The pharmaceutical machine and its cohorts operate along two basic hidden vectors: selling drugs that cause harm, injury and death, and suppressing promising non-toxic cures.

In the first case, we have the rarely published figure of 100,000 annual deaths in the US a result of correctly prescribed, FDA-approved drugs.

That’s 100,000 DEATHS.

The original mainstream article on this was written by Linda Marsa for the LA Times (January 8, 2001). It was based on a 1998 University of Toronto study, which not only announced that 100,000 Americans die every year of reactions to pharmaceutical drugs, but that 2.1 million MORE Americans are hospitalized for the same reason.

In 1999, the US FDA was sent 258,000 reports of “adverse drug events.” Normally, you can multiply what the FDA gets by 10 to a 100 to find the true figure.

Actually, Harvard goes even further. Dr. David Bates, associate professor of medicine at Harvard, told the Times, “…these numbers translate to 36 million adverse drug events per year.”

One reason for these horrendous figures: when these drugs are tested for safety on humans, prior to approval for licensing by the FDA, the drug companies themselves do the tests and do them very briefly—a few weeks or so in many cases. The shorter the time period the better, as far as the drug companies are concerned. They find fewer cases of damage and death.

Here is the longer Times quote given by Dr. Bates of Harvard. Bates is commenting on his own 2000 study on adverse drug reactions and the natural extrapolation of those figures to the whole US population: “People often have [drug-caused] symptoms for months, but they’re either reluctant to let their doctor know or they weren’t sure if they felt lousy…But these numbers translate to 36 million adverse drug events per year [in the US].”

Moving from that ongoing disaster, consider the suppression of a promising cancer treatment—the other side of the pharmaceutical coin.

Daniel Haley’s brilliant book, Politics in Healing, recounts how NCI’s 1991 clinical trial of the innovative and “alternative” cancer medicine, hydrazine sulfate (HS), was rigged.

Rigged to fail.

A spectacularly promising medicine, HS had shown good results in trials at Harbor/UCLA hospital and in Russia. NCI felt obligated to test the drug. But there was a catch.

The drug’s discoverer, Dr. Joseph Gold, had found that HS reacted badly if patients were taking other drugs, especially tranquilizers. Several warnings were given to NCI before it began its test. The warnings were explicit. Patients could DIE if they were taking tranquilizers.