by Jim Marrs
In 2006, media reports spoke of a “new study” that countered Soffritti’s research. This study was not new. It was actually conducted in the mid-1990s and reported that researchers could find no link between aspartame and cancer, according to Unhee Lim, PhD, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Lim and colleagues worked with 473,984 men and women between the ages of fifty and seventy-one who participated in this diet-and-health study. In 1995 and 1996, participants were asked how much they drank of three popular diet beverages—soda, fruit drinks, and iced tea. They were also asked if they added aspartame to their coffee and tea. From their answers, the researchers calculated how much aspartame they consumed on a daily basis. During the next five years, 1,972 of those studied developed lymphoma or leukemia, and 364 developed brain tumors. When the researchers looked at people who consumed an average of at least four hundred milligrams of aspartame a day—about the amount found in two cans of soda—they found no link between aspartame consumption and cancer.
Critics noted that this study was subject to “recall bias,” since those in the study were being asked to remember what and how much they drank. “If their recollections weren’t accurate, it compromises the findings,” said Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer watchdog organization. There also was no consideration of the many other foods and additives that contained aspartame, which added to the daily intake. Yet, the few corporate mass media outlets that carried the story in 2006 introduced the ten-year-old study with headlines such as “Findings May Help to Alleviate Concerns Raised by Rat Study Last Year.”
Why such aversion by the media to dealing with controversial health issues? According to the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), in the past seven years the pharmaceutical and health-products industry spent in excess of $800 million to lobby legislators and government officials at both the federal and state levels. Manufacturers of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and other health products spent nearly $182 million on federal lobbying from January 2005 through June 2006. “No other industry has spent more money to sway public policy,” stated a 2005 CPI special report titled “Drug Lobby Second to None.” “Its combined political outlays on lobbying and campaign contributions is topped only by the insurance industry.”
It should also be noted that the large pharmaceutical corporations annually spend nearly twice as much money on marketing as they do on research and development. In 2004, the CPI reported that pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer advertising has grown from $791 million in 1996 to more than $3.8 billion in 2004. Drug ads on television are now ubiquitous.
The cross-corporate ownership of both pharmaceutical houses, medical institutions, and the mass media, combined with the extraordinary amount of pharmaceutical advertising, might explain the media’s hesitation in reporting the deleterious effects of drugs. According to Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, profit is the driving force behind medicine today. “In 2002 the combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion),” she states. “Over the past two decades, the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the U.S. Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.” Dr. Angell, also author of the 2004 book The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It brings focus to the argument that the current power of the pharmaceutical industry can be directly traced to its phenomenal growth during the Reagan years.
“The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was perhaps the fundamental element in the rapid rise of Big Pharma—the collective name for the largest drug companies,” wrote Angell. Dr. Angell and a number of others took note of a strong pro-business attitude shift during the Reagan-Bush years—not just in government but within American society.
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when educated persons of class looked upon commercial businessmen only slightly more kindly than they had once looked upon theater folk. They also had a slight disdain for enormous inherited wealth. Scientists, teachers, public servants such as firemen and policemen chose their careers for service and community-betterment rather than for lavish salaries and retirement benefits. But times and attitudes change. Today, the corporate mass media portrays the race for wealth as practically virtuous. The wealthy are considered winners while everyone else is a loser. “The gap between the rich and poor, which had been narrowing since World War II, suddenly began to widen again, until today it is a chasm,” remarked Dr. Angell.
She went on to say that before 1980, pharmaceuticals was a good business, but afterward, it was a stupendous one. From 1960 to 1980, prescription drug sales were fairly static as a percentage of U.S. gross domestic product, but from 1980 to 2000, they tripled. “They now stand at more than $200 billion a year,” said Dr. Angell. “Of the many events that contributed to the industry’s great and good fortune, none had to do with the quality of the drugs the companies were selling.”
The success of Big Pharma has more to do with marketing than with the efficiency of its drugs. Dr. Michael Wilkes described a recent process called “disease-mongering.” This term is applied to large drug corporations’ attempts to convince healthy people they are sick and need drugs. “This is all in an attempt to sell treatments,” explained Dr. Wilkes. “When their profits don’t match corporate expectations, they ‘invent’ new diseases to be cured by existing drugs.” Dr. Wilkes cited these examples of medical conditions he considers disease-mongering: female sexual dysfunction syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, toenail fungus, baldness, and social anxiety disorder (formerly known as shyness). He said these are but a few areas “where the medical community has stepped in, thereby turning normal or mild conditions into diseases for which medication is the treatment.”
