C.E.P.T.A.
The CAMPAIGN for EFFECTIVE PREVENTION and TREATMENT of ADDICTION.
6. and 6a. OBVIOUSLY THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY IS INVOLVED IN DRUGS,
BUT WHAT DOES THE DRUG SCENE OWE TO PSYCHIATRY ? :
PSYCHIATRY’S ROLE
AS THE U.K’s PUSHER OF ADDICTIVE
PHARMACEUTICAL PRESCRIPTION DRUGS
by Kenneth Eckersley of CEPTA
The Campaign for the Effective Prevention and Treatment of Addiction.
Because of T.V. and other advertising - coupled with shop window presentations, counter top displays and attractive packaging in the thousands of chemist’s and pharmacists around Great Britain - it is easy to get the impression that over-the-counter high street sales of headache powders, cold cures, sedatives, tonics, backache pills, foot balms, creams, lotions, cough mixtures and hair & skin care products, etc., etc, are the main business of the chemical and pharmaceutical drug companies.
But this is not so.
Without the
pharmacists’ business of filling local doctor’s prescriptions added in, the
over-the-counter sales achieved by high street shops contribute little more than
a minor percentage of the profit generated by bulk chemical sales and by
marketing prescription drugs en-masse to the N.H.S., its associated specialist
departments and to or through other
Whilst there has always been a close relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medicine in general, over the last half century, the increasing ‘guidance’ or direction by the “big pharmas” of the psychiatric sector has been most marked, so that today it is unquestionably true to say that psychiatry is now by far the pharmaceutical industry’s main prescription drugs marketing arm.
This is seen not only in our hospitals, in clinics and in doctors’ surgeries, but also in our schools, our prisons, in the military and in our court-rooms, where psychiatry increasingly prescribes harmful and dangerous pharmaceutical drugs to the man–and-woman-in-the-street, to our children, to pensioners, to juvenile offenders and to other law-breakers – drugs which history has shown and continues to show CURE NOTHING, but regularly lead to addiction, crime and early death.
To this cosy psycho-pharm commercial relationship psychiatry brings its close contacts with the Department of Health and the N.H.S., the general medical field, individual doctors, drug users, drug workers, the military and the general public through psychiatric surgeries and clinics, universities, teaching hospitals, Drug Advice Centres, the National Treatment Agency, political, medical, police and prison ‘reform’ programmes, seminars and lobbyists, plus psychiatry’s increasing influence & pressure on councils, education authorities and parent / teacher associations, etc.
Psychiatry in turn receives from the pharmaceutical industry a ready-made set of ‘treatments’, ‘therapies’ and drug based interventions capable of being recommended for a range of real, but more often merely assumed, speculative and simply invented conditions, all of which are able to be prescribed without need of further investigation or testing by individual psychiatrists, the ‘scientific’ work of ‘assessing’ the value of each drug having been done for them by their ever helpful pharmaceutical suppliers.
But today psychiatry gains even more from pharmaceutical ‘answers’. Whereas fifty years ago doubtful psychiatric “treatments” were comprised mainly of Electro Convulsive Treatment (ECT), Narcotic Shock Therapy, pre-frontal lobotomy, leucotomy and other brain tampering surgery and, whilst such inhumane treatments are still prescribed and delivered every week of the year, the number of pharmaceutical drug interventions today outnumbers such other ‘treatments’ by many many magnitudes.
In fact it is recognised that without the availability of the thousands of widely obtainable non-cure symptom handling drugs* (see below) psychiatry itself would essentially have nothing to offer as ‘mental treatment’, psychiatry’s own earlier developed ‘therapies’ still also mainly proving non-curative and more often than not contributing to a worsening of the patients’ condition.
[* such as the Amphetamines, the major and minor Tranquilliser groups, Methadone, Prozac, Ritalin, Naltrexone, the Hypnotics (Benzodiazepines, Zolpidem, Zopicione, Chloral Hydrate and its derivatives, Clomethiazole, the Antihistamines), the Anxiolytics, (Buspirone, Beta-Blockers and Meprobamate), the Barbiturates, the wide range of Antipsychotics and Antimanics, (Carbamazepine, and Lithium), the Aversion Reaction Stimulators, (Disulfiram, Acamprosate Calcium), the Antidepressants, (the Tricyclics, the MAOIs, the Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors), and the Central Nervous System Stimulants, etc., plus a host of other psychiatric drug ‘therapies’.]
In other words, it is the pharmaceutical industry,
plus its expanding range of unsafe but potent prescription drugs,
which today keeps psychiatry in business.
But make no mistake. The pharmaceuticals also likewise gain from psychiatry’s ability to influence and actually control a huge army of psychiatrists, fellow travellers and other physicians. A so-called “professional” army found not only operating and prescribing in the medical field, but one which also influences national and local government policies at so many different levels and in so many different ways.
In fact the ability to both directly and indirectly influence political thinking is a major psychiatric contribution to the psycho-pharm relationship.
WHY? Because it is very seldom – if ever - that the patients who are prescribed psycho-pharmaceutical drugs make their own purchasing decision or have to find the money to pay for them. Instead, in the vast majority of cases, the drugs are prescribed by a psychiatrist or other physician, and are paid for by government out of taxpayer’s funds.
As a result, the pharmaceuticals have little necessity to market and sell prescription drugs to the general public. Their ‘clients’, i.e. the people they most have to convince, are the policy-makers in the DoH, the NHS, the NTA, the DfES and the Prison Service, etc., PLUS the senior policy-makers in government and their ‘advisers’ in the Civil Service.
