Johnson and Johnson engaged in elaborate drug profit kickback scheme, says Dept. of Justice lawsuit

(NaturalNews) Drug maker Johnson & Johnson paid tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks to nursing home pharmacies in order to boost the sale of its drugs, says a Justice Department lawsuit.

The payments were often disguised as grants or "educational funding," says the lawsuit, and they were directed to Omnicare, a prominent nursing home pharmacy company.

The elaborate kickback scheme caused sales of Johnson & Johnson drugs to skyrocket. Sales of the antipsychotic drug Risperdal, for example, helped J&J drug purchases from Omnicare nearly triple from $100 million to $280 million a year.

An email released by the Justice Department shows an Omnicare executive writing:

"WE ARE SELLING MORE HIGH PRICED DRUGS (read Risperdal here) FOR THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY!!"

Omnicare is already steeped in other accusations of fraud. The company agreed to pay the U.S. government $98 million in a settlement reached a few months ago (while admitting no guilt, of course). (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009...)

Drugging the seniors

Today's nursing home patients are often treated much like prisoners, mentally shackled with chemical restraints known as pharmaceuticals. The mass-drugging of senior citizens in nursing homes has now reached criminal proportions. Rather than actually treating patients in ways that make them healthy, nursing home staff in some facilities have discovered it's much easier to just drug patients into a zombie-like state where they don't ask questions or cause trouble.

Johnson & Johnson medications are used as part of this "chemical restraint" recipe, which is actually a form of chemical abuse of senior citizens. J&J and Omnicare, of course, are far more concerned with selling medications than actually improving the quality of life for nursing home patients, so the more drugs are sold and consumed, the more "success" these companies think they have.

But what's the cost in human lives? What is the real human impact of drugging our senior citizens to the point where they're barely human?

Companies like Johnson & Johnson only seem to care about their own profits. They appear to have no compassion whatsoever for the lives of the people impacted by their patented chemical pharmaceuticals. They also appear to have no respect for the law: Bribing Omnicare with kickbacks, if proven by the Justice Department, is a felony crime.

But as usually happens in these cases, Johnson & Johnson will probably get off with a slap on the wrist: An affordable fine and a bit of bad press. Then, like most other pharmaceutical companies, they'll likely go right back to violating the law in order to sell more high-profit medications. Why? Because it works.

Pharmaceutical companies rarely face any real consequences for their crimes, even when they're caught red-handed. It's a curious thing, really. In any other industry, companies engaged in such blatant fraud would be shut down, their CEOs arrested and prosecuted in federal court. But when it comes to Big Pharma, all they have to do is pay a small fine, after which they're free to continue committing crimes.

It's nice to see the Justice Department finally going after these corporate crooks. Just last year, Pfizer was hit with a record $1 billion settlement with the Justice Department for engaging in fraudulent drug advertising. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027276_P...)

It was a rare victory, however. Most of the time, drug companies get away with their crimes and face no real consequences for bribery, corruption, marketing fraud, scientific fraud, intimidation of scientists or elaborate financial kickback schemes that put extra dollars into the hands of doctors or pharmacies that push their drugs.

The pharmaceutical industry, in case you haven't noticed, is a criminal world where those who commit the boldest and most egregious crimes generate the highest profits. The risk of getting caught is so low -- and the financial rewards for committing crimes are so great -- that drug companies fully realize it pays to break the law.

That's why they'll keep breaking the law until something changes. As I've said before, I think it's time the Justice Department marched into the offices of these drug companies with pistols drawn and arrested the top CEOs for their crimes against humanity. Only by showing these drug companies that their executives are going to be prosecuted for their crimes can we hope to put an end to the criminal activities that have now become routine across the pharmaceutical industry.

Sources for this story include:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...

Cancer profiteering? New chemo drug costs $30,000 a month

(NaturalNews) Big Pharma's pill pushers and natural remedy skeptics are always trying to drill one idea into your brain: "Natural remedies are a ripoff!" they say. "And they aren't even proven to work!"

In response to those skeptics, allow me to introduce a new cancer treatment drug called Folotyn, made by a small drug company named Allos Therapeutics. It costs $30,000 a month. That's a thousand dollars a day, mathematically speaking.

