There is plenty below to ponder. When we arrive at that point
..............................................................................................
IAHF Webmaster: Breaking News, Whats New, All Countries
Re
Article Below "Pharma Buys a Conscience"
IAHF List: Please read the
email I just sent to Dr.Elliott and read his excellent article (below) about
how drug companies are trying to control and manipulate bioethicists in an
effort to suppress unwanted articles, such as his. While this is nothing new
to me and to most of you, it is none the less shocking and very revealing.
If you appreciate Dr.Elliott's article, please forward it widely, with or
without my letter to him. I will be on the air again tomorrow and also
Friday with Stan Monteith, see below...
To: Carl Elliott, MD,
PhD
Director, Graduate Studies
Center for Bioethics
Department of
Philosophy
University of Minnesota
[EMAIL PROTECTED]Dear
Dr.Elliott-
I deeply appreciate your article "Pharma Buys a
Conscience" (below for those I'm forwarding this to.) Please let me know if
you come under Pharma Attack for writing it, and if so, what the nature of
that attack proves to be. If you do come under attack, I'll be glad to help
you in any way possible. As a lobbyist for the dietary supplement industry
and for dietary supplement consumers world wide, I've had death threats and
constant threats of legal action- all of which I either ignore or find
creative ways to deal with.
By chance have you seen the excellent
documentary on PBS which raises badly needed questions about the fraudulence
and corruption inherent inside the FDA and with the FDA's so called "drug
approval process"? PBS raises the question: "The FDA: Hazardous to Your
Health"? PBS's series "Dangerous Prescription" can be seen on their website
at
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/prescription/hazard/
You should urge all your students to watch this, its very well done, and it
ties in directly with your message!
I am the President of
International Advocates for Health Freedom
http://www.iahf.com and am going to forward
your fine article to my global distribution list of thousands of dietary
supplement consumers who are up at arms against the Pharma Cartel's global
efforts to destroy the dietary supplement industry as unwanted
competition.
I am working closely with the Alliance for Natural
Health in the UK
http://www.alliance-natural-health.org
whose executive director, Dr.Robert Verkerk forwarded your article to me.
ANH has filed a lawsuit to overturn the European Union's mindless Food
Supplement Directive, which via globalization mechanisms threatens to be
imposed planet wide unless stopped by force of law.
The biggest
problem we face is pharmaceutically dominated vitamin trade associations
doing massive spin against our message.
Power corrupts, absolute
power corrupts absolutely.
As a person whose life was saved via a
suppressed alternative treatment mode after mainstream medicine almost
killed me due to a near total ignorance of clinical nutrition, my life was
saved over 20 years ago via orthomolecular medicine. The story of my
recovery has been downloaded over a million times by people around the world
searching for answers when grappling with severe depression and
schizophrenia. It has been translated into numerous foreign languages by
people in cyberspace who share our distrust of the Pharma Cartel, I never
had to pay anyone for doing these translations. If interested, you can read
my story at
http://www.iahf.com/on_the_back_wards.html
You may also be interested in my article from the July issue of Life
Extension Magazine about the Alliance for Natural Health's lawsuit to
overturn the EU Food Supplement Directive
http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2003/2003_preprint_eu_01.htmlThanks
again for having the courage to tell the truth. There aren't enough people
with your level of integrity in the world today, in or outside of
academia.
I am doing a radio show tomorrow on the American Freedom
Network, as the guest of Dr.Stan Monteith, and will mention your article on
the air. If you should want to listen in, it will be at 8PM west coast time
and you can hear it on the web at
http://www.americanewsnet.com/radio.htm
I'll also be doing another show with Dr.Monteith on Friday at 4PM west coast
time, same website.
If you would like to call to discuss anything I'm
saying here, I can be reached in Washington State at 800-333-2553 home and
work
Sincerely,
John Hammell, President
International Advocates
for Health Freedom
556 Boundary Bay Rd.
Point Roberts, WA 98281
USA
http://www.iahf.com800-333-2553
N.America
360-945-0352 World
cc: William Faloon, VP, The Life
Extension Foundation
http://www.lef.org
cc: Dr.Stan Monteith- Dr.Stan's Radio Show
cc: Greg Ciola, ceo,
Crusador Enterprises
cc: IAHF email distribution list
SEE
Dr.Elliott's article below.....
At 09:10 AM 12/29/03 +0000,
you wrote:
From In Touch, a journal of the Provincial Health
Ethics Network, Alberta, Canada
http://www.phen.ab.ca/materials/intouch/vol4/intouch4-09.html Volume
4, Issue 09 - December 2001
Pharma Buys a Conscience
[]
The
following are excerpts from an article published in The American Prospect
(Volume 12, Issue 12, 2001). Reproduced here with permission from the
publisher.
Guest Writer Profile:
Carl Elliott
[]Carl
Elliott, MD PhD, is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota
Center for Bioethics and the author of A Philosophical Disease: Bioethics,
Culture and Identity. He is Associate Professor and Co-Director of Graduate
Studies in the Center for Bioethics. He was educated at Davidson College in
North Carolina and Glasgow University in Scotland, where he received his PhD
in philosophy. He received his MD from the Medical University of South
Carolina.
He joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota in
July 1997 after four years at McGill University in Montreal, where he held
appointments in the Biomedical Ethics Unit and the Montreal Children's
Hospital and directed the Master's degree specialization in
Bioethics.
I was raised in a house filled with drug-industry
trinkets. My father has been a family doctor for more than 40 years, and
drug representatives bearing gifts have visited him throughout his career.
My brothers and I grew up tossing Abbott Frisbees and Upjohn Nerf balls. We
took down messages on Inderal notepads, wrote with Erythromycin pens,
carried Progestin umbrellas. We constructed weird Halloween costumes from
models of the human hand and brain supplied by Parke-Davis and Merck. My
father was no great fan of "detail men," as drug reps were called then.
(These days, if you're a male physician, your detail man is likely to be an
attractive young woman.) Nor did he take part in the drug industry's more
outrageous marketing efforts, such as frequent-flier miles in exchange for
drug prescriptions. But he saw no great harm in accepting drug samples for
his patients or toys for his children. Like virtually all doctors, he did
not think that the gifts influenced him in any way.
Why
pharmaceutical companies want the goodwill of doctors is no great mystery.
The surprise is why they want the goodwill of someone like me. I am a
philosophy professor, and I work at a bioethics center. While I do happen to
have a degree in medicine, that degree is largely decorative: The only
prescriptions I write these days are moral ones. Despite this difference (or
maybe because of it), the pharmaceutical and biotechnological industries are
funneling more and more cash into the pockets of academics who teach and
study ethics. Some of it goes straight to individuals, in the form of
consulting fees, contracts, honoraria, and salaries. Some of it--such as
gifts to bioethics centers--is less direct. Many corporations are putting
bioethicists on their scientific advisory boards or setting up special
bioethics panels to provide in-house advice. While I have not yet been
offered Frisbees or Nerf balls, I suspect that it is only a matter of
time.
The issue of corporate money has become something of an
embarrassment within the bioethics community. Bioethicists have written for
years about conflicts of interest in scientific research or patient care yet
have paid little attention to the ones that might compromise bioethics
itself. Arthur Caplan, the director of the University of Pennsylvania Center
for Bioethics, counsels doctors against accepting gifts from the drug
industry. "The more you yield to economics," Caplan said last January, "the
more you're falling to a business model that undercuts arguments for
professionalism." Yet Caplan himself consults for the drug and biotech
industries, recently coauthored an article with scientists for Advanced Cell
Technology, and heads a bioethics center supported by Monsanto, de Code
Genetics, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Geron Corporation, Pfizer, AstraZeneca
Pharmaceuticals, E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Human Genome Sciences,
and the Schering-Plough Corporation.
By no means does Caplan's
center stand alone in its coziness with industry. The University of Toronto
houses the Sun Life Chair in Bioethics; the Stanford University Center for
Biomedical Ethics has a program in genetics funded by a $1-million gift from
SmithKline Beecham Corporation; the Merck Company Foundation has financed a
string of international ethics centers in cities from Ankara, Turkey, to
Pretoria, South Africa. Last year the Midwest Bioethics Center announced a
new $587,870 initiative funded by the Aventis Pharmaceuticals Foundation.
That endeavor is titled, apparently without irony, the Research Integrity
Project.
Bioethics appears set to borrow a funding model popular in
the realm of business ethics. This model embraces partnership and
collaboration with corporate sponsors as long as outright conflicts of
interest can be managed. It is the model that allows the nonprofit Ethics
Resource Center in Washington, D.C., to sponsor ethics and leadership
programs funded by such weapons manufacturers as General Dynamics, United
Technologies Corporation, and Raytheon. It also permits the former president
of Princeton University, Harold Shapiro, to draw an annual director's salary
from Dow Chemical Company while serving as chair of the National Bioethics
Advisory Commission. Dow, of course, has been the defendant in a highly
publicized lawsuit over the Dow Corning silicone breast implants as well as
in numerous legal actions involving disposal of hazardous waste.
Part of the problem is aesthetic. It is unseemly for ethicists to
share in the profits of arms dealers, industrial polluters, or
multinationals that exploit the developing world. But credibility also is an
issue. How can bioethicists continue to be taken seriously if they are on
the payroll of the very corporations whose practices they are expected to
assess?
Listening to Eli Lilly
Last year some colleagues and I
helped put together "Prozac, Alienation, and the Self," a special issue of
The Hastings Center Report, a bioethics journal. Some of the papers that we
published, including one by me, expressed worries about the extent to which
antidepressants are being prescribed, especially for patients who are not
clinically depressed. One paper in particular - "Good Science or Good
Business?" - was especially critical of the drug industry. Its author, David
Healy, is a psychopharmacologist and a historian of psychiatry at the
University of Wales.