Psychiatrically
orientated practitioners can include educational psychologists,
psycho-analysts, psycho-therapists, social scientists and social and political
psychologists, etc., and these as well as psychiatrists have been increasingly
insinuated into management positions in the government organisations just
mentioned. As a result, indirect but highly effective control by
pharmaceutical drug manufacturers of
And that control
is exercised by those who make – and who strive by every means possible to
continue making – enormous turnover and huge profits from drug sales, paid for
by government out of
Like the iceberg
which sank the Titanic, 90% of pharmaceutical prescription drugs
marketing is below the surface consciousness of a majority of politicians,
civil servants and the
Some of that image is of course true, so this report is not intended to blacken the whole of the pharmaceutical industry in which many companies & products do try to live up to the image which their P.R. departments and lobbyists like to project. But it is such a large industry, dealing in so many life threatening substances, that less than half of its members and their dangerous products are sufficient to create the devastating scenarios exposed here. There are of course also some good amongst the many bad apples in the psychiatric barrel.
To fully understand the real threat of pharmaceutical turnover and profit intentions, we must differentiate between their marketing of their huge range of non-prescription chemist shop and other over-the-counter reliefs, ‘cures’ and placebos, versus their vast range of dangerous, unsafe, habit-forming and life threatening prescription drugs, which are designated as “only available on prescription” precisely because they are dangerous, unsafe, habit-forming and life threatening!
Non-prescription over-the-counter drug and ‘medicine’ sales are of course used to develop a friendly, helpful and sympathetic image and are promoted openly and with vigour by the manufacturers themselves, with little need of psychiatric or other medical support, except perhaps as ‘professional’ endorsements – a marketing contribution more effectively made by pop stars and sports personalities, whom the general public tend to trust more than psychiatrists.
On the other hand, in a marketplace based predominantly on a State provided ‘free’ National Health Service, rather than on ‘paying-patient’ private medicine, ‘prescription’ drugs are sold in bulk to the politicians and the Civil Servants running the N.H.S. – not to the patients / users.
As a result, the main prescription marketing tools are not public advertising and local private G.P. advice to patients, but instead are based on a broad range of pro-fessional P.R. and lobbying organisations, medical academia, overt & covert ‘health-
interest’ front groups and publications, so-called ‘fact articles’ and all the paraphernalia needed to influence the decision-makers at every level of the government selection and purchasing cycle.
Some of this ‘marketing’ is done by pharma industry executives and psychiatrists mixing socially and commercially with senior politicians and civil servants, as well as by pharmaceutical industry ‘advisors’ and sales reps dealing at G.P. level, hospital buying officer level and junior civil service level. But many government buying decisions are also quietly done via pharma moles already installed in decision influencing positions, as well as by vested interest psychiatrists unwittingly employed by the State to actually make such procurement policies and decisions.
Whilst the drug market’s most obvious criminals and suppressers of our society appear to be the producers, smugglers and pushers of illicit drugs of all types (the suppliers that customs officers and police have been attempting to halt with sustained and expensive law enforcement activities for the last half century) these “drug barons” are not the real problem.
Illicit drugs are the smaller part of the U.K. drugs marketplace, and it is other vested interests – namely those which influence demand as well as supply which are our real problem. These fall into four main classes:
1) Elected policy-makers, MPs, civil servants, medical and psychiatric advisors and other government employees who are themselves users of addictive substances; recent notable examples being the former Deputy Drugs Tsar and his Minister in the Cabinet Office. This is a growing cancer, and there are many hundreds of others whose attitudes are dictated by their own use of drugs.
2) Policy-makers, MPs, Local Councillors, civil servants, medical and psychiatric advisors, other official employees, pharmacists and local chemists whose livelihoods or lifestyles depend on drug consumption and / or on chemical production.
3) Those national and international business interests for whom legal drug production and sale can (and already does) provide income and profitability of eventual astonishing magnitude. This is mainly the ‘psycho-pharm fraternity’, held by many observers to control the N.H.S. which has been entrusted by successive governments with solving our drugs problems, yet has more employee personal drug-use problems than any other government public service department.
4) Those disguised lobbying organisations and individuals working ‘under-cover’ for wealthy vested interests dedicated to taking over and expanding world drug supplies by covertly seeking the legalisation of currently illicit drugs. These include Mike Trace – the former U.N. Drug Control Programme Demand Reduction Chief, and are believed to include George Soros and Roger Howard – former Chief Executive of DrugScope, and many of his colleagues and contacts.
If that were not enough, psychiatric physicians are now signing prescriptions for patients they have never seen to lend a spurious legality to the pharmaceutical companies’ escalating profitable sales of prescription drugs over the Internet.
In other words psycho-pharms are now
by-passing every
A Revealing Look at Prescription Marketing Methods:
CREATE THE MOST ADVANTAGEOUS ‘USAGE’ CIRCUMSTANCES:
If the psycho-pharms were to admit that drug addiction IS curable then addicts (whose prescribed methadone doses are the foundation of much of the pharmas’ huge and profitable sales) would very quickly cease to be the large and increasing source of income which has been developed by their marketing people in the form of so-called habit management.
Instead, to maintain sales – i.e. to keep those addicts using – two main strategies (both based on false ideas) have been developed:
1) Dual diagnosis, is based on the psychiatrically promoted false idea that drug addiction is a form of mental illness which, because of its innately neurotic, psychotic or ‘inherited’ nature cannot be cured. It must, they say, therefore be ‘managed’ with psychiatrically prescribed drugs. This clearly keeps psychiatry in the driving seat in respect not only of treatment, but also in regard to policy. After all, who other than a psychiatrist does a politician or Civil Servant misguidedly feel he needs most to consult on the subject of ‘mental illness’?
