Butterball is certified by the British Retail Consortium, says the site, on “300 elements related to food safety and quality, as well as worker safety, environmental impact and management commitment.” The turkey processor practices “good citizenship” based on “self-governance,” “social responsibility,” and  “sustainability.”

But search for the words “welfare,” “Mercy For Animals” or “Shannon, North Carolina” (where a grisly Christmas-time expose took place) and you will get no results. Maybe you didn’t spell the words correctly.

Between November and December of 2011, while people were making their holiday plans, an undercover employee at a Butterball turkey semen collection facility in Shannon documented turkeys with open sores, infected eyes and broken bones, covered in flies and living in their own waste. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

“In the video, workers can be seen kicking and stomping on turkeys, as well as dragging them by their wings and necks,” reported ABC news. “The video also shows injured birds with open wounds and exposed flesh.”

Birds at the Butterball facility were left to slowly die from their injuries, some unable to even reach food or water, says the undercover employee. The “pain and the suffering that they’re experiencing,” is clearly visible she told NBS news.

Like scores of other gigantic food producers who have been exposed on undercover videos as harboring sadistic employees and sick and dying animals, Butterball pleads ignorance. It has a “zero tolerance policy for any mistreatment of our birds,” and has fired the proverbial “bad apple” employees it did not know about. Who knew?

Butterball is also “taking steps to help ensure that all new and existing associates have a clear understanding of our animal well-being policies,” said Rod Brenneman, president and CEO of Butterball. Maybe employees don’t know they aren’t supposed to stomp and kick birds, drag them by their wings and necks, not to mention bash them in the heads with metal bars, as the employee reports. Let’s tell them!

But, it wasn’t only Butterball management that enabled the agricultural hell for turkeys in the interests of cheap “holiday” food. Dr. Sarah Mason, head of animal health programs in the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, tipped off Butterball about a December 28 raid and managed to sabotage it.  Even as the Hoke County Sheriff’s Department sought to raid Butterball on the basis of videotaped evidence, Mason contacted “a friend and fellow veterinarian” who works for Butterball, which assured that the raid “never had a chance,” reports the Fayetteville Observer.

Hey, from one vet to another, we better hide the animal abuse we’re permitting!

Given that the state agency is in charge of regulating Butterball yet undermined the raid, was there a quid pro quo involved? “That’s a criminal matter, to be decided by the district attorney’s office,” opines the Observer.

The sordid collegiality between government and industry which makes a mockery of democracy, consumer rights and animal welfare, brings to mind the saga of egg don Austin “Jack” DeCoster, the salmonella king.

Despite the recall of half a billion salmonella-contaminated eggs from DeCoster-affiliated farms in 2010, his conviction on animal cruelty,  the same year and nine deaths and 500 illnesses traced to his eggs in 1987,  Iowa state agencies thought he was a pretty cool dude.

“One of the things I’ve always said about DeCoster is that when there’s a problem at his facilities, he acts fast,” enthused Kevin Buskins, a spokesman for Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources which shares oversight of egg operations with the state agriculture department.

Will Butterball get a pass like DeCoster did? So far no charges have been filed against the turkey processor and its state regulator “friend” still has her job. And there is even more good news for the turkey processor. The company and its communications agency, Howard, Merrell & Partners, received four public relations awards from the Virginia Chapter of the National Agri-Marketing Association, Carolinas, this month at an industry banquet.

Receiving honors were a celebration for the “millionth fresh bird produced during the 2010 holiday season,” a press release announcing  330,000 pounds of turkey products donated to the needy and a campaign in partnership with the Weekly Reader that demonstrates “how responsible agricultural practices lead to healthy animals and safe, high-quality food for consumers.”

Bayer launched Yaz in 2006 as a pill that goes “beyond birth control” to treat acne and severe PMS, all the while avoiding the water retention of traditional birth control pills. But soon, previously healthy teenagers experienced “beyond birth control” effects they hadn’t expected. Fifteen-year-old Katie Ketner had her gallbladder removed after taking Yaz, Susan Gallenos had a stroke and part of her skull removed and Michelle Pfleger, 18, collapsed and died of a pulmonary thromboemboli, according to published reports.

The FDA could have held hearings into the safety of the Yaz ingredient, drospirenone, as early as 2002, instead of this month. That’s when the newsletter, Worst Pills Best Pills, warned that drospirenone, just approved in the pill Yasmin, “has never before been marketed in the US,” and could cause “serious heart and other health problems such as a change in acid balance of the blood and muscle weakness.”

But instead of investigating the drug nine years ago, the FDA decided to ban the newsletter’s editor, Sidney Wolfe, MD, head of the Public Citizen Health Research Group from voting at this month’s Yaz hearings, because the newsletter had termed the drug a “do not use.” The FDA accused Wolfe of an “intellectual conflict of interest.”

This is not the first time the FDA has silenced Wolfe. During 2010 hearings about Jazz Pharmaceuticals’ fibromyalgia drug Rekinla, Wolfe’s microphone was turned off when he asked why the manufacturer’s guilty plea and $20 million penalty for illegal marketing a different drug was never brought up at the hearings. Was it not relevant?

Jazz’s off-label marketing, “is a matter related to compliance and it’s not a matter that’s related to the topic under discussion today,” explained Bob Rappaport, MD, director of the FDA Division of Anesthesia & Analgesia Products. The only significance of bringing up the wrongdoing case would be to, “impugn the sponsor in the hopes that the committee would be punitive towards them in your deliberations and recommendations regarding this application,” said Rappaport. Why should a $20 million guilty plea affect future approvals?

Not only was the Jazz guilty plea irrelevant, the FDA did not even know about it before Wolfe’s disclosure said published reports.

Nor is this is the first time the FDA’s right hand does not know what the FDA’s left hand is doing. Just three months before a major label change for the antipyschotic drug Seroquel, Janet Woodcock, MD, head of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research told Project on Government Oversight a warning about mixing drugs would not happen.

“At this point, there is agreement within CDER that an interaction between quetiapine [Seroquel] and methadone that confers unreasonable risks to patients is exceedingly unlikely and, therefore, no further action is indicated regarding the labeling for these products or for related communication initiatives,” she writes in a rambling, defensive letter.  But the ink was barely dry on the letter before the FDA announced that Seroquel “should be avoided” in combination with at least 12 other medicines including heart rhythm drugs, synthetic opioids like methadone, antibiotics, anti-infectives and other antipsychotics. Families’ of soldiers and others who died while taking Seroquel had said exactly that for years.

When a reporter asked about the apparent egg on the FDA’s face, Sandy Walsh, an FDA spokesperson, said Woodcock’s letter was still correct, “because the F.D.A. had found no biological basis for a problem or unusual numbers of deaths at normal dosages.” In other words, the deaths were just from drug interactions and overdoses. Whew. The decision to suspend Wolfe’s voting rights was also agreed upon by Woodcock.

Of course, the FDA’s claim that Wolfe has an “intellectual conflict of interest” reduces anyone who believes in consumer rights or governmental justice to the level of a six-digit pharma lobbyist. Holding an opinion, holding a lucrative pharma consultancy–same idea right?

In fact, FDA advisory committees are so packed with pharma consultants, its Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee was actually chaired by a paid AstraZeneca speaker until 2009, even as it reviewed AstraZeneca drugs! The only reason AstraZeneca speaker Jorge Armenteros, MD was removed from voting and then his chairmanship  was because the Philadelphia Inquirer exposed the extreme conflict of interest. The FDA would probably call the Inquirer’s reporting an “intellectual conflict of interest.”

Well, Ambien is back with a new name for a new type of insomnia this holiday season.

Intermezzo is marketed for “middle-of-the-night” insomnia, one of many varieties of insomnia Pharma has rolled out to churn the insomnia drug market. Others are chronic, acute, transient, initial, delayed-onset, and terminal insomnia and don’t forget non-restful sleep which can co-exist with all of the above.

Of course, the only thing more lucrative to Pharma than a new variation on a disease is a new patent on an existing drug because no research and development is necessary. Remember how Prozac resurfaced as the PMS pill Sarafem? The antidepressant Effexor was tweaked into Pristiq? And most recently Neurontin resurfaced as Horizant, a treatment for restless legs (though many say Neurontin causes restless legs)?

Kennedy was not the only person to walk, drive and engage in purposeful behavior in an Ambien blackout. Law enforcement officials reported that traffic accidents increased under Ambien, with some drivers not even recognizing the police officers there to arrest them. (“Dude–where’s my car?”) Ambien’s manufacturer was forced to publish ads telling people if they were going to take Ambien, to get in bed and stay there after Kennedy’s over zealous parliamentarianism. (Or you’ll break out in handcuffs, added cynics.) The FDA issued warnings about the potential of “complex sleep-related behaviors” on Ambien and other sleeping pills which may include “sleep-driving, making phone calls and preparing and eating food (while asleep).”

In fact, it was EWI– eating while intoxicated or “preparing and eating food (while asleep)” — not DWIs that gave Ambien its worst rap. Fit and sexy people awoke amid mountains of pizza, Krispy Kreme and Häagen-Dazs cartons consumed by their evil twin, on Ambien. Weeks of dieting and treadmill time shot to hell.

