My but they're plain speakin' folk in Wilmington.

Article published Nov 28, 2004
Drug safety up to Congress

http://tinyurl.com/6hnjl

It's time Congress cared as much about us human guinea
pigs as it does the profits of the drug companies.

They've made millions while their customers were
experiencing little side-effects such as high
blood-pressure, strokes, heart attacks and funerals.

Those customers believed their government was
protecting them and their loved ones from medicines
whose dangers only experts could possibly discern. But
their government was in bed with the drug companies,
which offer handsome "campaign contributions" to
compliant politicians.

A decade ago, such politicians took up the industry
cry that the Food and Drug Administration was too slow
to approve new medicines. Newt Gingrich and his allies
denounced it as a sluggish bureaucracy that denied
relief to the suffering.

The FDA got the message. It's been oh-so-kind to drug
outfits like the American company whose overseas
vaccine plant had such serious problems that British
regulators shut it down.

The FDA has also sped up the approval of drugs, some
of which turned out to have unexpected consequences.
For example, death.

Children may have committed suicide because the
anti-depressants they were taking made them worse. One
FDA official has estimated that the pain-killer Vioxx
may have killed thousands of people.

Another warns that dangers might lurk in other drugs,
and he says his agency is incapable of protecting
patients. For one thing, the folks who approve a drug
might be reluctant to believe subsequent evidence that
it's hurting patients.

That's assuming it gets such evidence. The companies
are not always forthcoming with information that might
threaten their profits.

The Journal of the American Medical Association is
urging creation of a separate and independent
drug-safety agency. That's not a new idea. The drug
companies and their Washington allies have killed it
before, and they're trying to kill it again. They say
it isn't needed.
Others might disagree - if they weren't in their
graves.