And so: who quietly dictates government drugs policy?
“Cannot be cured” is of course also the perfect excuse for the psycho-pharm’s continuous long-term increasing failure to handle our drug problems of the last 50 years. Far from curing any form of addiction, the last decades have seen ever escalating levels of drug usage of all types, and the people responsible for government supported “treatment” over that whole period have been none other than the psycho-pharmaceutical fraternity operating via the N.H.S. as well as via both overt and covert lobbying organisations and practices.
Via counselling sessions, ‘advice’ centres, clinics, pharmacies and surgeries, etc., psychiatrists and their pharmaceutical suppliers have been in near exclusive contact with – and control of – the addicts and other users, who in fact form the consumer demand side of our drugs marketplace.
To maintain that demand for the ‘treatment’ which creates psycho-pharm income, turnover and profit, decades of statistics show that THE LAST THING which that fraternity does, or wants to do, is to reduce drugs demand by curing the addicts, and the prescription drug users, upon whom they depend for their continuing business.
NOR DO THEY WANT ANYONE ELSE CURING THEM.
Little wonder that Keith Hellawell (whose anti-liberalisation policies
were a clear danger to increasing drug use and a brake on rising drug sales)
was moved sideways and out,
as soon as he started to emerge as an effective Drug Czar.
2) Harm Reduction, a strategy also based on the false idea that drug addiction is incurable. Therefore, politicians are told, the ‘harm’ which drugs do must be ‘reduced’ by various interventions. (All of which, coincidentally but unmentioned, can be made to show a profit for the psycho-pharms and associated business interests.)
Originally ‘harm reduction’ was a set of apparently well-meaning ideas intended to reduce harm to the already addicted drug user. i.e. to protect the existing addict from AIDS, HIV, hepatitis and other transmittable diseases in various ways, originally and mainly by providing clean needles to heroin injectors, etc. The concept was then taken up and twisted or spun into a wonderful long-term money-maker by vested interests in the psycho-pharmaceutical field.
“Harm Reduction” was craftily stretched to include existing methadone ‘maintenance therapy’, as the best way to ‘reduce the harm’ to the society in which the addict lives. So, at taxpayer expense, a ‘free’ daily supply of an addictive drug more powerful and harmful than heroin is prescribed – methadone, or in some cases - buprenorphine.
This, the politicians were told, is effective “management” of an otherwise ‘incurable’ habit ‘to the benefit of the whole community’, which would no longer be plagued by daily acquisitive crimes committed by addicts to feed their addictive craving. However, the ‘Big Issue’ August 1999 survey & report proved this to be downright false, as a majority of prescribed methadone users continue with other drugs on a daily / weekly basis, and thus also continue with a life of acquisitive and other crime.
To turn our youth into drug consumers
other facets of modern ‘Harm Reduction’ propaganda are now being used
to get real and positive PREVENTION of drug use out of the way,
whilst having the effect of actively promoting increasing drug use.
Promoted as drugs education, Harm Reduction concepts such as ‘safe use’ (of drugs), ‘informed choice’ (of drugs) and ‘responsible use (of drugs)’ combine to produce a child who will say to his or her parents: "Don't worry Mum, I know all about drugs”, and, because of that dangerous ‘little knowledge’ feels safely inclined to use them. On the other hand, a child effectively schooled in real PREVENTION will say to parents: “Don’t worry Dad, I don’t use drugs and I never will”.
But who would want prevention to fail? Obviously those who wish to sell more and more drugs at higher and higher profits – because YOU CAN’T REGULARLY SELL DRUGS TO A PERSON WHO IS NOT A USER OR AN ADDICT. And it makes no difference whether a drug is legal or illegal. Such designations are a whim of political policy and vary from country to country and from time to time.
The main characteristic of a drug - legal or illegal - is that the consumer / addict can only say “YES” to his or her supplier. Addicts have no choice in this. Their insatiable, habitual and irresistible craving for the substance is the decision-maker, as a result of which an addict is a goose which compulsively lays golden eggs – for his or her drug supplier – whether that supplier is illicit or legal, whether that supplier is a crook or a pharmacist!
Which of course is why one finds psycho-pharm motivation behind virtually every overt and covert, and behind practically every direct and indirect, support or promotion of drug liberalisation and legalisation. Legalisation under psycho-pharm control of course, as they are the self-proclaimed ‘experts’ and ‘authorities’ in the drugs field.
Every time another youngster takes up illegal heroin, there is quiet psycho-pharmaceutical applause, because statistics show that in something like
three years or so, that individual will be another customer for methadone,
buprenorphine, disulfiram or naltrexone, etc., - paid for by the taxpayer.
(Prescription Marketing Methods Continued):
CREATE NEW USES AND NEW REASONS FOR SUCH USAGE:
1) Psychiatric purveyors of so-called ethical pharmaceutical drugs have been, and are increasingly, pushing bigger volumes of dangerous drugs into our schools than even the drug barons.
Prozac, and particularly Ritalin, are daily prescribed to thousands and thousands of our young and youngest British schoolchildren, and even though such dosages are now known – amongst other side effects – to sooner or later form a basis for addiction to other drugs (both illicit and legal) psychiatrists continue to use the spurious and un-researched and totally unproven “ailments” in the discredited American “Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders” to label more and more U.K. schoolchildren with a false mental health problem, and thus create more and more “clients” for themselves and more and more turnover for their pharmaceutical drug suppliers.