The new sleeping pill also served to occlude three uncomfortable Big Pharma settlements right before Thanksgiving. Did anyone notice that Merck pled guilty to criminal marketing of the painkiller Vioxx and agreed to pay $950 million before the holiday? In addition to the $4.85 billion it has already paid to victims?

Vioxx was billed as a “super-aspirin” for everyday pain until it was removed from the market in 2004 for doubling heart attack risks and causing between 27,000 and 50,000 heart events and deaths. Merck knew the heart risks and pushed Vioxx for non-approved uses according to published reports, but no corporate executives ever went up the river. “There was no basis for a finding of high-level management participation in the violation,” Merck’s pre-Thanksgiving news release self-congratulates.

Then there’s Pfizer. The drug giant agreed to pay more than $60 million to resolve federal probes into alleged bribes to overseas doctors to use Pfizer drugs, reported the Wall Street Journal before the holiday. Penalties were probably reduced because Pfizer was willing to help the government by “ratting” on its competitors, says the Journal.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune reported before Thanksgiving that Abbott is about to settle lawsuits that it illegally marketed the epilepsy drug Depakote to nursing home directors, geriatric doctors and other long-term care facilities and greased palms with kickbacks.  Abbott has set aside $1.5 billion for a settlement, says the Trib.

While the Merck, Pfizer and Abbott settlements may look sizeable, copping to a settlement allows drug companies to keep the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement which is their lifeblood. Profits from the alleged wrongdoing usually dwarf penalties, too. “Even with these large fines, it is still good business to promote drugs illegally,” says Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, director of PharmedOut, a project at Georgetown University Medical Center.

The public barely noticed the million and billion dollar settlements. They were too busy eating, sleeping and maybe both.

In June, Pfizer announced it was ending arsenic-containing chicken feed which no one realized they were eating anyway but its arsenic-containing Histostat, fed to turkeys, continues. Poultry growers use inorganic arsenic, a recognized carcinogen, for “growth promotion, feed efficiency and improved pigmentation,” says the FDA. Yum.

And in August, Cargill Value Added Meats, the nation’s third-largest turkey processor, recalled 36 million pounds of ground turkey because of a salmonella outbreak, linked to one death and 107 illnesses in 31 states. Even as it closed its Springdale, Arkansas plant, steam cleaned its machinery and added “two additional anti-bacterial washes” to its processing operations, 185,000 more pounds were recalled the next month from the same plant.

Since the mad cow and Chinese melamine scandals of the mid 2000′s, a lot more people think about the food their food ate than before. But fewer people think about the drugs their food ingested. Food animal drugs seldom rate Capitol Hill hearings which is just fine with Big Pharma animals divisions since if people knew the antibiotics, heavy metals, growth promotants, vaccines, anti-parasite drugs and feed additives used on the farm, they would lose their appetite. Besides, people aren’t Animal Pharma’s primary customers anyway and the long term safety of animals drugs isn’t an issue, since patients are supposed to die.

One of the late Sen.Ted Kennedy’s last legislative fights was about the overuse of livestock antibiotics. “It seems scarcely believable that these precious medications could be fed by the ton to chickens and pigs,” he wrote in a bill called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2007 (PAMTA) which has yet to pass. “These precious drugs aren’t even used to treat sick animals. They are used to fatten pigs and speed the growth of chickens. The result of this rampant overuse is clear: meat contaminated with drug-resistant bacteria sits on supermarket shelves all over America,” said Kennedy.

Because antibiotics make animals use feed more efficiently so they eat less and control disease in confinement farming’s packed conditions at the same time, they are practically the fifth food group. On a turkey farm with five million hens, antibiotics would save almost 2,000 tons of feed a year says an article in a poultry journal.

And when the FDA tried to ban cephalosporins in 2008, one type of antibiotic crucial for treating salmonella in children, it became apparent just what Kennedy was up against. Two months after the FDA announced a hearing about a cephalosporin “Order of Prohibition” in agriculture, the regulatory action had morphed into a “Hearing to Review the Advances In Animal Health Within The Livestock Industry” thanks to lobbyists from the egg, chicken, turkey, milk, pork and cattle industries.

“Order of Prohibition”… “Hearing to Review the Advances In Animal Health Within The Livestock Industry,” same idea, right?

At the House Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry hearings, the National Turkey Federation’s Michael Rybolt defended antibiotics as a cost savings to consumers. “The increased costs to raise turkeys without antibiotics is real,” he said. “Today at retail outlets here in the D.C. market, a conventionally raised turkey costs $1.29 per pound. A similar whole turkey that was produced without antibiotics costs $2.29 per pound. With the average consumer purchasing a 15 pound whole turkey, that would mean there would be $15 tacked on to their grocery bill.”

Conventionally grown turkeys are even a better deal when you consider the cost of antibiotics!

And antibiotic-based turkey farming is downright green, said Rybolt, calling 227 acre turkey operations, “small family farms.” Without them, more land would be needed to grow crops and house the animals because of the “decrease in density.” And, with 175,550 more tons of feed needed, there would be “an increase in manure.”

When the FDA capitulated to industry and turned the cephalosporin prohibition into a salute to animal “advances,” former Kansas governor and former dairyman John Carlin, asked, “What changed in less than five months? Certainly the problem hasn’t gone away.”

This month, the FDA also rejected petitions to ban human antibiotics like penicillins, tetracyclines and sulfonamides in livestock filed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Environmental Defense, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT), and the Union of Concerned scientists, some filed over 12 years ago. Why?  “FDA cannot withdraw approval of a new animal drug until the legally-mandated process,” said an FDA spokesman. The process includes an “evidentiary hearing,” perhaps like the cephalosporin advances.

Of course. germs in turkey and other meat, even antibiotic resistant germs, are neutralized by cooking–but drug residues are not. A report last year from the USDA’s inspector general accuses U.S. slaughter houses of releasing products to the public with excessive drug levels in them and charges that, “The effects of these residues on human beings who consume such meat are a growing concern.”

Nor are the antibiotics just in the meat! Scientists at the University of Minnesota found antibiotic residues in corn, green onions and cabbage after growing them on soil fertilized with livestock manure. The drugs siphoned right up from the soil in just six weeks.

A quick look at the Code of Federal Regulations for turkey drugs does not whet you appetite for Thanksgiving. There are several arsenic turkey drugs approved to provide an, “increased rate of weight gain and improved feed efficiency,” say the official guidelines. But they are also “dangerous for ducks, geese, and dogs,” and must be discontinued,  “5 days before slaughtering animals for human consumption to allow elimination of the drug from edible tissues.” Whew.

Halofuginone, another drug given to turkeys to kill pathogens, “is toxic to fish and aquatic life” and “an irritant to eyes and skin,” says the Federal Code. “Avoid contact with skin, eyes, or clothing” and “Keep out of lakes, ponds, and streams.” Bon appetit.

Drug-based farming has cut the time to “grow” an animal almost in half while doubling the market size of the animal itself.  For example, chickens were once slaughtered at fourteen weeks, weighing two pounds and are now slaughtered at seven weeks, weighing four and six pounds.

But the brave new food techniques come at a price because the animals’ organs can not always keep up with the metabolic frenzy. Birds “fed and managed in such a way that they are growing rapidly,” are at risk of sudden death from cardiac problems and aortic rupture, say poultry scientists.

Growth drugs in turkeys may also “result in leg weakness or paralysis,” says the Federal Code, a side effect that a turkey slaughter house worker reports firsthand. Many turkeys arrive at the House of Raeford, in Raeford, NC with legs broken or dislocated, he told me in an interview and, “When you try to remove them from their crates, their legs twist completely around, limp and offering no resistance.” The turkeys, “must have been in a lot of pain,” says the worker, but they don’t cry out. “In fact the only sound as you hang them, he says, is the “trucks being washed out to go back and get a new load.”

The undercover employee’s reports of the “live hanger” culture at the House of Raeford, in which workers pulled the heads and legs off turkeys when they were stuck in crates and worse, led to Denny’s suspending its business from Raeford, the nation’s seventh largest turkey producer. The slaughter house is also infamous for a chlorine spill that killed a worker in 2003, an ammonia spill that evacuated  two towns the next year and a murdered worker in 2006.

Still, the mother of all turkey drugs is the asthma-like drug ractopamine, marketed as the “Medicated Tom Turkey Feed” Topmax. Approved for turkeys only two years ago, figures for Topmax use in turkeys are not yet available but the same drug is now used in 45 percent of U.S. pigs and 30 percent of ration-fed cattle.

There are two reasons ractopamine has raised safety questions. One is that its label reads:

WARNING: The active ingredient in Topmax, ractopamine hydrochloride, is a beta-adrenergic agonist. Individuals with cardiovascular disease should exercise special caution to avoid exposure. Not for use in humans. Keep out of the reach of children. The Topmax 9 formulation (Type A Medicated Article) poses a low dust potential under usual conditions of handling and mixing. When mixing and handling Topmax, use protective clothing, impervious gloves, protective eye wear, and a NIOSH-approved dust mask. Operators should wash thoroughly with soap and water after handling. If accidental eye contact occurs, immediately rinse eyes thoroughly with water. If irritation persists, seek medical attention. The material safety data sheet contains more detailed occupational safety information. To report adverse effects, access medical information, or obtain additional product information, call 1-800-428-4441.