But here's the best part: Folotyn has never been proven to save lives. That's the complaint about natural remedies from conventional medicine pushers, and it reveals the contradiction in their criticism: When natural remedies aren't proven to work, they call them "quackery." But when their $30,000-a-month medicines aren't proven to work, they don't have any problem with that. Take your medicine and stop asking questions! Who needs scientific proof when they're already so sure they're right?

Folotyn has been proven, by the way, to shrink tumors by 27%. Of course, you can accomplish the same thing with vitamin D, spirulina, green tee, medicinal mushrooms and other anti-cancer nutritional therapies. Even if you went all-out and bought a huge collection of anti-cancer supplements and started taking them aggressively, you'd be hard pressed to consume more than $2,000 worth of product in a single month. That's a $28,000 savings over Folotyn, and the best part is that all those supplements would boost your brain health, heart health, liver health, kidney health and immune health at the same time.

Or, you could just exercise outdoors, getting both vitamin D and exercise for free, saving you $30,000 a month while healing your own cancer. (It also helps to give up all the cancer-causing chemicals in your foods, personal care products, home cleaning products and medicines.)

I don't know about you, but I'd much rather save the $30,000 and just heal the cancer myself. That might be good advice for you and me, but it would spell financial disaster for the cancer industry.

A thousand dollars a day to poison yourself

Reading this news about this $1,000-a-day cancer drug makes me laugh, because lots of people still complain about the cost of a $19 book on cancer cures, or a $20 bottle of superfoods that contains anti-cancer medicine. Somehow, any amount of money seems justifiable for conventional medicine, but even the smallest investments in personal nutrition or wellbeing are met with a lot of resistance.

I remember talking with a couple at an acupuncture clinic a few years back. They were complaining about the price of the $75 acupuncture treatments for infertility. When I asked them what they had tried before, they told me they had spent something like $20,000 on an infertility clinic, with no success. Wow! And $75 is expensive?

Now, if a legitimate cancer cure really was offered by conventional medicine (and it never will be, because such a cure would destroy their business model), it might be worth $30,000 or more. Heck, a one-time cure might be worth a million dollars, but don't hold your breath on that one... no chemical cure is forthcoming.

Not from the world of conventional medicine, anyway. The only cures that exist today are from the realm of natural medicine, where cancer is routinely cured by patients who heal themselves with the help of natural cancer clinics all around the world. And at those cancer clinics, the entire treatment is usually far less than $30,000.

Of course, if you really want to poison yourself while paying somebody $1,000 a day, this high-priced chemotherapy agent might be just what you're looking for. But you can chug wheatgrass shots for less than ten bucks a day and probably get just as much tumor shrinkage -- at 1/100th the cost!

Draining you bank account before you die

Conventional cancer treatments are a ripoff. They cost you a fortune and they don't even work. No one has ever been cured by cancer from chemotherapy. Not a single person... ever! There isn't a single documented case anywhere in the medical literature claiming that a person was cured of cancer from chemotherapy. So why do people still fall for the chemo scam?

The answer: Because they're desperate. They're dying, and they're willing to pay anything for hope, even if it's a false hope thrust upon them by their oncologist. It is in this context that these cancer drug companies charge $10,000 a month, $20,000 a month or even now $30,000 a month to treat you with their "breakthrough" cancer drugs.

The purpose of all this isn't to cure your cancer: It's to drain your bank account before you die, extracting every last dollar of your savings and retirement money before you expire. No one out-quacks the cancer industry in terms of exploiting the fears of dying elderly patients.

If this were done in the financial industry, it would be called a swindle. If an investment con man targeted sick, elderly people, promising some miraculous result if they just paid him $30,000 a month, he'd be arrested and locked up as a purveyor of financial fraud. But when the cancer industry perpetrates the same fraud on our nation's elderly, they get away with it! No one questions the fraud. No one realizes the industry is based on fraudulent marketing and fraudulent science combined with a huge financial con that convinces sick, elderly patients to part with their life's savings in exchange for some high-tech quackery that will never save them.

Part of the reason this con continues, I think, is because the victims of it don't live very long. Dead men don't talk, and dead cancer patients don't file complaints with the Better Business Bureau.

Sources for this story include:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/h...

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/12...