Infant, Junior and Senior school prescribing of drugs to children (labelled by psychiatry with non-existent mental conditions when their real problems are allergies, other undiagnosed physical medical conditions or even just youthful high spirits) is proving another huge money-spinner for those vested interests. Why? Because here also the drugs are paid for by government from taxpayer funds – another example of the ruthless marketing of pharmaceutical drugs by psychiatry – not to the user, but to the government and Civil Service to provide an opportunity for prescribing to create new individual drug users.
2) Similarly, government-employed and other psychiatrists prescribe for offenders on Drug Testing and Treatment Orders addictive and debilitating drugs such as methadone, which provably have no beneficial effect on the individual’s life and well-being, and in fact ultimately lead to physical and mental debility and lifelong addiction - more often than not accompanied by a (shortened) life of acquisitive crime and more or less total dependency on the State.
3) The same situation applies to incarcerated prisoners in a misguided attempt to subdue them, again thus basically ensuring they will become pharmaceutical and / or other drug users for life – inside and outside prison – and dependent on the State and its taxpayers for medical and housing support as well as for ‘free’ pharmaceutical drug supplies.
4) The psycho-pharm fraternity regularly releases “new” drugs for “addiction control” when, as is inevitably the case, an existing ‘habit management‘ drug is finally found out to be ineffective as a cure and is recognised as clearly exacerbating the drug problem rather than reducing it. Morphine was prescribed to manage Opium addiction. Then Heroin was prescribed to handle Morphine habituation, followed by Methadone and Buprenorphine to manage Heroin addiction, and most recently followed by Naltrexone to handle Heroin, Methadone and Buprenorphine addictions.
A Current Example
of How New Uses for Prescription Drugs are Invented.
Whilst the above is a generalised statement of what is happening, right now we have a very specific example of the lengths to which international psychiatry plus one gigantic U.S. multi-national pharmaceutical company will go to take increasing control of our community health and education systems - solely in order to be able to mass market more prescription drugs to our government and Civil Service for payment out of U.K. taxpayer contributed funds.
In the first half of 2005, under the banner “WITHOUT BOUNDARIES”, the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH) - sponsored and supported by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Ely Lilly – has set in motion an international plan to promote the wider diagnosis of the invented illness ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and other bogus, scientifically un-researched and totally unproven “ailments” listed in the discredited U.S. psychiatric “Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders”.
This ‘manual’ – which is nothing more than a list of symptoms not scientifically researched or proven but given psychiatric names merely by show of hands – is increasingly used to label more and more of our schoolchildren with false mental health conditions, and thus create more and more “patients / customers” for psychiatrists and more and more turnover for their pharmaceutical drug suppliers.
This
But symptoms are not illnesses. Nor are they diseases or causes.
If water is coming down through your living room ceiling, it might be that the bath is overflowing, it might be that the water cylinder has burst, it might be that a pipe is leaking, it might be that the ball-cock in the toilet cistern is stuck, it might be a central heating radiator is leaking, it might be that the roof is leaking or it might be one of a number of other causes - but the ‘water coming down through the ceiling’ symptom doesn’t tell us which.
Whilst dad or mum might quickly try to handle the symptom of the problem by putting a bowl or bucket under the point where the water is coming down, the real cure action is to rush upstairs, find the cause and then handle that. Turning off the taps, draining the water cylinder, finding the leaking pipe, freeing the ball-cock, turning off the central heating, turning off the main water supply or getting a patch on the roof are all curative actions which can eventually and conclusively handle the symptom.
But not if you are a psychiatrist. You wouldn’t want a cure, because a cure is a lost client. Symptoms are your livelihood, and your continuing treatment (and income) depend on “managing” the symptoms of problems – because psychiatry doesn’t know any cures. So forget about the real cause upstairs. Instead carefully organise a chain of family members and friends with buckets to catch the water from the ceiling and then cart it out to the road to empty down the drain.
This can then keep you fully employed for as long as you wish.
Similarly, a child put on prescription drugs helps employ a psychiatrist for life!
So this is how you handle ADHD.
You first observe the behaviour of groups of young people. You note that some are more active, restless, or high-spirited than others and that their additional motion can be distractive for those who are less active. You ignore the fact that some of the quickest and brightest students are amongst the ‘active’ group, and that they are bored by the slow pace of the lessons and want more action.
You also carefully avoid testing for dietary problems caused by excess sugar, over-refined foods, too much fat, preservative chemicals, added colourings and flavour enhancers, etc., and you totally ignore any possibilities that some of the youngsters in your ‘active’ group might suffer from one or more of a range of food allergies or even allergies to cleaning materials, chemicals used in their lab work, etc., or cats, dogs and hay-fever, etc., etc.
Instead you label the more active ones as ‘hyperactive’ and promote the idea that such hyperactivity is a ‘disorder’ and that they can’t concentrate
because they have a shortage or ‘deficit’ of ‘attention’.
This then gives an excuse to say that their ‘hyperactivity’ must be curbed (for the benefit of others - not their own benefit) and thus provides an opportunity to prescribe a nice ‘ethical’ pharmaceutical drug on a daily basis for the rest of their school days and quite probably for the rest of their life, as most of the prescribed drugs are provenly habit forming and / or fully addictive.