Referring to the colossus that the pharmaceutical industry has become, Dr. Angell remarked, “It is used to doing pretty much what it wants to do.” Beginning in the 1980s, important new laws were passed relaxing restrictions on pharmaceutical corporations. These included the Bayh-Dole Act, after its chief sponsors, Indiana Democratic senator Birch Bayh and Kansas Republican senator Robert Dole. The Bayh-Dole Act allowed universities and small businesses to patent discoveries from research underwritten by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the major distributor of tax dollars for medical research. It also allowed taxpayer-financed discoveries formerly in public domain, to be granted to drug corporations through exclusive licenses. Dr. Angell said that today universities, where most NIH-sponsored work is carried out, can patent and license their discoveries and charge royalties. Subsequent but similar legislation allows the NIH itself to directly transfer NIH discoveries to industry. Today, “all parties cash in on the public investment in research,” she noted.
Under this system, research paid for by public money becomes a commodity to be sold for profit by private concerns. Dr. Angell provides examples of the large consulting fees paid by pharmaceutical corporations to individual faculty members and to NIH scientists and directors, increasing the intrusion of the globalist pharmaceutical corporations into medical education and the almost complete domination of medical education, particularly when it comes to drugs. Recall that it was an NIH study that refuted peer-reviewed research linking cancer to the sweetener aspartame.
Approximately half of the largest pharmaceutical corporations are not American. About half of them are based in Europe. In 2002, the top ten were the American companies Pfizer, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Wyeth (formerly American Home Products); the British companies GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca; the Swiss companies Novartis and Roche; and the French company Aventis (which i
n 2004 merged with another French company, Sanafi Synthelabo, and that put it in third place). “All are much alike in their operations. All price their drugs much higher here than in other markets,” stated Dr. Angell.
The lucrative connection between Big Pharma and medical schools and hospitals has brought about a definite corporate-friendly atmosphere. “One of the results has been a growing pro-industry bias in medical research—exactly where such bias doesn’t belong,” argues Dr. Angell.
She also blasted pharmaceutical corporations for their claims that high drug prices are necessary to fund research and development. “Drug industry expenditures for research and development, while large, were consistently far less than profits. For the top ten companies, they amounted to only 11 percent of sales in 1990, rising slightly to 14 percent in 2000. The biggest single item in the budget is neither R&D nor even profits but something usually called ‘marketing and administration’—a name that varies slightly from company to company. In 1990, a staggering 36 percent of sales revenues went into this category, and that proportion remained about the same for over a decade. Note that this is two and a half times the expenditures for R&D.”
Dr. Angell further noted what many people see as excessive salaries of pharmaceutical executives such as Charles A. Heimbold Jr., the former chairman and CEO of Bristol-Myers Squibb, who made $74,890,918 in 2001. This does not count his $76,095,611 worth of unexercised stock options. During this same time, John R. Stafford, chairman of Wyeth, made $40,521,011, not counting his $40,629,459 in stock options.
Congress expressly prohibited Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices through its bulk purchasing power and, in 1997, the FDA permitted the drug industry to do direct advertising, previously restricted to physicians, to the public, with no mention of side effects except for the most serious.
The excesses of the globalists’ pharmaceutical corporations have prompted many Americans to seek price relief by traveling to Canada or Mexico to purchase drugs.
Dr. Angell concluded that only an aroused American public can rein in the power of the pharmaceutical monopoly. Noting that drug companies have the largest lobby in Washington, and they give copiously to political campaigns, Dr. Angell said legislators and the mass media corporations are now so dependent on the pharmaceutical industry for campaign contributions and advertising that it will be exceedingly difficult to break their power. “But the one thing legislators need more than campaign contributions is votes. That is why citizens should know what is really going on…. there will be no real reform without an aroused and determined public to make it happen,” she said.
IF ASPARTAME IS not worry enough, a 2007 report by Peter Piper, a professor of molecular biology and biotechnology at Britain’s Sheffield University, stated that sodium benzoate, a mold-prevention substance used routinely by the $160 billion soft-drink industry, creates the carcinogen benzene when mixed with vitamin C in drinks. Worse yet, according to Piper, “These chemicals have the ability to cause severe damage to DNA in the mitochondria to the point that they totally inactivate it: they knock it out altogether…. there is a whole array of diseases that are now being tied to damage to this DNA—Parkinson’s and quite a lot of neurodegenerative diseases, but above all the whole process of aging.”
This report intensified the controversy over chemical food and drink additives that have been linked to hyperactivity in children. One British news report on sodium benzoate quoted the makers of Coca-Cola, Pepsi Max, and Diet Pepsi, which all contain sodium benzoate, as saying they entrusted the safety of additives to the government. Unfortunately, many government agencies are under the control of the giant pharmaceutical corporations.