The other reason is that ractopamine is not withdrawn at slaughter. In fact, it is begun as the animals near slaughter and started during turkeys’ last 14 days. It is actually pumping through their systems as they arrive on the killing floor.

Like antibiotics and arsenic, ractopamine is given to turkeys to make them grow faster. It is similar to clenbuterol, a performance enhancing sports drug that is banned in the US, for both humans and livestock, and elsewhere. But ractopamine is also banned in Europe, Taiwan and China, where 1,700 ractopamine “poisonings” were reported and ractopamine-produced pork was seized in 2007. (You have to worry when China calls a food unsafe.)

Ractopamine caused actual riots in Taiwan in 2007 when 3,500 Tawainese pig farmers, some carrying pigs, threw dung and rotten eggs at police and military soldiers over the rumor that a ractopamine ban would be lifted.  “Get out, USA pork” and “We refuse to eat pork that contains poisonous ractopamine,” they chanted for hours according to Taiwan News.

Reports of ractopamine’s lack of safety are not hard to find.  In 2009, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) termed ractopamine a cardiac stimulator. Ractopamine residues “represent a genuine risk to consumers,” wrote a medical  journal article, citing “long plasma half-lives, and relatively slow rates of elimination.” And a report from Ottawa’s Bureau of Veterinary Drugs says that rats fed ractopamine developed a constellation of birth defects like cleft palate, protruding tongue, short limbs, missing digits, open eyelids and enlarged heart.

The FDA is well aware of ractopamine’s downside. In 2003, three years after the drug was approved for use in U.S. pigs, the FDA accused its manufacturer, Elanco, of withholding information about ractopamine’s “safety and effectiveness” and “adverse animal drug experiences” in a fourteen-page warning letter.

Elanco, said the FDA, failed to report furious pig farmers phoning the company about “dying animals,” “downer pigs,” animals “down and shaking,” “hyperactivity” and “vomiting after eating feed with Paylean,” and also suppressed clinical trial information. But, thanks to same probable lobbying that reversed the cephalosporin ban, the FDA approved ractopamine for cattle the following year and for use in turkeys in 2009! Last year, the FDA enlarged the approval for cattle.

Turkey meat produced with ractopamine is not the same as normal meat by Elanco’s own admission! “Alterations” in muscle were seen in turkeys fed ractopamine like an increase in “mononuclear cell infiltrate and myofiber degeneration,” says its 2008 new drug application documents. There was “an increase in the incidence of cysts,” and differences, some “significant,” in the weight of organs like hearts, kidneys and livers. (“Enlarged hearts” had been seen in test rats feed ractopamine in the Canadian studies.)

Still, ractopamine, like antibiotics, is being hailed as “green” and for lowering the carbon footprint. It has “positive environmental benefits for livestock producers in terms of decreased nitrogen and phosphorus excretions,” extols one journal article. It results in a “reduced amount of total animal waste,” unless, of course, you count the manure coming from Big Pharma.

Big Pharma and the FDA have known for years that formoterol fumarate, found in Symbicort, Dulera and Foradil, and salmeterol, found in Advair Diskus and Serevent Diskus, can paradoxically cause asthma deaths, especially in children and African-Americans. In fact, the FDA has heightened the warnings on the labels several times and convened several hearings about the drugs’ safety and some doctors have called for their complete ban.

But the drugs, called long acting beta agonists, or LABAs, are so lucrative — Advair was the fourth best selling drug in the US last year, making almost $5 billion — they are marketed despite their estimated US death toll of 4,000 a year. That’s equal to, or even more than, the number who die from asthma itself!

LABAs, whose aggressive marketing coincided with direct-to-consumer drug advertising, are billed as add-on drugs that treat asthma in a different way than traditional steroid asthma drugs. Traditional, inhaled corticosteriods like Flovent, Pulmicort, Asmanex and Qvar treat asthma’s inflammation, while LABAs, prescribed as maintenance or “control” drugs, expand constricted airways and protect against bronchospasm.

But study after study show the “bronchoprotective” effects have a downside. They can “mask” asthma that is actually getting worse though people feel fine, and they can produce “desensitization” or “down regulation” also known as tolerance, in which the more you use them the less they work.

In fact, Salmeterol, the drug in Advair and Serevent, is considered so unsafe, a huge trial called the Salmeterol Multi-center Asthma Research Trial, or SMART was terminated in 2003 after there were 16 deaths, 44 intubations and 369 hospitalizations on LABAs, mostly in African-Americans.

At FDA hearings after SMART, Pharma doctors tried to spin the results by saying the patients had been sicker to begin with, that they were too slow to seek medical care and that their self-reports of LABA use couldn’t be trusted because patients lie. They also said (somewhat contradictorily) that LABAs don’t mask worsening asthma because patients know if they are getting worse (not that they get worse!) — and the deaths can be explained by patients’ DNA types. Whew.

LABA defenders even said the SMART results couldn’t be trusted because the trial was stopped early.

Usually, the justification for unsafe drugs like LABAs is that their benefits outweigh their risk. But at FDA hearings three years later, David Graham, MD, an FDA official, said LABA “benefits, if any, seemed to be small compared to placebo.” He also blew the whistle on the widespread Pharma myth that a decline in US asthma deaths over the last decade is due to LABAs.

“It is true that trend for reported asthma deaths has declined over time, ” he said in the hearings. “But nobody has shown that the decline has anything to do with LABA use.” Fifty percent of the decline “is due to the change in classification coding from IC-9 to ICD-10,” said Graham, known for testifying before Congress about Vioxx dangers.

While the number of asthma deaths is down, the number of asthma sufferers is growing — and no one really knows why. Some cite more pollens in the air from global warming, an excess of allergy causing plug-in air fresheners and the “hygiene theory” that we have created such a germ and dirt free environment, our immune systems can’t differentiate real threats from harmless pollens or dust.

Others cite burgeoning prescription drug use. Researchers at Henry Ford Hospital found children given antibiotics within their first six months of life were more likely to develop allergies. Data presented at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology suggest children whose mothers took prescription acid-blocking drugs like Nexium during pregnancy are more likely to suffer symptoms of asthma. And research in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine found that Tylenol may be, “an important risk factor for the development and/or maintenance of asthma, rhinoconjunctivitis and eczema in adolescent children.” Meanwhile, a 1999 European Union report speculates about the role of sex hormones and meat additives in asthma.

To prove that LABAs are safe and effective, Pharma not only points to falling US asthma deaths rates, it points to LABAs’ inclusion in government asthma guidelines Even though Pharma doctors virtually wrote the government guidelines!

William W. Busse, MD, from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, chaired the expert panel which developed the government’s 2007 National Asthma Education and Prevention Program Guidelines — even though he is financially linked to GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer Genentech/Novartis, Schering and five other Pharma companies according to the guidelines themselves.

No wonder federal guidelines extol the “established beneficial effects of LABA for the great majority of patients who require more therapy than low-dose ICS alone to control asthma,” and call LABAs a “preferred option” that “improves lung function, decreases symptoms [and] reduces exacerbations!” Not that we have an opinion.

Why is a Pharma doctor writing federal disease treatment guidelines? And why, on top of 10 Pharma backers, does he have “research support from the NIH” which is our tax-dollars? Aren’t enough tax dollars buying Medicare and Medicaid-reimbursed LABAs thanks to the “guidelines”?

Since SMART and more reported deaths, the FDA has continued to hold hearings and tighten warnings. Currently, warnings say LABAs should only be used when inhaled corticosteriods don’t control asthma, and for the shortest time possible and should notbe used without corticosteriods or as a “rescue” medication.

Needless to say, if LABAs have to be used in addition to inhaled corticosteriods and in addition to rescue inhalers (like Proventil HFA, ProAir HFA, Ventolin HFA) what they are actually good for is not clear — even as Pharma sells a third, possibly surplus drug. No wonder Forbes magazine calls the LABA-containing Advair, “more a miracle of marketing than of science.” Many also question whether the addition of an inhaled corticosteroid, which Symbicort, Dulera and Advair have, even makes them safer.

Of course, LABA promoters are furious about the warning that LABAs should not be used long term. “Suddenly stopping medication that is providing a protection for individuals — without good literature experience to back it up — is something we’re very concerned about,” said William Busse at an asthma conference. And when the FDA announced this year it will retest LABAs, Busse cowrote an angry letter to the New England Journal of Medicine. New trials are unnecessary he said and calling them “‘safety’ studies suggests that LABAs have some direct toxicity that causes death or leads to hospitalization.”

Some people love LABAs and claim their asthma symptoms have gone away. But the longer they use them, the more likely they are to report Advair or Symbicort “poop-out” (like “Prozac poop-out”) in which the drug stops working and they feel worse than before.

On the drug-rating web site askapatient.com, patients also report feeling “addicted” to the drugs and that their lung capacity is changing. “My lungs feel different than normal, like my lungs are feeling dried out and sticky if that is possible, all at the same time, reports one person about Symbicort. “It seems they are becoming lazy, like now they cannot miss a dose.”