Because it is not even a realistic lie, ADHD is not catching on as fast as the psycho-pharmaceutical industries had hoped, and so sales of the drugs which they pretend ‘manage it’ are not expanding as quickly as they had forecast. As a result, the WFMH & Lilly are now even asking the media to help in promoting it to government, civil servants, other physicians, teachers, parents and social workers, etc., and are also implying that long-term treatment of a significant percentage of our youth with prescription drugs is vital to the general health and well-being of our nation ! ?
The psycho-pharms tell us that there are no physical tests for ADHD. Now isn’t this just fortunate for them, as it means that diagnosis depends entirely on the opinion of the examining psychiatrist based on the American Psychiatric Association‘s Diagnostic Statistical Manual – undoubtedly the world’s most discredited, biased and divisive pseudo-scientific publication.
Any unbiased competent medical diagnostic procedure would involve
a whole battery of tests intent upon detecting or eliminating the whole range of possible causes of the observed symptom(s).
Are there dietary problems caused by excess sugar? By over-refined foods? By too much fat? By preservative chemicals, added colourings and flavour enhancers, etc? Do any of the ‘active’ youngsters suffer from one or more of a whole range of food allergies? Is the youngster an addict – not just drugs, alcohol or solvents – but coffee, other caffeine drinks, chocolate, cigarettes, sugar and fast foods, etc? Does he or she have allergies to cleaning materials, or to chemicals in their lab work? Or to chalk dust? Or to cats, dogs or new mown grass, etc? Or to warm asphalt? Or to cement dust? Or to dust mites? Or . . . or . . . or, etc., etc?
There is a huge range of testable causal factors which can produce those same symptoms, which most psychiatrists single-mindedly, short-sightedly and resolutely designate as ADHD, usually without first making any of the above tests to eliminate or detect other likely causes. This is pre-conceived ideas. This is deliberate bias. This is suppressive authoritarianism. This is intent to deliver psycho-pharm products and services at any cost.
The truth is that, because ADHD is an invented disease based on symptom interpretation and on no other evidence, thorough diagnosis such as that indicated above will normally reveal the true cause. And this is why large numbers of psychiatrists do not bother to do such tests, as they are looking for long-term prescription business and don’t want to lose any by finding real causes.
So, we have the new joint Eli Lilly & World Federation for Mental Health promotion (under the title of “Without Boundaries” and in other guises), appealing to doctors, parents and teachers to make sure that they are not missing out on diagnosing the psych’s pet ADHD “disease”, and practically begging the media to spread the word about this hidden and undetectable (except to psychiatry) “hereditary” illness which they falsely claim can only be treated with pharmaceutical drugs and which should be ‘diagnosed’ at the earliest possible date – the younger the better.
Why? Because a child starting on prescription drugs at 6 years of age is going to be a user of that and other profitable drugs for 10 or 20 years longer than someone starting at 16 or 26 years of age.
And they offer so-called parental ‘guidance and training’ in “recognising” the symptoms of ADHD. But of course the intention of this is to indoctrinate parents (and teachers and medical doctors) into the psych’s own ‘tunnel-vision’ attitude which ignores the hundreds of other possibilities for their child’s symptoms.
A May 2005 symposium in the
One thing which became clear, is that the Lilly / WFMH promotion of ADHD has been brought (by them) out into the open because their earlier covert promotion is not expanding their sales as quickly as they had hoped. Increasing public experience of ADHD diagnosis and so-called ‘treatment’ has begun to work against them. The truth about ADHD is beginning to emerge and so the psycho-pharm’s new “Without Boundaries” promotion has been mounted to try and counter the real truth by describing that truth as “myths” and pretending there exists some form of conspiracy against psychiatric and pharmaceutical treatments.
But the only ‘conspiracy’ against them is the natural inevitability over time of truth emerging - no matter how many lies are promoted and how much money and force are put into sustaining those lies.
The tentacles of the psycho-pharms are deeply embedded in our governmental arenas, in health, education and even in our legal system and religious areas. As a result such high-powered promotion of ADHD will ensure that it takes a long time for it to succumb to the harsh light of truth and thus disappear.
However, whilst the muted desperation of the psycho-pharms’ new “Without Boundaries” promotion may indicate that they are beginning to feel the necessity for some sort of defensive or rear-guard action, this is no reason for slackening off on the exposure and eradication of ADHD and other false psychiatric illnesses.
(Prescription Marketing Methods Continued):
MAKE USE OF USEFUL LAW, OR SEEK TO CHANGE IT
1) To eliminate competition from non pharmaceutical anti-drug substances and viable addiction cures, attempts were recently made by the psycho-pharms to introduce legislation into the E.U. which would outlaw large dose format natural vitamin and mineral supplies.
At the same time they attempted to limit vitamin sales to small dose daily supplies based on manufactured vitamins (rather than extracts from natural sources) which, by such new law, they wanted to be retailed only by established high street chemists and other allied or controlled pharmaceutical outlets: clinics, hospitals, etc.
This was thus seen by many observers as an attempt by the big pharm drugs industry to monopolise the food supplement industry in the same way as those same vested interests currently monopolise prescription drug production. Additionally however, their attack on the large dose format natural vitamin and mineral extract producers hid a far more sinister motive.
As earlier noted, the basis of all psycho-pharm strategies is the continuing strong and broad promotion of the false idea that drug addiction is incurable. Unfortunately for them, there are numerous organisations around the world which do help addicts cure their drug addiction on a regular basis, with comfortable lifelong abstinence success rates running between 69 and 84 percent. Alongside some rather unique rehabilitation training concepts, natural vitamin and mineral extracts are used in short-term controlled escalating doses to help the body confront its deprivation of its previous addictive substance(s) and to flush out the drug residues which can cause flash-backs and a resumption of drug use.
