Are drug regulators for hire?

[fyzygy]

BMJ study shows that Therapeutic Goods Administration (Australia, 2022) was 96% funded by pharmaceutical industry. 

 

[Ishmael Fleishman]

This is how capitalism works, at its heart is corruption.

 

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed" Abraham Lincoln

 

Look at any industry, and the same thing happens again and again. Products and services are legal and approved when there are profits to be made. Those with the means to actualize those profits buy or are gifted the influence they desire. A revolving door of industry consultants, hired by the very government departments whom they have sought to influence, and when said lobbyist tenure in government draws to a close, they are embraced again by their paymaster in the for-profit sector.

 

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office".

 

Look at the recent ethical conflicts of interests reveled in the US supreme court. Mega-rich benefactors just happen to be friends with supreme court judges who just happen to be making decisions on legal cases that effect the business ventures of the said Mega-rich benefactors. And these very same justices just happen to decide that it is in the best interest of the law and society to vote in favor of laws that just happen to coincide with the very best interest of their friends and buddies the mega-rich benefactors. What a vile state we are in when such morals are held up to be beyond reproach.

 

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

 

The decisions around the legalization of medical cannabis and the more recent legalization of medical MDMA and psilocybin. Which came about because the private sector seeing a new profit stream, and in so it became imperative that these products be made legal but only in so far as to benefit of the financial backers of these legal reforms.

 

On a recent podcast, Keeper Trout commented that the criminalization of LSD just happened to coincide with Sandoz's patent on LSD-25 running out, and with the growth of competing clandestine LSD suppliers, Sandoz could no longer see LSD as profitable. Criminalization was in Sandoz best interest.

 

Look at the alcohol industry, which is a global US $1700 billion industry in 2023. An industry that makes these obscene profits through the sale of something that is nothing more than a poison deleterious to human health and has ZERO health benefits outside of being a cheap and effective wound cleaner. Does anyone for every a nano-moment consider these profits to be the product of just good fortune on the behalf of the alcohol industry.

 

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back". - Carl Sagan

 

Behold in all its abhorrence the animal farming industry. An industry that is one of the world's largest contributors to global warming, destroying vast tracts of old-growth forests and land, leading to the contamination of rivers and groundwater with fecal waste (more then 95% of rivers in New Zealand are not safe to drink from due to farming fecal waste), and farmed animals spewing out billions of tons of methane. The vast majority of the grain and soy grown in the world, using up trillions of acres of land, is being destroyed by monoculture farming methods that poison soils and rivers with excessive nitrogen and petrochemicals, leading to desertification and environmental and human destruction.

 

"Money and corruption are ruining the land, crooked politicians betray the working man, pocketing the profits and treating us like sheep, and we're tired of hearing promises that we know they'll never keep". Ray Davies

 

So that in the end people can eat meat, eggs, and dairy that science has demonstrated to be deleterious to human health. The WHO classifies processed meat as a class 1 carcinogen and red meat as a class 2 carcinogen. Humans have no need to consume cholesterol, trans fat, or saturated fat. Nor do we need to consume products that drive our epidemic rates of obesity, kidney disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer.

 

All of this is allowed to happen because chemical companies that produce pesticides and fertilizers need to make ever larger profits. Farmers, who are just fronts or near-indentured slaves for multinational agribusiness corporations, need to make ever more profits. Supermarkets and food retailers need to keep up one of their most profitable revenue streams. Governments need to collect taxes. Advertisers and marketers continue to promote the consumption of "tasty" products laden with saturated fat, cholesterol, inflammatory compounds, fecal contamination, and toxic residues from animal farming for ever more profits. Slaughterhouses, which are a haven for animal and worker abuse and are classified as essential services, are allowed to continue to operate because of their need for ever more profits.

 

All of this is because corporations and their consultants and backers influence the government, which itself exists solely to rubber-stamp corporate decisions providing a veneer of corporate transparency and responsibility that serves only to ensure corporations can keep their profits growing. So that, in the end, everyone wins and the only cost is a dead and dying planet.

 

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his prejudices depend on his not understanding it!"

 

This is true for all industries who everyday fight regulation that is in opposition to their own vested interest. People are fooled by the call to deregulate industry to remove red tape that hinders growth. Nothing can be further from the truth. Their is no right or left, just the corporations whose imperative seeks to shape regulation to conform with their own vision of the corporate good.

 

What chance does a brainwashed and deluded population and the very planet on which our survival depends ever stand against an artificially human construct the likes of money imbued with the pestilence of ignorance and corruption?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 8, 2023 by Ishmael Fleishman

[fyzygy]

It's appalling enough that drug manufacturers would submit not necessarily the safest, or most efficacious, but only the most lucrative products to the TGA for approval. It's doubly concerning that TGA operations are wholly contingent (i.e. financially dependent) on these (largely successful) industrial applications. It's triply concerning that this state of affairs (the full extent of the TGA's financial dependence) was disclosed only by means of a Freedom of Information request. 

 

This is industry self-regulation at its worst, with public health -- the ostensible goal of the TGA -- subservient to private economic interests. A sign of the times, to be sure. ARPANSA (self-regulatory lackey for the giant telecommunications sector) would be another case in point: a captive government agency masquerading as trustworthy guardian of public health and environmental safety. 

 

In an age of limitless profits, industrial self-regulation is a sick joke. But someone is laughing, all the way to the bank. 

 

[Ishmael Fleishman]

1 hour ago, fyzygy said:

But someone is laughing, all the way to the bank.  

 

The 1%

[-RC-]

So to answer the OP's question, "Yes, absolutely!" 

Edited September 10, 2023 by -RC-