“When I sucked it in, it felt like I was collapsing my lungs,” says an Advair user in Forbes. The man’s doctor told him the drug “couldn’t possibly be making him worse,” but it was.

Twenty-five patients on Advair Diskus 100/50 also report racing and irregular heart beats, palpitations and the feeling of an imminent heart attack.

LABAs are not the only asthma drugs with questionable safety and effectiveness that have become billion dollar businesses for Pharma. Singulair, a leukotriene receptor antagonist or LTRA, was the nation’s seventh most popular drug last year, according to IMS health and earned more than $4 billion.It ranks only two places below Advair. Other LTRAs are Accolate and Zyflo.

Soon after Singulair was released to the market, FDA reviewers cautioned in the New England Journal of Medicine that adult studies of the drug “may not be predictive of the response,” in children. No kidding! In Singulair’s FDA approval documents reviewers note that Singulair levels in adolescents are different from “healthy adults” and that an infant monkey, four weeks old, had to be euthanized because “infants may be more sensitive to the toxicity,” of Singulair. (“Three out of five guinea pigs also died from “severe anaphylactic responses.” If animal tests do not extrapolate to human safety, why are they done?)

Scores of human subjects in the FDA approval documents withdrew from trials because of “worsening” asthma and reviewers even write that one study, “demonstrates that it is better to leave patients on beclomethasone [a corticosteroid] than to switch them to montelukast [Singulair]. There’s an asthma drug for you!

Approval documents include 10 blanked out pages, marked “This section was determined NOT to be releasable,” and the frequent phrase, “Portions of this review were excerpted directly from the sponsor’s submission,” as in we didn’t read it but we waved it through.

William Busse, the guidelines writer, was also an investigator in the Singulair approval trials though not the most compliant one. He was issued an FDA warning letter when an inspection of his facility revealed incorrect consent forms, incorrect patient enrollments, and drug inventory and labeling errors.

Singulair was heavily marketed for allergies, in addition to asthma, and to kids. Marketing included a partnership with Olympic gold-medalist swimmer Peter Vanderkaay, a basketball “skills challenge” for kids 9 to 14 and materials distributed through (and legitimized by)American Academy of Pediatrics said published reports.

Meanwhile, more than 100 parents on askapatient were reporting that Singulair caused hyperactivity, tantrums, depression, crying, school trouble, facial tics, strange eye movements and self-harm in their children, some as young as one. Many were put on the drug for sniffles, wheezing and early “symptoms” of asthma, in keeping with Pharma’s “early treatment” push.

“Last night was a complete meltdown over every single thing that could have possibly been a minor annoyance, such as not being able to squeeze enough toothpaste out of the tube, which culminated in a 30-minute screaming and crying bonanza,” writes the mother of a 7-year-old who has been on Singulair for six months. “I was reading stories to her tonight, and she must have popped her jaw open at least 40 times over the course of two books (mouth open wide like a yawn in fast-forward). I was keeping an eye on her, and a few times I asked her why she kept doing that and she said she didn’t know, and she thought maybe her mouth was ‘itchy.’”

But in 2009, after 15-year-old Cody Miller of Queensbury, NY was given Singulair for hay fever and took his own life 17 days later, the FDA gave Singulair a warning for “neuropsychiatric” side effects. And the next year, Fox TV reported that kids on Singulair are being diagnosed with ADHD, Tourette Syndrome and serious behavioral and neurological conditions. Most are “cured” when they go off the drug. Singulair is no doubt driving other pediatric drugs sales.

Even adults are put on the drug for minor reasons with major consequences. “I was perfectly healthy prior to taking this drug,” reports a 53-year-old woman about Singulair on askapatient.”Doc noticed I had a little wheeze and prescribed Singulair. I began to have the dreams, insomnia and depression after the first few days,” which led to “suicidal thoughts,” she says.

Could there be any more clouds over today’s blockbuster asthma drugs? Yes! Clinical trials on which many of the top asthma drugs were approved were so corrupted at least one researcher went to prison. William H. Ziering, MD was sentenced to six months in prison and lost his medical license for falsification of five drug studies according to government documents.

Ziering conducted trials on Salmeterol (the LABA), Flonase and other respiratory drugs and wrote medication-friendly papers like “Allergic rhinitis. Measures to control the misery,” and “Diagnosis and treatment of allergic rhinitis and asthma in infancy and childhood.”

During the same time period, clinical trials of Singulair and at least five other top asthma drugs conducted at Vivra Asthma & Allergy also came to the attention of federal authorities. A “patient mill” was operated at the Tucson facility to pocket the lucrative compensation paid per subject for trials, says Robert Davidson, MD, a sub-investigator at the facility, regardless of the appropriateness of the subjects. People who participate in drug trials are called subjects, not patients

The irregularities at the Vivra facility led to onsite FDA inspections in which witnesses told inspectors they were told to “NOT mention potential risks” to subjects to not “scare them away,” and subjects were pressured to participate despite risks to their heath. (One subject was hospitalized from the trials.) Enrolling inappropriate subjects risks both their health and future users of the drug, whose safety was “proved” from their participation.

In one study, conducted at Vivra and elsewhere, more than 40 percent of people on Singulair and Salmeterol (the LABA in Advair) had adverse events, two withdrew with –anybody? — “worsening asthma” and “one died as a result of bronchial asthma!” The drugs were “well tolerated,” write the researchers.

There is no evidence that approval of drugs “tested” by Vivra or Ziering was delayed or revoked nor do the related published papers appear retracted.

Among drugs tested at Vivra was the antibiotic Raxar® which was withdrawn from the market for fatal heart rhythm abnormalities and the genetically engineered Xolair which was investigated by the FDA for heart attack and stroke links and carries a severe anaphylaxis warning. Seventy-seven people who took Xolair had life-threatening allergic responses in a year-and-a-half, according to FDA reports.

Genetically engineered drugs like Xolair cost as much as $20,000 a year and cause TB, cancers and super infections because they suppress the immune system. But they seem slated to be the next big thing in asthma.

A study in May says Xolair can provide, “additional clinical benefit” for patients who are “inadequately controlled” on inhaled corticosteroids. That’s exactly what was said about LABAs. The study was funded by Xolair’s manufacturer and one of the authors is William Busse.

Last year, Hefner attended the premier of a film commemorating his life called Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel at the Gene Siskel Film Center, part of Chicago’s Art Institute. Looking more like a seasoned Maurice Chevalier or elder statesman than Bathrobe Erectus, Hefner received a standing ovation.

The movie, directed by Brigitte Berman, is one of several recent films to chronicle Chicago history. Last year the center screened Disturbing the Universe about Chicago 8 lawyer extraordinaire William Kunstler. The year before, the film center premiered Radical Disciple: The Story of Father Pfleger, which had David Axelrod, Chicago’s second most famous son (after President Obama) in attendance.

Anyone who grew up before Reagan, in Chicago or both enjoyed the forgotten cultural icons that director Brigitte Berman revives in the film: Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr., William F. Buckley, Dick Cavett, David Steinberg and many more.

TV clips from hifi, party record and hootenanny days from the TV shows Playboy’s Penthouse and Playboy After Dark feature folk singers Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and rare performances.

Who knew, until the film, that Playboy sponsored one of the biggest jazz festivals in history? Who knew it sent the Playboy jet to retrieve Vietnam orphans who were nursed back to health by bunnies (out of costume)? Who knew Playboy supported Children of the Night, a group that helps runaways evade prostitution?

But halfway through the movie, a creep factor sets in. Maybe, it was the parade of so many talking heads who have died since the film was made–Alex Haley, Robert Culp, Tony Curtis–or the fact that Hef wannabe Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione died right before the film was shown.

Maybe it was the ubiquity of Kiss’ Gene Simmons who is so sexually and psychiatrically unbalanced that he told NPR’s Terry Gross to “open your legs” in an interview–or the appearance of a leering James Caan who was linked to Hollywood prostitute broker Heidi Fleiss. (At the film’s end, Simmons who, pontificates about male sexual parts being aroused by clothing while women’s are hidden away (what?) removes the sunglasses he’s been wearing through all the film in a repulsive gesture of grandiosity and apparent exhibitionism.)

Still the straw dog enemies of lust that director Berman sets up in the film–Pat Boone, Jerry Falwell, Charles Keating–are not nearly as creepy as those who are supporters of Hefner’s brand of lust.

What, for example, is the Rev. Malcolm Boyd, author of Are You Running With Me Jesus, doing at an establishment where half the sky, as Nicholas Kristof puts it, is deemed worthy of wearing animal tails? Where have Hefner supporters Dick Cavett and David Steinberg been for the last 30 years to not notice that Oprah, Chelsea Handler and the women on the View have retired them? And what is up with Bill Maher’s appearance?

In fact, the pride that Hefner says he feels for “liberating” the segregated New Orleans Playboy Club so that African-American men could enjoy “cottontail” service produces a sense of incredulity in women viewers. It brings to mind a scene in Sacha Baron Cohen Bruno in which Cohen invites the singer Paula Abdul, who has arrived for an interview, to use a Mexican gardener on his hands and knees as a chair–and she does! Hefner’s fight against “oppression” and “sexual McCarthyism,” that the film exalts is like the Bruno scene–everything is fine if you ignore the furniture.