Such cure systems are not only capable of taking drug clients away from the psycho-pharms, but are also capable of exposing costly psycho-pharm habit management interventions for the rackets they truly are. So the psycho-pharms’ grand plan was to cut off supplies of essential food supplements from those organisations capable of killing off the psycho-pharms’ golden goose – the addict – by curing him, and equally capable of killing off their profitable stranglehold on government funded drug treatment programmes.
Fortunately, E.U. fair-trading concepts prevailed, and the psycho-pharma “codex alimentus” plans for a take-over of the food supplement field (and thus the elimination of real cures for addiction) were defeated. However, it is rather clear that this proposed legislation was only a first shot in what is certain to develop into a long-winded and large scale battle, because, if the psycho-pharms are to stay in their large and lucrative habit management and harm reduction businesses, they MUST maintain the idea that drug addiction is incurable, and to do this they must kill off those organisations which can prove them wrong.
2) Whilst the National Treatment Agency was jointly formed by the Drug Czar, the Home Office and the N.H.S. with the intention of searching out, examining and aligning all forms of drug treatment interventions in order to make them more broadly available, it is interesting to note that Home Office and Drug Czar involvement is no longer extant and that the N.T.A. is now “a special health authority, with a remit to increase the availability, capacity and effectiveness of treatment for drug misuse in England”.
And yet, it is now part of the NHS, the government Department with the biggest personnel drug misuse problems in the U.K.
Furthermore, although full and effective addiction cure procedures exist here and to a greater degree abroad, it is difficult to find more than passing mention of non-pharmaceutical treatment interventions by the N.T.A. and in fact their ‘Models of Care’ “for treatment of adult drug misusers” emerges merely as a possibly better organised way of justifying and maintaining the status quo of the failing psycho-pharm treatment modalities with which the U.K. has been saddled for the last several decades.
Not surprising when one examines the membership of the Models of Care ‘development team’, which is comprised mainly of former DrugScope personnel, psychiatrists and pharmaceutically orientated members.
Because DrugScope has for years been seen by many anti-drug observers as a front for the psycho-pharm industry, it is disconcerting to find 2 representatives of that lobbying organisation now helping to run the N.T.A. In fact one of them was not only the Head of the N.T.A’s Personnel Department during the time when most of the senior management appointments were made and the Models of Care development team members recruited, but she is now the chairperson for that team.
She is also said to have been responsible for the appointment as a senior Director of the N.T.A. of the now discredited covert legaliser and drug user Mike Trace, and it is therefore not surprising that the N.T.A. is increasingly seen as a product of psycho-pharm covert lobbying – especially as members of DrugScope and of the ACMD were so closely involved in its formation.
It is also interesting that this government funded said-to-be ‘independent’ body - in the forefront of national drug misuse treatment - should also hold to the false idea that drug addiction is basically incurable. Hardly a confirmation of the open-minded approach they were said to be bringing to ‘the drug problem’ when the N.T.A. was in process of being formed. Furthermore, their stand on legalisation of drugs is strangely reminiscent of psycho-pharm propaganda and their repeated support of the Methadone Alliance (i.e. legalisation of opiates by prescription, plus campaigning for increased dosages) continues without similar support being shown for non-pharmaceutical treatment or training modalities.
3) Unprincipled psychiatric physicians are today now signing prescriptions for patients they have never seen or previously heard of. The statutory requirement for an authorised signature on a prescription is intended as a safeguard, but pharmaceutical prescription drug suppliers have gone out of their way to line up physicians who are prepared (for a fee) to lend a spurious legality to the drug producer’s basically illicit business of selling a variety of prescription drugs to individuals who want them – not because they are ill, but because they have become addicted.
Some of these sales are done over the local pharmacist’s counter, but the vast still escalating majority are done over the Internet.
In other words psycho-pharms are now by-passing every U.K. government drug prescription regulation in order to expand their sales into areas they pretend to be protecting with that prescription system. To whom are they selling? They don’t know! Because the anonymity of the Internet means that anyone with access to a credit card number now also has access to a whole range of dangerous prescription only drugs – dangerous, because that is why they are ‘prescription only’.
This useful, new and profitable marketing arm is perhaps cleverly
within the letter of the law, but it entirely avoids its spirit.
(Prescription Marketing Methods Continued):
SIDE-LINE OTHER ADDICTION CONTROL & CURE METHODS
In the cut and thrust of multinational commercial politics, P.R., promotion advertising, marketing and merchandising, etc., are not considered enough to ensure success. Drug companies have clearly decided that one must also be prepared to stop others from being successful and particularly those other organisations, products, systems and services which are capable of exposing one’s own short-comings, doubtful claims and downright lies.
One of the most revealing insights into the “courtship” of the “psychs” and the “big pharmas” is to be found in the history of failing “street drug treatments” in this country. The three factors most likely to reverse our constantly worsening drugs scene are:
1) Truly Effective Prevention,
2) The Training of Addicts to Rehabilitate Themselves (because we
now know that ONLY the addict can fully cure him or her self) and,
3) Culture Change.
Controlled as we are by powerful and entrenched vested interests ‘Culture Change’ is vital to our ability to progress Effective Prevention and the Training of Addicts in Self-Cure. This is because it is the status-quo psycho-pharm hold on our culture’s official policies - governing Prevention and Cure activities - which maintains the present escalating usage of drugs of all types whilst keeping out other more effective solutions. These policies must therefore urgently be changed.
