there is no limit to how many prescription medications you can simultaneously take. If you have ten health problems, they've got ten different pills for you. And when those pills cause twenty different dangerous side effects, they're ready for twenty more prescriptions for you to dutifully swallow.

This idea that health is achieved by taking prescription chemicals is ludicrous from the start. And yet it's the foundation of the pharmaceutical industry. Take as many pills as you "need", they insist. Don't worry: They're all FDA approved!

This is akin to believing that if it's safe to drive 65mph in your truck, and it's also safe to drive 65mph on your motorcycle, then if you load your motorcycle onto your truck, it's now safe to drive 130mph.

The fatal flaw in the theory behind pharmaceuticals

As you already guessed, there's a fatal flaw in this pharmaceutical approach to sick care: Pharmaceuticals have never been tested in combination with other drugs. So all the so-called "gold standard science" is absolutely worthless at knowing what might happen when half a dozen pharmaceutical drugs are combined in a patient's body. Brittany Murphy may have been on as many as TEN drugs!

Despite the fact that no combination testing has ever been done on pharmaceuticals, they are regularly prescribed in combination. Obviously, this creates a whole new realm of unknown risk based on the way multiple drugs might chemically interact in the human body.

The more pharmaceuticals you take, the more dangerous they become. While one pharmaceutical chemical may at first seem harmless (even though just one drug can actually kill you), when you start adding a second, third, fourth and fifth prescription on top of that, you're dealing with Acute Pharmaceutical Toxicity (APT) that's never even been tested in clinical trials.

Pharmacists are trained to help people avoid the most toxic two-drug combinations, but they rarely have any real knowledge about what happens when you combine three, four, five or more drugs. No one does. The science has simply never been done on that question. It's no wonder: With all the possible combinations and permutations of pharmaceutical toxicity, it would take literally trillions of clinical trials to test them all.

So this whole idea that you can take a drug to treat one problem, then take a second drug to treat a second problem, and a third to treat a third problem... this entire approach to health care, upon which modern medicine is largely based, is flawed from the start. In clinical trials, patients are tested for one drug at a time. Never five or six (or ten).

So all the clinical trials that have ever been conducted by the pharmaceutical industry need to be thrown out the window for patients who take more than one drug. And that's just about everybody! Ask any senior citizen which prescription drugs they take, and most of them (the ones who can still remember, anyway) will rattle off a shockingly long list of toxic chemicals that have never been tested in combination. Just because one drug in isolation seems "safe" in one trial in no way means it's going to be safe when combined with half a dozen other toxic chemicals taken by the patient at the same time.

The list of drugs taken by Brittany Murphy boggles the mind

According to information leaked to the press, Brittany Murphy was found near prescription medications of all the following drugs:

• Topamax (an anti-seizure medication)
• Methylprednisolone (anti-inflammatory drug)
• Fluoxetine (antidepressant)
• Klonopin (anxiety medication)
• Carbamazepine (bipolar medication)
• Ativan (anxiety medication)
• Vicoprofen (pain reliever)
• Propranolol (hypertension drug)
• Biaxin (an antibiotic)
• Hydrocodone (pain medication)

That's a whopping ten medications that Brittany Murphy may have been swallowing all at once.

Now, you can search PubMed, the National Library of Medicine and the archives of the FDA, and you will never find a single clinical trial testing these ten drugs in combination. It's never been done (and never will be). Big Pharma, you see, isn't interested in finding out what happens when their various drugs are combined in the same patient at the same time. Why? Because they know the results would be disastrous.

The result was certainly disastrous for Brittany Murphy. Her FDA-approved, doctor-prescribed, Big Pharma-promoted combination of toxic drugs appears to have cost her her life.

How many other patients are dying from Acute Pharmaceutical Toxicity? (APT)

Brittany Murphy surely isn't the only Big Pharma customer who has been killed by Acute Pharmaceutical Toxicity. But no one knows the actual number because no one keeps track!

The FDA simply doesn't want to know. That's why reporting drug side effects and deaths to the FDA remains entirely voluntary. Big Pharma doesn't want anyone looking too closely at this issue, either. Coroners, for their part, rarely ask about pharmaceuticals as a possible cause of death. Typically, they just blame the death on whatever organ failed, calling it a "heart attack", for example, even when the heart attack might have been brought on by toxic pharmaceuticals.

Imagine if police detectives worked the same way. Investigating a crime scene where someone was thrown from a ten-story window and plunged to their death on the street below, imagine if the detective reported the cause of death as being, "Hitting the ground."

That's the way coroners work with the cause of death in patients killed by pharmaceuticals. They routinely ignore the real cause -- the chemical cause -- and just name whatever organ happened to fail first. "Liver failure" is a popular one. But what caused the liver to fail in the first place? It usually has something to do with Acute Pharmaceutical Toxicity.

Why celebrities need real nutrition

I've said it before, but celebrities lead extremely stressful lives. Being a movie star is no easy career choice -- it involves long hours, stressful travel and crazy work schedules.

Sadly, many movie stars have turned to pharmaceuticals to try to keep them functioning through the extreme stresses of a movie shoot. This inevitably leads to devastating consequences.

What professional actors need more than medication is nutrition. Only high-density nutrition can help them cope with the enormous stresses their careers demand. That's why I think more movie stars need to be drinking Boku Superfood, or Living Fuel, or Pure Synergy, or other high-quality superfoods every single day.

I continue to believe that if Brittany Murphy had ditched all those dangerous psychotropic drugs and instead turned to superfoods and high-density nutrition, she'd be alive and well today.

The bigger question in all this, though, is: Could millions of people around the world be dying right now from Acute Pharmaceutical Toxicity? If so, how would we even know?

Sources for this story include:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/new...