An admitted sex, Dexedrine, Pepsi and work addict, Hefner has the constellation of self-centeredness and resentments often called King Baby. He says he “deserved” seven girlfriends because he had been monogamous for eight years before that. He says the death of playmate Dorothy Stratten, who was murdered by her husband, Paul Snider, months after she was named the 1980 Playmate of the Year, gave him his stroke and that it was a “miracle,” he got through it. (Let’s talk about ME.) And he says the suicide of his former secretary, Bobbie Arnstein, who was found dead in a Chicago hotel room after an overdose of drugs in January 1975, was caused by drug officials and hurt the Playboy brand and image.

Hefner is admired for his business acumen yet he’s clueless about why the magazine tanked by the late 2000′s. He actually blames Former Attorney General, under Ronald Reagan, Edwin Meese for labeling the magazine obscene, not the laddie magazines and cyber porn that carved away his market. Hefner took the brand hard core in 2001 over the objections of daughter Christie, CEO of Playboy Enterprises, who told the Daily Telegraph as a “feminist” she would not take the magazine hard core.

Of course the half the sky who became doctors, judges, senators, astronauts, scientists, House Speakers, Secretaries of State and magazine publishers also helped retire the Playboy brand along and a backlash against commodification capitalism and mindless consumerism.

In fact, when asked flat out about Playboy treating women as sexual objects–animals with tails attached–Hefner still stands by the brand and says it is because they are. Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel confirms that Playboy is a just a White Boy’s Club that decided to let men from other races in.

One reason for the switch away from pills is that doctors are increasingly wary of prescribing new “blockbuster” drugs after the recalls of Vioxx, Bextra, Baycol, Meridia, Trovan, Fen Phen and new warnings on asthma, epilepsy, pain, bone and hormone drugs.

And there are new wrinkles in compensation. Private and government insurers are becoming less willing to “cough up money for an expensive new drug–particularly when a cheap and reliable generic is available,” the Wall Street Journal reported recently.

So it’s no wonder that Pharma and its benefactors at the National Institutes of Health are mining a new revenue source: the nation’s millions of alcoholics and drugs addicts who need a “vaccine.”

“Sixty percent of people with a substance abuse disorder also suffer from another form of mental illness, says a recent New York Times’ Science Times. (Another?) They are “wired differently” and may have a “developmental brain disorder,” says the article, next to a photo of Amy Winehouse, lest anyone miss The Point.

“We now know that addiction is a disease that affects both brain and behavior,” says Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in an National Institutes of Health newsletter. “We have identified many of the biological and environmental factors and are beginning to search for the genetic variations that contribute to the development and progression of the disease.”

Of course, Pharma’s stratagems to grow its “mentally ill” franchise are well known. People with occasional anxiety are really depressed, then bipolar, then suffering from an assortment of amorphous “spectrum” diseases and dysrythmias with no known cause, no cure, no diagnostic tests and no turnoff valve on the pharmacy spigot.

The situation is even worse for children because they’re given drugs against their will by parents, teachers and doctors. Toddlers are diagnosed with ADHD, conduct disorders, depression, bipolar disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, mood disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, mixed manias, social phobia, anxiety, sleep disorders, borderline disorders, irritability, aggression, pervasive development disorders, personality disorders and (pant, pant) even schizophrenia–all of which require expensive medication cocktails.

But the picture gets scarier when researchers start identifying “biological factors” in “animal models” of addiction and depression at major primate research centers.  (There are eight including the University of Washington, Seattle; the University of California, Davis; the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Emory University; Harvard University; the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research; Oregon Health Sciences University; and Tulane University.)

Scarier for people that is. It’s already pretty scary for animals.

Because even though “proof” of mental illness in animal and human brain matter is as accurate as phrenology, it allows Brave New World diagnoses in which people suffer from – or are at risk of -psychiatric illness in the absence of symptoms. On the basis of a brain scan!  Because we have a drug to treat it.

Already drugs for pre-asthma, pre-diabetes, pre-mental illness, pre-cardiovascular conditions and pre-osteoporosis are a big part of Pharma’s arsenal. (And bone measuring machines that “prove” risk for osteoporosis, are in doctors’ offices.)

Pharma’s “early treatment” ruse — especially insidious in children who aren’t given the chance to grow up without drugs — is accelerated by disinformation that the mongered “silent” diseases are progressive: the longer you wait to treat them, the sicker you get! But who knows whether the drugs were ever needed, since they’re taken before symptoms appear?

Of course, the first problem with Pharma’s plan to treat alcoholic and drug addicts’ mental illness with a vaccine is that they are not mentally ill or suffering from a vaccine deficiency. But, secondly, alcoholism and drug addiction are diseases of denial in which sufferers want to drink. Hello? (Can anyone imagine Amy Winehouse asking for a vaccine?) That’s why Antabuse, a drug that makes people violently sick if they drink on it, fails.

Thirdly, doctors have long recognized that alcoholism and drug addiction are not strictly medical problems that can be treated by practitioners. “If a doctor is honest with himself, he must sometimes feel his own inadequacy. Although he gives all that is in him, it often is not enough,” wrote William D. Silkworth, MD, in 1939. “We physicians must admit we have made little impression upon the problem as a whole. Many types do not respond to the ordinary psychological approach.”

The only treatment that works for alcoholics and addicts — much to Pharma’s chagrin — is non-medical, non-pharmaceutical and free — administered in self-help groups run by other alcoholics and addicts. Which brings us to the fourth reason Pharma can’t cash in on its new chosen customers: for alcoholics and addicts, drugs are not the solution they are the problem!

So many car commuters have converted to bus and train commuters, cities are reporting an 8 to 34 percent rise in public transit usage.

In Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s town, Chicago, the transit system is good enough that you can get away with not owning a car like in New York City. Not only can you get to both airports for $2.25, you will get there quicker and save $30.00 or $40.00.

But even though most Chicagoans will take public transit to Cubs and Sox games, Navy Pier, Taste of Chicago, and Lolapalooza, when it comes to work they are pretty Angeleno and tend to buckle up for the ride.

During blizzards like the one we had on Groundhog’s day, the amount of people who own cars they don’t regularly use was revealed dramatically. Car “carcasses” were dug out weeks later in a meteorological version of the barfly whine, “I can’t find my car.”

But as gas prices sky rocket in Chicago, parking lots are emptying say attendants and strap hanging appears to be up.

Of course getting people out of their cars and onto the train has always been a tough psychological sell say transit activists. Even if driving costs more, even if you float in a sea of brake lights as train whiz by and actually beat you to work, there’s the convenience of leaving when you want, sitting down and controlling your own environment. (And who you sit next to.)

Driving is regarded as a “right” and gives people a feeling of control even as they move nowhere and burn their equity position. Many say the worst part of a DWI conviction is losing driving privileges and being towed can cause a well adjusted person to panic.

Nor do people even want to share. Car pools fall apart because people don’t trust the “other guy’s” driving. And in car share programs where you only use the car as needed, people don’t trust the wear and tear the other guy puts on the car or whether he is maintaining it.

But of course the paradox of city driving is you’re “in control” of your car but out of control of everything else: road congestion, weather, parking, other motorists, accidents and of course gas prices.

So it’s no surprise that some who have surrendered the wheel to the bus or train operator find it sweet. In addition to some reading, music or quiet time, they don’t arrive at work splenetic at the guy who cut them off. (Nor does the guy they would have cut off arrive steaming.) One recent train convert reports the conductor saw him coming and actually held the train for him. When has that ever happened — a car waiting for someone else — in rush hour traffic?

What began as “something deeply personal and private” in their lives has become their call for social justice, awareness, and “protecting the health and safety of our loved ones,” say Debbie Alsberge of Seattle and Robin Briggs of Charlotte, NC.

Adverse reactions to Neurontin have been greatly underestimated and unreported Debbie Alsberge says she believes, harming unsuspecting families and their physicians. “We must have the full and accurate facts about a drug’s risks to make good decisions when family members consider treatment, especially with psychoactive drugs. We cannot do that if pharmaceutical companies are allowed to taint the outcome of clinical trials and bury the harmful evidence.”

Growing up in northern California, the son of a surgeon, Dr. Doug Alsberge practiced occupational medicine near Seattle. A devoted father of two sons, he enjoyed hiking,  sailing, swimming, and golf. He also liked to write and play his acoustic guitar, says Debbie.

But when back pain from a pre-existing condition began to interfere with being able to stand for prolonged periods at work, Doug sought treatment from a pain specialist he sent his own patients to, says Debbie. The doctor gave him a narcotic analgesic and the recently approved Neurontin which was heavily marketed for pain, though only FDA approved for use in epilepsy. “There was nothing in the medical literature to alert his physicians that it might not be effective, or worse, cause further harm,” says Debbie.

Though off the narcotics, Doug’s entire demeanor continued to change on Neurontin. He was agitated, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t sleep and had tremors says Debbie. The Alsberges attributed the symptoms to Doug’s bipolar disorder, diagnosed in the 1990′s. But whereas it had always stabilized with treatment before, this time, Doug went into a psychological free fall which began to affect his ability to work. His appearance degenerated, he stopped eating normally and police had to be called to the house for his emotional volatility.