It was mainly submissions made by the ACMD, DrugScope, the N.T.A., the N.A.C, the so-called Police ‘Foundation’ (not to be confused with the highly principled and representative Police Federation), the UK Harm Reduction Association and their fellow liberalisers and legalisers which led to the recent downgrading of cannabis – a move which is now seen as sufficiently damaging to merit a government U-turn.
One UK MEP is reported as saying that whether he is in Brussels, Strasbourg, London or any other major E.U. city, he knows he can rely on three meals a day seven days a week all paid for by one pharmaceutical company P.R. Agency or another, and constant psycho-pharm ‘networked criticism’ within the WHO, the NGOs and the European Union is directed against any individual or organisation it appears might upset their status-quo hold on government drugs policy and addiction treatment, or on the escalating psycho-pharm prescribing of drugs to our children.
Although there already exist in some 40 countries, over one-hundred and fifty 39 year established, provably and undoubtedly effective, centres and / or systems for training drug addicts to take themselves into comfortable abstinence for life, psycho-pharm P.R. agents, lobbyists and speakers continue to deceitfully insist that drug addiction cannot be cured or alleviated and must therefore be “managed” (by the use of pharmaceutical drugs of course). These already existing effective handlings of addicts are unfairly ridiculed by dishonestly describing them as searchers for the elusive “Magic Bullet” – i.e an obviously impractical and impossible one-stop cure which, the psycho-pharms audaciously claim they themselves would have discovered by now if such a magic bullet existed.
Often with backing from organisations like the National Treatment Agency, the NHS, the ACMD and the DfES, major conferences, seminars and presentations directly or indirectly sponsored or supported by psychiatric and / or pharmaceutical organis-ations will regularly grant platform time to their own failed and failing viewpoints whilst excluding speakers liable to present an opposite or more effective view. At the same time, the featured platform speakers will indirectly attack opposing viewpoints and endeavours which are not present and not represented on the platform.
In fact, such biased platform speakers often reserve their most aggressive attacks for later private conversations with U.K. opinion leaders when hidden away from the attention and possible denunciation which public platform statements might attract. And attacks on other addiction control and cure methods seldom if ever appear on TV or radio. This is because the real psycho-pharm attack is devoted to making sure that such other methods are neither seen nor even heard of.
This is done by keeping competitive speakers and viewpoints off the air, in the same way that competitive speakers are kept off the conference platforms.
Because psycho-pharm activities make huge money and because the protests of concerned citizens are funded from their own pockets, the overwhelmingly major difference - by far - between the publicity machines and methods of the psycho-pharms and the honest endeavours of other prevention, addiction control and cure methods - is spending power.
This means that the psycho-pharms can make louder, longer noises from more directions than their smaller more effective competitors, and is why one of the psycho-pharms tactics is to get their competitors to waste their meagre resources denying psycho-pharm lies. Fortunately, repeating a lie does not make it more true.
(Prescription Marketing Methods Continued):
BY ANY MEANS POSSIBLE CONTROL TRADE, POLITICAL & PUBLIC MEDIA
In the May 17th edition of THE TIMES, under the heading of “Editor says drug firms ‘use’ medical journals”, Nigel Hawkes reported as follows:
“MEDICAL journals act as a marketing device for drug companies, and profit hugely by it, a long term editor of the British Medical Journal has charged.
Richard Smith who left the BMJ last year to join the U.S. health care company United Health Europe as chief executive, and who now serves on the board of PLOS Medicine, an online journal, says that the studies funded by drug companies are carefully planned to produce positive results.
This can be done, he argues, by asking the right questions, using multiple endpoints (outcome measures) and selecting the ones that show the product in the best light, and by publishing trials again and again, in different journals, by different sub-group analysts, and in different geographic regions, to give the impression of a huge weight of evidence.
The trials are well conducted, he acknowledges, but adds “studies funded by a company were four times more likely to have results favourable to the company than studies funded from other sources.”
The companies will often order huge numbers of reprints, worth possibly more than £500,000 to the journal publisher, for distribution to doctors.”
This recent article is typical of others revealing the hidden pressures put on, and the inducements regularly proffered to, editors and publishers by pharmaceutical P.R. and promotional departments and agencies.
But “media” in the fields of psychiatry, pharmaceuticals, politics and medicine is of course not restricted just to erudite professional publications.
“Media” is any piece of paper, leaflet, agenda, newspaper, radio or TV programme, set of minutes, invitation, conference, seminar, audio tape, video tape, CD and / or DVD, etc., which can influence a policy-maker, a physician, an MP, a local Councillor, a civil servant, a medical advisor, a Minister, an education authority, a parent / teacher association, a grant making charity, a military commander, a prison or probation officer and / or any national or local government employee.
Psycho-pharm influenced media includes large beautifully constructed web-sites covering myriad subjects. Some sites are overtly promotional, but many others are both identified and unidentified attackers of other competitive prevention, addiction control and cure methods. Psycho-pharm front-group lobbyists large and small, obvious and obscure, use their own weasel words as expertly as Hitler’s Goebbels manipulated his propaganda – black and white – to support the rise of Nazi Germany and to suppress its competitors.
These include the former SCODA and ISDD – now DrugScope - DrugLink, the Federation of Drug and Alcohol Professionals, the ACMD, the Drug Education Practitioners Forum, Forward Thinking on Drugs, the Alliance, the Roehampton Institute, the National Addiction Centre, the Police Foundation, UKHRA and Transform, etc., etc.