Don’t look for any real relief from the Democrats. Although two of the leading Democratic presidential hopefuls in 2008, New York senator Hillary Clinton and Illinois senator Barack Obama, both pledged to fight the huge pharmaceutical and insurance industries—promises similar to those Mrs. Clinton made during her husband’s time in office—campaign contributions data released in April 2007 showed that, with the exception of Republican Mitt Romney, both Clinton and Obama were the largest recipients of Big Pharma largess in campaign funding.
And despite announced plans by Mrs. Clinton to pass laws to prevent insurers from charging higher rates to people in poor health, the insurance industry contributed a whopping $226,245 to her campaign.
WHILE THE FASCIST globalists took swift charge of Nazi drug technology after the war, it is most interesting that they neglected a little-known and little-publicized aspect of the Third Reich—the fight against cancer, tobacco, alcohol abuse, and occupational hazards.
In fact, the National Socialists’ predilection for health foods and preventative medicine may have been yet another reason the globalists turned against Hitler and his regime. After all, most food additives, colorings, and preservatives are petrochemicals, and any decrease in human consumption would spell loss of profits to the globalists’ corporations. Early on, the Nazi regime instituted policies designed to create healthier environments within the workplace. However, as the imperatives of wartime production grew, these measures lost priority.
One example of globalist neglect of Nazi science can be seen in the issue of asbestos. By the late 1930s, Nazi Germany had firmly documented the link between asbestos and lung cancer. This connection was flatly stated in a 1939 textbook, and by 1943 the Nazi government had recognized asbestos-induced cancer as a compensable occupational disease. This Nazi research would be used in later years to counter asbestos producers’ claims that they were unaware of the danger of asbestos until modern studies.
“The net effect in the field of cancer research was to slow recognition of the asbestos hazard,” noted author Robert N. Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Pennsylvania State University and author of The Nazi War on Cancer. “The consensus achieved in Germany in the early 1940s would not [be] obtain[ed] in Britain or the United States until more than two decades later. Science and political stigma [and commercial obstinacy] thus conspired—at least for a time—to confine the truth to the shadows.”
In addition to confining occupational health hazards to the shadows in corporate America, the owners of the U.S. tobacco industry fought a successful, decades-long rearguard action against the claims that cigarettes are a leading cause of cancer. Utilizing one hired expert after another, they bought time while they diversified their ownership away from tobacco.
Contrary to the popular belief that the link between smoking and cancer was demonstrated in postwar Britain and America, “it was in Germany in the late 1930s that we first find a broad medical recognition of both the addictive nature of tobacco and the lung cancer hazard of smoking,” according to Proctor. The Nazis were among the first to ban smoking in public places such as Nazi party offices, post offices, hospitals, rest homes, and waiting rooms—a restriction today becoming prevalent across America. In 1938, the Nazi Luftwaffe barred all smoking on its properties. As in modern America, limitations were placed on tobacco advertising.
Much of the attack on alcohol and tobacco stemmed from the Nazi ideals of racial hygiene and Aryan purity. But it also was well supported by German science.
Although the connection between smoking and cancer has been theorized for many years, it was the German physician Fritz Lickint who brought the connection to public knowledge with the publication of his 1939 opus Tabak und Organismus, or “Tobacco and the Organism.” In 1940, Lickint, described as “most hated by the tobacco industry,” escaped persecution by the Nazis for belonging to the Social Democratic Party, thanks to official Nazi support for his antitobacco work.
As in America from the 1960s to the 1980s, German tobacco interests formed organizations and hired various experts to counter the claims of antitobacco activists. As in America, they claimed that the medical evidence against tobacco was “unscientific” and the propaganda of health fanatics. But it was an uphill fight, considering the amount of scientific data then available, plus the fact tha
t Hitler disdained tobacco and alcohol.
In the widespread National Socialist effort to stamp out both smoking and drinking, it was continually pointed out that Hitler neither smoked nor drank. Hitler would not permit his lover, Eva Braun, or his deputy, Martin Bormann, to smoke in his presence. Once, Hitler even suggested that tobacco was “the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man, vengeance for having been given hard liquor.” It was also publicly noted in wartime propaganda that while Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were nonsmokers, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin all smoked cigarettes, cigars, or a pipe.
The attack on tobacco also has been traced to economic concerns. The Nazis, like modern American corporations, came to realize that tobacco-related illnesses could impact the hospital industry as well as the insurance industry. This concern, coupled with the increasing demands for healthy wartime workers, undoubtedly was an added stimulus for the antitobacco campaign.
It is ironic to learn that some of the Nazis’ most ardent antismoking activists, such as Karl Astel, director of Jena University’s Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research, who committed suicide in 1945, were also virulent anti-Semites and supporters of euthanasia. This is a fascinating example of how social idealism can be subverted for tyrannical purposes. As Proctor noted, “[T]here is the fact that many of Germany’s leading antitobacco activists were also war criminals.”