“We didn’t know his extreme internal restlessness was akathesia, which is linked to suicide in medical journals, or that it was from Neurontin,” says Debbie. In his last, dark days, Doug drove for miles “searching for a knife to end his life,”  buying one at a nearby hardware store and another at a culinary store hours away. On Palm Sunday, April 13, 2003, in an apartment he had rented away from his family, Doug died of multiple, self-inflicted stab wounds to the chest. He was 52.

The death was “surreal, bizarre and horrific,” says Debbie. But it was only when she saw an article about Neurontin suicide links that she requested Doug’s pharmacy records and realized the increases in drug dosages correlated with his symptoms and personality change says Debbie. “I just stood there in the parking lot outside of the pharmacy holding the documents in stunned disbelief,” she remembers.

Dr. Douglas Briggs was a Princeton graduate who practiced family medicine near Charlotte, NC.  Dedicated to his patients, wife and two sons, he also coached soccer, headed the PTA, played tennis and ran in what sounds like a storybook existence. Nor did Briggs ever visit a psychiatrist or mental health professional.

But after back surgery, Briggs was also put on Neurontin for the pain it was widely marketed to treat. “Medicine had been Doug’s passion and his whole life” says his wife, Robin, a former nurse. “But after a few months on Neurontin, his bedside manner became curt. He stopped reading his journals and just lay on the couch. He had always been a stoic and he became whiny about his back ache. We had never fought and we began fighting. He became a different person.”

Doug was a conservative prescriber and grilled his Pfizer rep about Neurontin’s safety more than once, says Robin. He was so attuned to his responses to medications, when he took Vioxx before its dangers were known, he noted heart palpitations — and discontinued its use. A week later, Vioxx was pulled from pharmacy shelves for causing heart problems in some patients. But thanks to Neurontin-caused akathesia, Doug’s ability to detect his own mental changes on the drug disappeared. “He did not know his suicidal thoughts were drug-induced and not his own,” she says.

On Christmas day, 2004, after opening presents, Doug urged Robin and the boys to go to a movie. Hesitant to separate on a holiday at first, Robin says she remembered an Oprah show about how men should get the chance to be alone in the house, to unwind,  like women have, so the three went see Meet the Fockers. When they returned, they found Doug hanging in the foyer. He had been on Neurontin for 10 months. He was 54.

Like Debbie Alsberge, Robin Briggs’s “aha” moment came later. Two weeks after Doug’s funeral, a distraught patient literally drove up on the Briggs’ lawn saying he couldn’t accept the uncharacteristic suicide and demanded to know what antidepressant Dr. Briggs was on, says Robin. Even though she had been asked the question countless times, responding, “He wasn’t on an antidepressant, he just took Neurontin,” this time Robin says a light bulb went off in her head and she ran upstairs to the medicine cabinet to read the Neurontin patient information for the first time.

It did not list suicide as a side effect but it did list “emotional lability” recounts Robin. “So I called my sister who is a nurse and asked her to look up Neurontin in the nurse’s desk reference. In bold letters it said ‘suicidal tendencies, sudden unexplained deaths and psychoses.’ I was sickened. Pfizer deliberately hid the risk from patients and doctors!”

The faith that Drs. Alsberge and Briggs and their doctors had in Neurontin for non-epilepsy indications didn’t just happen. It was the goal of a web of paid doctor lectures and peer selling, planted journal articles, phony medical education and rep visits to doctors that Pfizer (previously Parke-Davis and Warner-Lambert) conducted for years.

But even though Pfizer pled guilty to criminal marketing of Neurontin in 2004 and was found guilty again in 2010, it earned  $387 million from the drug in 2008. Who says crime doesn’t pay?

In just three years, Parke-Davis planted 13 ghostwritten articles in medical journals promoting off-label uses for Neurontin including a supplement to the prestigious Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine which Parke-Davis made into 43,000 reprints to mail to the journal’s “psychiatry audience” and to hand out by door-to-door sales reps. (“See, Doc — it says right here…”)

Even Scott Reuben, MD of Baystate Medical Center, termed the Bernie Madoff of medicine because he never conducted any of the clinical trials on which his conclusions were based, stumped for Neurontin. “Gabapentin would seem to be the ideal analgesic for managing acute and chronic pain following breast cancer surgery,” effused the researcher who was a paid member of Pfizer’s speakers bureau and recipient of five Pfizer grants in five years. In 2010, Reuben was sentenced in Federal Court to six months imprisonment.

In fact, the US Cochrane Group, which reviews health care interventions, is the only organization to retract phony Neurontin studies. The other studies still stand like legitimate medical literature, are still cited and no doubt fuel the continuing off-label sales.

After being presented with evidence of hundreds of Neurontin-linked suicides in 2005, the FDA added warnings to all epilepsy drugs in 2008. But not before Dr. Robert Temple, FDA’s Associate Director for Medical Policy for the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, both legitimized Neurontin’s off-label uses and blamed patients, not the drug, for suicides.

Referring to Neurontin’s popular pain, migraine, insomnia and bipolar uses without mentioning their lack of FDA approval, he told the Boston Globe, “These are the sorts of people who are complicated to think about because they tend to be at risk already.” Adverse event reports “can’t really tell you whether the suicidal event is because of the drug or despite the drug,” he added.

Meanwhile Debbie Alsberge and Robin Briggs, who both have a son in medical school, don’t want to see the tragedy of drug-induced suicides continue.

“Suicide has always been looked at as a choice, but for many people on psychoactive drugs, it’s a chemical path they are on and not a choice at all” says Robin Briggs. “My husband would be alive today if this information were available and not hidden.”

“Suicide is deeply stigmatizing and devastating. But when families stay silent, we cede power to corporations that put profit ahead of human lives and we become part of the problem,” says Debbie Alsberge. “In sharing my story of what happened to Doug, I take comfort in knowing this may help others to recognize the adverse effects of Neurontin and prevent the deaths of their loved ones. I urge other families to stand up, tell their stories and be counted.”

But rather than a safer product, clearer warnings or regulatory distance between federal officials and the industry they are supposed to oversee, tuna fish consumers have gotten nothing but more studies.

Last year Time magazine reported 100 samples of both lean red tuna and fatty tuna from 54 restaurants and 15 supermarkets in Colorado, New Jersey and New York, exceed recommended amounts of mercury.

And this year Consumer Reports says every tuna sample tested at an outside lab “contained measurable levels of mercury, ranging from 0.018 to 0.774 parts per million. The Food and Drug Administration can take legal action to pull products containing 1 ppm or more from the market. (It never has, according to an FDA spokesman.)”

In fact, mercury-filled tuna is so rampant in the food supply, it was what inspired Fischer Stevens to make the Oscar winning-documentary about the Japanese dolphin fishing industry, “The Cove”.  He personally came down with mercury poisoning, he told NBCLA, after eating tuna three or four times a week which caused him to investigate the entire seafood industry.

Nor is much of the meat necessarily safe. Even though you can cook pathogens like E. coli, salmonella, listeria and campylobacter out, veterinary drugs, pesticides and heavy metals like copper and arsenic remain after cooking says a government report.

According to a 2010 Office of Inspector General report, of 23 pesticides designated by the EPA and FDA as high risk, the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service only tests for one. Four carcasses contaminated with “violative levels of veterinary drugs” were released onto the public dinner plate in just six months, says the report.

Farmers are prohibited from selling milk for human consumption from cows that have been medicated with antibiotics (as well as other drugs) until the withdrawal period is over; so instead of just disposing of this tainted milk, producers feed it to their calves,” says the report, sounding more like an animal activist group than the U.S. government. “When the calves are slaughtered, the drug residue from the feed or milk remains in their meat, which is then sold to consumers.”

FDA records corroborate the OIM report, finding that Templeton Feed & Grain and Darr Feedlots recently sold antibiotic-tainted animal feed and that Land Dairy and Martin Feed Lot sold cows with the antibiotic sulfamethazine in their livers to be sold as human food.

And while consumers are told to cook meat thoroughly to remove pathogens that are eliminated by intense heat, cooking has a downside. Frying, broiling and grilling beef, pork, poultry and even fish can produce cancer causing compounds from dripping fat called heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons says the National Cancer Institute. They are linked to stomach, colon, bladder and several other cancers and are to be avoided.

And processed foods like luncheon meat, ham and hot dogs? They are pre-treated with nitrites to kill food-borne germs and maintain a “natural” color like the natural “color” of mass farmed salmon. Nitrites become nitrosamines which are well known carcinogens. They are as good for you as cigarettes.

Once again Big Food is “appalled” by the video — which shows sick and injured calves killed with hammers, workers standing on calves’ necks and barely alive calves on “dead piles” — while working to make publicizing such videos illegal.

And once again farm owners blame employees and play innocent, while video clearly shows them sanctioning the violence and verifying that the suffering crossbreed calves depicted should get no medical care.

Like most factory farm owners whose operations have been investigated by Mercy For Animals, Kirt Espenson, owner of the 10,000 calf E-6 Cattle Company in Hart, TX, both denies condoning the abuse and defends it.

The animals denied medical care for their open sores, swollen joints and severed hooves are actually E-6 Cattle Company’s wholesome meat initiative he says: they were not given medicine so that people wouldn’t get drug residues! (And the ones not going to be eaten by people are given drug$? Right!)