Whilst a number of them are knowingly controlled by or working for the psycho-pharms, amongst them there are also other genuinely dedicated people who are unfortunately so naïve as to be unable to recognise that they are being manipulated by expert public relations concepts and operators.
Like the honest Joe General Practitioner:
who was recently reported in the national press as saying that, whilst he had for years dismissed gifts and invitations from pharmaceutical companies as of no influence on him or other doctors, he was a short time ago suddenly appalled to recognise that many of his decisions had in fact been very definitely swayed by those contributions to his life and practice. He could not believe that such overt ‘persuaders’ could possibly influence his professional decisions, until he realised that they worked like the steady drip of water which wears away a hard piece of stone.
It is “media management” by their PR companies, ‘front-groups’, fellow-travellers, hidden allies and paid and unpaid opinion leaders which has convinced politicians that drug addiction is incurable, has ensured that the search for a so-called ‘Magic Bullet’ to end drug addiction should be abandoned, and has convinced government that their funding should be restricted to psychiatrically run organisations.
The truth is that the drug-use cure arena already has several very effective magic bullets, but this data is deliberately obscured and withheld from both the government and the general public by pretending that such programmes can never succeed because: “Well, we’re the experts and we all know that drug addiction can’t be cured – so why waste time on these myths?”.
Another Viewpoint:
In their May 2004 issue, the Brussels based satirical magazine - “The Sprout” - published a review of what was likely a spoof “confidential” memorandum supposed to have been circulated amongst members of an imaginary ‘conspiracy-theory’ alliance of pharmaceutical companies and linked influential psychiatric groups.
What caught the attention of the magazine’s editors and prompted their closer investigation was the pretty unarguable truth of the various plans, policies, strategies and tactics attributed by the unknown author to his (or her) imagined “pharmaceutical industry trade promotion and protection society”, thus prompting the editors to suspect and to try and seek out a “whistle-blower” of some sort.
The article was titled “The Goose that lays the Golden Eggs”, the “goose” being your neighbourhood drug addict who – by virtue of his irresistible habit - has no choice but to buy or otherwise obtain his drug needs every day, either from a ‘pusher’ of illicit drugs or from a pharmaceutical source, and it became clear that for some time and still continuing, a war is raging between the illicit drug barons and the pharmaceutical companies for the custom of drug users around the world.
Both these massive opponents make money from initiating and maintaining lifelong addiction to drugs so, apart from the legal difference between these two rivals, the main difference is in the way in which they get their money. In both cases the society pays. The drug barons callously push their addicted illicit drug customers into more and more acquisitive crime in order to pay for their daily ‘fix’ or ‘hit’.
But the psycho-pharms are far more crafty. The legal addict pays nothing for his prescription methadone, buprenorphine, disulfiram or naltrexone, etc., as the psycho-pharms have cleverly and just as dispassionately arranged for the government to pay them for the drugs out of funds collected from U.K. taxpayers.
But the psycho-pharmaceutical drug pushers are also another step up on the drug barons. Anyone starting on cannabis today has an excellent chance of migrating to heroin at a later date. When he or she does so, the legal pharmaceutical drug supplier has as much cause for rejoicing as the illicit drug baron. This is because drug-use market research shows that some three years or so after starting on illicit heroin, a majority of such addicts will likely enter the so-called ‘treatment system’ to enrol for free daily prescription doses of methadone, buprenorphine (or even medical heroin) – supplied by the psycho-pharms and paid for by the taxpayers.
As a result, whilst psychiatrists in schools are hooking our youth onto prescription drugs, alongside them drug barons are enrolling our youngsters into the illicit drug scene, not realising that, ultimately, they also are recruiting future customers for prescription pharmaceutical drugs.
And this arises because legalised drug use by prescription
places the control, increasing turnover and profit from addictive drugs
firmly in the hands of the psycho-pharmaceutical industry.
Little wonder that that industry and its fellow travellers are the greatest supporters both overtly and covertly of liberalisation and legalisation – because that is the easiest and most inexpensive way to expand the world drugs market. Examples of this in the fields of addiction are smoking and drinking. Look at the escalating tax evasion, theft and other crime in our legalised tobacco market. Look at the growing tax evasion, theft, violence and in-family and community crime in our licensed alcohol market.
The so-called ‘confidential’ leaked memo is concerned with the psycho-pharmaceutical industry’s approach to drug addiction, treatment systems and expansion of world wide drug use, and shows much of what is happening in the psycho-pharmaceutical’s political world and why its campaigns for liberalisation are a main line to profit.
For those who enjoy well researched tongue-in-cheek exposés, the writer of this present report would be happy to supply you (on request) with a scanned copy of that now famous ‘leaked’ ‘confidential’ memo which he received through the post - apparently along with several hundred other workers, MPs and other decision makers in the drugs use field,.
And the writer of this current commentary also trusts that your view of the ‘ethical’ pharmaceutical industry will be shaken by that satire, as well as by the data set out above, and that you will thus be moved closer to the truth, and to decisions and actions of a more sane and effective nature than those which currently masquerade as a UK drugs strategy.
E. Kenneth Eckersley, FCMI, FIOD, HonMPHMA(Int), HSDC, MCIM, MFDAP, MABFDFE,
Former Magistrate and Retired Justice of the Peace.
© Copyright C.E..P.T.A. and E. Kenneth Eckersley, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 & 2005. All World Rights Reserved
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