Tag: big pharma

Tim Ryan Took Money From Opioid Distributor Whose Executives Mocked Addicts as ‘Pillbillies’

On the campaign trail, Rep. Tim Ryan, the Democratic Senate candidate in Ohio, likes to tell voters about his work as co-chair of the Congressional Addiction, Treatment, and Recovery Caucus and to attack pharmaceutical companies for profiting from “getting so many millions of Americans hooked on opiates.” None of that stopped him from accepting money from a political action committee funded by an opioid distributor whose executives mocked addicts as “pillbillies,” a Washington Free Beacon review of campaign finance documents found.

The $1,000 donation came from AmerisourceBergen PAC in November 2019. Emails revealed in 2021 during a lawsuit against the company for its alleged role in the opioid crisis showed AmerisourceBergen’s executives expressing broad contempt for poor whites suffering from addiction, which at the time was largely fueled by pharmaceuticals such as OxyContin.

In one exchange, a senior AmerisourceBergen executive circulated a parody song containing references to “hillbilly heroin,” “a bevy of Pillbillies” and a reference to Kentucky as “OxyContinville.” Another email shared between executives joked about how crackdowns against so-called pill mills—doctors who illegally prescribe opioids to customers—in Florida will lead to a “max [sic] exodus of Pillbillies heading north.” 

The donation could prove to be a political liability for Ryan, a Democrat running in a state that has been inordinately impacted by the opioid crisis. The Associated Press reported earlier this month that opioid distributors donated at least $27,000 to Ryan’s political campaigns since 2007.

At the same time, the AP found, Ryan voted against bills meant to increase funding for anti-opioid initiatives, such as spending packages for addiction treatment. In a statement to the AP, Ryan’s campaign said one of the donors, Cardinal, is a large employer in Ohio.

The Ryan campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

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Pharmaceutical Industry Suffers Billions In Losses After States Legalize Marijuana, New Study Finds

The pharmaceutical industry takes a serious economic hit after states legalize marijuana—with an average market loss of nearly $10 billion for drugmakers per each legalization event—according to a first-of-its-kind study.

The peer-reviewed research article, published in the journal PLOS ONE on Wednesday, looked at stock return and prescription drug sales data for 556 pharmaceutical companies from 1996 to 2019, analyzing market trends before and after the enactment of medical and adult-use cannabis legalization laws at the state level.

The stock returns were “1.5-2 percent lower at 10 days after legalization,” the study authors founds. “Returns decreased in response to both medical and recreational legalization, for both generic and brand drugmakersInvestors anticipate a single legalization event to reduce drugmaker annual sales by $3 billion on average.”

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Big Tech, Pharma, Finance Urge SCOTUS to Uphold Race-Based Discrimination in College Admissions

A large cross-section of corporate America filed briefs with the Supreme Court on Aug. 1 urging the court to allow colleges to continue using race as a factor in student admissions.

The court is poised to hear challenges to these racially discriminatory policies in its new term that begins in October. The challengers say so-called affirmative action not only hurts white applicants, but works out to be an “anti-Asian penalty” as well. Asian American applicants generally have higher academic scores and higher extracurricular scores, they say.

Some legal observers speculate that the nine-member court—whose six-member conservative majority broke new ground in June by curbing environmental regulatory powers, declaring that the court was wrong to recognize a constitutional right to abortion 49 years ago, and declaring that there is a constitutional right to carry firearms in public for self-defense—wouldn’t have agreed to hear challenges to race-based college admissions unless it intended to curb them.

The use of race-based criteria by institutions of higher learning in the admissions process isn’t popular in the United States.

Surveys from both Pew Research Center and Gallup have indicated that nearly 75 percent of Americans of all races “do not believe race or ethnicity should be a factor in college admissions.”

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Have millions been taking antidepressants with harmful side-effects for decades – when there’s no scientific evidence they do what they claim? Some experts have suspected it for years. Now patients have been left reeling by a groundbreaking study

Like millions of patients who seek help from their GPs for depression, Emma Ward was repeatedly told she was suffering from ‘an imbalance of chemicals in the brain’.

If Emma wanted to get better, her doctors said the 26-year-old should keep taking the antidepressants she had been prescribed since she was 15 — even though the drugs did not seem to improve her mood, and left her feeling perpetually numb emotionally.

Now, shocking new research published yesterday shows that the theory justifying the millions of prescriptions for antidepressants handed out every month to patients such as Emma, is simply not true.

The research confirms what some medical professionals have increasingly come to suspect. That the ‘chemical imbalance’ theory — that depression is due to a lack of the brain chemical serotonin — is nothing more than a myth.

This myth was created more than 35 years ago by pharmaceutical companies to justify their products, and has been perpetuated ever since by the training and practice of doctors around the world. In the most comprehensive review of the research on links between depression and serotonin ever carried out, researchers from the UK, Italy and Switzerland looked at 17 major international reviews that had documented the findings from more than 260 studies, involving 300,000 patients.

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Bombshell Oxford Study: Less than 6% of “Approved” Medical Drugs Are Backed by “High-Quality Evidence” to Support Their Benefits – “Harms” are Significantly Underreported Across the Board

According to a newly released study by the University of Oxford, a jaw-dropping 94% of recently approved medications are not supported by high-quality evidence that demonstrates their benefits. What’s more, just like with the experimental Covid-19 ‘vaccines,’ side effects and adverse reactions to these drugs are being severely underreported across the board.

When looking at medical drugs that have been approved since 2008 under the Cochrane reviews – a “leading” international journal and database that is endorsed by over 100 organizations worldwide, including the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) -researchers determined that just 87 of the 1,567 medications (6%) had clinical data that met the “high-quality” standard.

From the Oxford study:

“Of 1567 eligible interventions, 87 (5.6%) had high quality evidence on first-listed primary outcomes, positive, statistically significant results and were rated by review authors as beneficial.”

Unbelievably, the majority of these drugs could not even pass the ‘moderate-quality’ review, with over 50% failing to meet the reduced threshold. And yet, consumers have access to these drugs, which are causing unknown and underreported side effects – something that should amount to medical malpractice at the very least. That is – if we lived in a sane, well-functioning society.

One of the study’s authors, Dr. Jeremy Howick, certainly thinks so. Writing about the findings, Dr. Howick deemed the issue worrisome and stressed that, with this happening, ‘informed choice’ about medical treatments is essentially impossible.

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