Many others were sick from the cold weather and had to be eliminated, says Espenson — as if cold weather were an untreatable disease and sentient mammals are a walnut crop.

While Big Food, law enforcement officials and government regulators continue to view videos like E-6 as isolated events, no farm that Mercy For Animals has investigated has lacked such atrocities. From the DeCoster egg farms, finally investigated by Congress, to the Hy-Line Hatchery in Spencer, Iowa where newborn male chicks are ground up alive, to the Conklin Dairy Farms in Plain City, Ohio where cows are stabbed with pitchforks, Mercy For Animals continues to show that abuse is the order of the day when animals are nothing but economic units.

Nor do perpetrators pay. No charges were filed against the Conklin Dairy owner, Gary Conklin, for example, because “in context, Mr. Conklin’s actions were entirely appropriate,” said Union County prosecuting attorney David Phillips.

While condemning animal cruelty depicted in videos like this week’s and stressing that welfare guidelines exist, Big Food is also currently trying to make such videos, shot by undercover employees, illegal. After the E-6 video broke, June delivery for live cattle at the Chicago Mercantile exchange fell to $1.15 per pound, down over one percent. That’s real money.

The video.

All you knew about prescription drugs were creepy ads in a JAMA at the doctor’s office with a lot of fine print. Even if you knew the name of a drug, you’d never ask your doctor for it because that would be self-diagnosing and cheeky for a patient.

Flash forward to the late 1990s when direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising, drug Web sites and online drug sales came on board, and self-diagnosing and demanding pills has become medicine-as-usual for many doctors and patients.

The DTC/Web perfect storm didn’t just sell drugs like Claritin, Prozac and the Purple Pill, it sold the diseases to go with them like seasonal allergies, GERD and depression. It sold risk of diseases like heart events for which you’d take a statin like Lipitor, osteoporosis for which you’d take a bone drug like Boniva and asthma attacks for which you’d use a second asthma drug like Advair. Of course, by the very definition of prevention, you didn’t know if the drugs were working but you weren’t paying out of pocket anyway so what the hay…

Thanks to DTC advertising, people started taking seizure drugs like Topamax and Lyrica for everyday pain or headaches and antipsychotics — hello? — for everyday blues or mood problems. They started taking monoclonal antibodies made from genetically engineered hamster cells like Humira that invite cancer, superinfections and TB when they didn’t have to. And FDA mandated risk disclosures — brain bleeds, sudden death, difficulty breathing, stomach bleeding, liver failure, kidney failure, muscle breakdown, fainting, hallucinations — perversely sold the drugs more either because ad frequency itself sells or because people like the identity in having a disease, like chemically experimenting on themselves or like taking a dare.

Soon anxiety graduated to depression which graduated to bipolar disorder. Children got schizophrenia and depression like adults and adults got ADHD like kids. And it didn’t stop there. If the depression you or your kid had didn’t go away — maybe because it wasn’t depression in the first place but a thing called “life” — you needed to add a drug like Abilify or Seroquel on to the original drug(s) because your depression was “treatment resistant.”

Of course if people were paying for the drugs out of their pocket and you told them to add a drug that costs almost $500 a month because the first one isn’t working, they would say the only thing “treatment resistant” is your sales pitch — go find another sucker. But if third party payers get stuck with the bill, no one seems to mind pharma’s double-(and triple)-its-money plan — or even notice it.

In fact psychiatric drug cocktails of eight, ten and twelve drugs are now common medical practice for “treatment resistant” depression and PTSD (often paid by government entitlement health plans) even though the drugs have never been tested when taken together. Unless you count the patients taking them now!

Pharma also adds an urgency pitch to the sell in case you think you can wait to take you or your child’s treatment resistant drug cocktail until symptoms worsen. Depression is now a “progressive” disease say pharma-paid doctors after being known for decades as a self-limiting disease. (The one good thing you could say about depression; it would go away.)

And don’t think kids will outgrow mood problems either, says pharma. That erratic behavior is no doubt early mental illness that will become Worse if you’d don’t treat it in the bud. Even mothers of one-year-olds with the sniffles are told serious asthma is just around the corner if they don’t treat their toddler now.

Pharma is also having a field day with sleep because everyone is in the demographic. In fact comedian Chris Rock riffs about hearing a DTC ad that asks, “Do you fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning?” and recognizing himself. “Yeah, I got THAT,” he says.”

Not falling asleep soon enough of course is the disease of insomnia which can have “strains” like “middle-of-the-night” and “terminal” insomnia. But it also sets you up for — what’s the pharma euphemism — wakefulness problems the next day. And once you’re using a wakefulness aid like Adderall or Nuvigil, what do you bet you’ll have sleep problems?

Because of pharma-paid doctors, PR firms and industry subsidized medical journals and Web sites like WebMD, pharma is able to create new diseases (osteopenia, the “risk” of osteoporosis), perimenopause and Low T), “humanize” others by giving them nicknames (ED, RA, RLS, Hep C) and elevate others to public health problems like HPV/venereal warts. (It doesn’t hurt that Julie Gerberding, MD, former CDC head resurfaced as head of Merck vaccines after she left the government.)

But a more insidious sell are pharma subsidized “patient groups” that lobby FDA and state agencies about expensive drugs, often psychiatric. While these “patients” — often flown by pharma to testify at FDA hearings — pretend they can’t get needed drugs like terminal cancer patients, the issue is seldom availability but money: either they want a new use covered by insurers or don’t want an older, cheaper drug substituted.

The same patients appear on Web site testimonials and phony grassroots PSAs (public service messages) about the epidemic of depression or childhood mental illness. How can you tell they’re not real patients but pharma plants? The Web sites and PSAs look exactly like direct-to-consumer ads.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s ruling last week that the names of the 1.3 million people with Firearm Owners Identification cards (FOID) in the state is public information has gun owners up in arms, pun intended.

The same groups that declare no one would put a sign in front of their home saying NO GUN now fear the opposite. They’re no longer worried about their right to bear arms, they’re worried about their right to bear arms anonymously. Their right to privacy.

1,000 to 1,500 gun owners converged on the Statehouse this week in Springfield to oppose the decision and push for conceal and carry laws. In Peoria, Circuit Judge Scott Shore halted disclosure with a temporary restraining order. And in a related privacy concern, Amish Illinois residents lobbied their state representatives and law enforcement officers to keep their photos off their FOID cards after former Illinois State Police Director Jonathon Monken said the policy would be reversed.

The Illinois State Police’s Firearms Services Bureau conducts background checks and updates FBI databases on the 230,000 gun owner applications it receives a year. That amount rose to 326,000 in 2009 says bureau chief Lt. John Coffman which he attributes to last year’s Supreme Court decision that overturned Chicago’s handgun ban and extension of the card’s validity to 10 years, reports the State Journal-Register.

In 2005 Illinois State Police procedures were also under scrutiny when an employee with guns in his truck at the agency’s training academy shot his girlfriend and himself says the Chicago Tribune. A state police firearms official said the agency could have confiscated the man’s weapons but didn’t in a different court case.

Two years ago a similar name disclosure flap occurred when the Memphis Commercial Appeal decided to publish a searchable base of state firearm permit holders, despite gun owner identity protection laws in states like Florida, Ohio and South Dakota that sealed names. The Appeal found that 70 of 154 state permit holders had criminal records including Bernard Avery (arrested 25 times with a murder charge dismissed on mental competency) and Reginald Miller (a felon with 11 arrests). Oops!

Chris Cox, then executive director of Illinois’ NRA, wrote the Appeal after the disclosures and called the decision “dangerous” — as if gun safety advocates and employers were armed instead of gun-owners. Hello?

Even though 25 other states call gun owner information public or do not specifically call it private, pro-gun Illinois politicians say the public has no right to the information and have introduced counter legislation to Madigan’s ruling. The Illinois State Police has also refused to release the information, which it has held confidential for forty years, in defiance of Madigan’s ruling and a Freedom of Information Act request from the Associated Press.

Pro-disclosure and gun safety activists, on the other hand, say knowing whether a neighbor, daycare worker or the kid sitting next to your son or daughter at community college is armed is very much their business. Especially since 10,222  firearm  applications the Illinois State Police received in 2009 were denied and 5,952 were outright revoked.

Though the firearm owner information which Madigan wants to release would not include addresses, phone numbers or photos, gun activists worry they will be harassed in their community, by gun control activists or by anti-gun employers. They also worry that criminals will break into their houses and steal their weapons.

In fact, gun activists are so worried about others knowing they’re armed, you have to wonder if the weapons make them safe — or unsafe. And if they need to buy more weapons to defend their weapons.

Water taken near a Nebraska feedlot had four times the trenbolone levels as other water samples and male fathead minnows nearby had low testosterone levels and small heads.

Nor do you have to see a doctor to imbibe a witch’s brew of prescriptions like pain pills, antibiotics and psychiatric, cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy and heart meds in your drinking water, says the AP. Free of charge.

Other “biosolids” found in drinking water include anti-fungal drugs and the toxic plastic, Bisphenol A, from some bottled waters which people ironically drink to avoid tap water.