Shortly after these Prozac essays were
published, Eli Lilly and Company, which manufactures Prozac, withdrew its
annual gift to the Hastings Center, citing the special issue as its reason.
Lilly's yearly check for $25,000 was not especially large by industry
standards, but it was the Hastings Center's largest annual corporate
donation. Lilly's letter to the organization was especially critical of
Healy's article. Healy had previously published research indicating that
some patients, particularly those who are not clinically depressed, may be
more likely to commit suicide while taking antidepressants. He has also
testified as an expert witness against Lilly and other drug manufacturers in
lawsuits brought by family members of patients who killed themselves or
others after taking antidepressants. In "Good Science or Good Business?"
Healy argued that manufacturers of antidepressants have gone into the
business of selling psychiatric illnesses in order to sell psychiatric
drugs. Apparently, this was not the kind of bioethics scholarship that Lilly
had in mind when it donated money to the Hastings Center.
The
reaction of bioethicists to all of this is emblematic of the difficulties
raised by corporate money. Some were encouraged by the response of the
Hastings Center staff -particularly by the Report's editors, who published
the special issue without regard to Lilly's reaction. We are never hostage
to corporate money, these scholars say. We can always turn it down, resign
our posts, and do the right thing despite enticements to the contrary. For
others, however, the fact that the Report's editors faced such incentives is
precisely the problem. Given enough cases where bioethicists must choose
between scholarship and their corporate funders, the funders will eventually
win out. In the long run, money conquers all.
But the Hastings
Center episode was only the first chapter of the Healy affair. In November
2000, Healy gave a talk on the history of psychopharmacology at the
University of Toronto's Center for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), where
he was scheduled to take up a new position as director of the Mood Disorders
Program. In that lecture, Healy mentioned his worries about Prozac and
suicide. Shortly thereafter, the center rescinded his appointment. He was
given no reason but merely informed by e-mail that CAMH did not feel that
his "approach was compatible with the goals for development of the academic
and clinical resource" of the clinic. CAMH officials insist that the Eli
Lilly Corporation had nothing to do with the decision; yet the center is the
recipient of a $1.5-million gift from Lilly. The Mood Disorders Program,
which Healy was to direct, gets 52 percent of its funding from corporate
sources.
Whether Lilly or any other corporate funder had anything to
do with Healy's dismissal is impossible to know. Even so, the trouble CAMH
has had in convincing the public that industry sources were not involved
points to the difficulty of discerning financial influence. Would CAMH have
dismissed Healy if it had no ties to Lilly whatsoever? Does fear of being
unable to attract future corporate money count as influence? Does fear of
angering powerful industry-tied psychiatrists?
"Doctors fear drug
companies like bookies fear the mob," says Harold Elliott, a psychiatrist at
Wake Forest University. Corporate money is so crucial to the way that
university medical centers are funded today that no threats or offers need
actually be made in order for a company to exert its influence. The mere
presence of corporate money is enough.
And researchers are probably
right to be afraid. The University of Toronto itself has seen two other
public scandals erupt over pharmaceutical-company funding in recent years.
The most visible one involved Nancy Olivieri, a researcher at the
university's Hospital for Sick Children,
"How can bioethicists continue
to be taken seriously if they are on the payroll of the very corporations
whose practices they are expected to assess?" who was conducting clinical
trials of deferiprone, a thalassemia drug, for the generic-drug manufacturer
Apotex. When Olivieri became concerned about possible side effects of
deferiprone, she broke her confidentiality agreement with Apotex and went
public with her concerns. In response, Apotex threatened her with legal
action. Rather than backing Olivieri against Apotex, the Hospital for Sick
Children attempted to dismiss her. News headlines had hardly faded when
Apotex promised the University of Toronto $20 million (about $13 million in
U.S. dollars) in funding for molecular biology, then threatened to withdraw
it if the school's then-president, Robert Prichard, did not lobby the
federal government to change its drug-patent regulations. Apotex wanted
rules that would be more favorable to generic-drug manufacturers. The
president did as he was asked and was later forced to apologize publicly
when the story broke.
Industry-sponsored bioethics programs face
problems that parallel those encountered by industry-sponsored medical
researchers. What do you do when your scholarly work conflicts with the
goals of your industry sponsor? No one is forcing industry money on
bioethics programs, but many of them are located in academic health centers,
where faculty members are expected to generate money to fund their research
either by seeing patients or by obtaining grants. If bioethics is seen as an
activity that can attract industry sponsorship, university administrators
strapped for cash will inevitably look to industry as a financial solution.
All that remains is for bioethicists themselves to dispense with the ethical
roadblocks...
Still, we can all take heart: Help may be on the way.
The American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs
is planning a $590,000 initiative to educate doctors about the ethical
problems involved in accepting gifts from the drug industry. That initiative
is funded by gifts from Eli Lilly and Company, GlaxoSmithKline, Inc.,
Pfizer, U.S. Pharmaceutical Group, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, Bayer
Corporation, Procter and Gamble Company, and Wyeth-Ayerst
Pharmaceutical.