While pharma and water treatment professionals routinely deny the existence of prescription drugs in public waterways and drinking water — easy to do when they are not tested for anyway! — Mary Buzby, director of environmental technology for pharma giant Merck, was a little more candid in 2007.

“There’s no doubt about it, pharmaceuticals are being detected in the environment and there is genuine concern that these compounds, in the small concentrations that they’re at, could be causing impacts to human health or to aquatic organisms,” she remarked at a conference in 2007, says the AP.

And if we need a second opinion from the antibiotics found in Tucson drinking water, sex hormones in San Francisco drinking water and seizure and anxiety meds in Southern California drinking water, there’s the animals themselves.

Fish caught near wastewater treatment plants near five major US cities had residues of cholesterol, high blood pressure, allergy, bipolar and depression drugs reported Discovery news in 2006.

Male fish in the estrogen-saturated St. Lawrence River around Montreal are developing ovaries, reported Daniel Cyr, at Quebec’s National Institute for Science Research according to the Independent Post in 2008.

And now fish in the same area are showing signs of the antidepressant Prozac in their systems says the University of Montreal.

(And that’s not counting the feminized frogs with both female and male sex organs which are increasingly found in US waterways and even suburban ponds, an ominous “canary-in-the-water” trend that indicates serious ecological damage say scientists.)

When scientists studied hybrid striped bass exposed to Prozac at Clemson University, SC they found the fish maintained a position at the top of the water surface, sometimes with their dorsal fin out of the water unlike the fish not on Prozac who remained at the bottom of the tank. Staying near the top of the water and maintaining “a vertical position in the aquaria” could increase the bass’ susceptibility to predators and decrease their survival reported the researchers. Nor did the bass eat as much as non-Prozac fish.

A similar loss in survival behaviors has been seen in shrimp exposed to Prozac who are five times more likely to swim toward light than away from it, making them also more susceptible to predators reports the Southern Daily Echo News.

”Crustaceans are crucial to the food chain and if shrimps’ natural behaviour is being changed because of antidepressant levels in the sea this could seriously upset the natural balance of the ecosystem,” says Dr Alex Ford, from the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Marine Sciences.

For years public health officials have told people that just because the bass and other fish in their waterways are contaminated with chlordane, PCBs and methylmercury it doesn’t mean the drinking water is unsafe. But the prescription drugs levels in fish are precisely because the drinking water is unsafe.

Shot by Mercy For Animals (MFA), employees at Catfish Corner, near Mesquite, skin and dismember catfish that clearly fight for their lives to the very end.

In one incident filmed on September 13, 2010 and conveyed to David Alex, Administrative Chief of the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office in a petition for enforcement of Texas cruelty to animals statutes at the facility, a completely skinned but conscious catfish escapes from an employee’s hand and flails around the sink until the employee retrieves the animal and puts him or her back on the tabletop.

In an incident filmed on September 26, 2010, a catfish being slaughtered never stops opening and closing his or her mouth and trying to escape, as blood runs down the side of the sink and skin is removed. Eventually the camera view is blocked.

In other incidents, animals open and close their mouths to breath and tense and move their caudal fins in vain struggles to escape their circumstances, right up until the time their heads are removed. In some cases the animals’ bodies are visibly shaking.

No attempt is made to render the animals unconscious or to reduce their suffering in the 66 incidents of cruelty documented for authorities, says the animal welfare group, based in Chicago.

The 55-acre Catfish Corner breeds and stocks in artificial ponds as many as 12,000 pounds of captive fish at one time. The animals are slaughtered and sold to the public as food. MFA also believes fish from Catfish Corner are used to stock State of Texas lakes like Lake Ray Hubbard and lakes near Grand Prairie.

In recorded video, the owner of Catfish Corner states on film that he skins and dismembers the animals alive, despite the government’s instruction to “electrically shock them.” MFA says it has documented other Texas facilities which electrically stun fish prior to skinning the animals in order “to render them unconscious and reduce their suffering.”

In a letter to MFA declining prosecution of Catfish Corner, Assistant Dallas County District Attorney Melinda Edwards writes that “Texas animal cruelty law lacks precedent that would support criminal prosecution for the conduct you brought to our attention.”

The ability of fish to feel pain is no longer in dispute.

The skin of the fish “contains sensory receptors for touch, pressure and pain,” says the Standing Committee of the European Convention for the Protection of Animals Kept for Farming Purposes and is the “first line of defence against disease and provides protection from the environment.”

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh’s Division of Biological Sciences say the fact that fish “can learn to avoid an adverse stimulus such as electric shock … and hooking during angling,” proves their responses are not “simply a nociceptive reflex.”

And Dr. Temple Grandin, the leading farmed animal welfare expert and an advisor to the US Department of Agriculture, says “Research shows that fish respond to painful stimuli in a manner that is not just a simple reflex.” Upon viewing the Catfish Corner video she added, “People processing live fish should first render the fish insensible before skinning, removing meat, or other invasive procedures.”

After Sulejman Talovic killed five in Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square mall and Vincent J. Dortch killed three at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard within days of each other in February 2007, the NRA was also silent.

Like Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, Stephen Phillip Kazmierczak, the Northern Illinois University killer, Latina Williams, the Louisiana Technical College killer and Jennifer Sanmarco, the Goleta postal facility killer, Talovic and Dortch were legal gun owners.

Williams might have been living in her car, paranoid and delusional and giving her possessions away in suicidal gestures but she walked right into a New Orleans pawn shop and bought a .357 revolver and a box of ammunition the day before the shootings.

Talovic may have been a Bossnian immigrant required to show a piece of second identification but bought the murder weapon at Sportsman’s Fastcash, a pawn shop chain in Utah, with just one say investigators.

And remember the Psycho Santa? Bruce Pardo bought at least five guns within five months from a single gun dealer before killing nine on Christmas Eve in Covina, CA.

Other legal gun owners were Jiverly Voong, who killed 13 in Binghamton NY and was a frequent customer of Gander Mountain, and Richard Poplawski, who murdered three Pittsburgh police officers and bought his arsenal over the Web, according to his mother.

And don’t forget Terry Ratzmann, the Milwaukee church service killer, Chai Vang the Wisconsin hunter killer and Bart Ross, who killed a Chicago Federal judge’s husband and mother — all of whom sailed through background checks.

No matter how Halloween III the rampages become — Michael McLendon kills his mother, grandmother, uncle, two cousins, the wife and daughter of a sheriff’s deputy and three more in Alabama in 2009; Terry Sedlacek shoots and kills a pastor through the Bible he is holding at an Illinois church service the same year — NRA spin doctors induce a national genuflection over the “rights” behind the carnage.

“When you begin taking away the rights of people that you don’t like, that’s the slippery slope,” said NRA lobbyist Marion P. Hammer when the Sun Sentinel reported that valid concealed weapon licenses were issued to 1,400 probable felons including a man who shot his girlfriend as she cooked breakfast, a pizza deliveryman wanted for fatally shooting a 15-year-old over a stolen order of chicken wings and six registered sex offenders.

Nor should you take away the right to amass an arsenal like McLendon, Sedlacek, Poplawski, Voong, Oakland cop shooter Lovelle Mixon and Cathage nursing home killer Robert Stewart all maintained according to publisher reports, says the NRA.

Still it’s hard to miss increasing attacks on local politicians even before Tucson like the shooting of the Kirkwood, MO mayor, public works director and two city council members in 2009 and last month’s Panama City school board shooting.

And a brochure posted on the Web in 2007 shows the NRA’s crosshairs side.

The 27-page draft called Freedom in Peril attacks former New Orleans major Ray Nagin, Sen. Hillary Clinton, Katie Couric, Rosie O’Donnell, George Soros, Michael Moore and York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg with inflammatory drawings.

Menacing African-Americans and Asians are depicted as “the illegal alien gangs” and homeowners are shown shooting at invading gangs from rooftops.

It is joked that politicians who stand up to the NRA are also known as Unelected. But thanks to the NRA arming “people that you don’t like,” even pro-NRA politicians aren’t safe anymore.

In 2009 the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), part of USDA, says it poisoned 489,444 red-winged blackbirds in Texas and 461,669 in Louisiana. It also shot 4,217 blackbirds in California, 2,246 in North Dakota and 1,063 in Oregon according to its posted records.

We won’t even talk about the starlings, crows, ravens, doves, geese, owls (yes, owls), hawks, pigeons, ducks, larks, woodpeckers and coots our tax dollars annihilated to benefit ranchers, farmers and other private interests. Or the squirrels, rabbits, badgers, bobcats, beavers, woodchucks, coyotes, opossums, raccoons and mountain lions.

The he-men at the Wildlife Service also shot 29 great blue herons, 820 cattle egrets and 115 white-faced ibises in 2009, despite the known dangers of approaching shore birds.

It’s hard to know which is worse: government agencies like APHIS, Louisiana State University and the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry helping private rice farmers and landowners with our tax dollars. Or the scorched earth baiting of their rice fields with poison “until blackbird populations are depleted,” as LSU’s Rice Research Station News puts it.

APHIS even uses caged red-winged blackbirds as decoys to attract wild ones says Audubon magazine and “pre-baits” an area with unpoisoned food to ensure the most takers.

Nor does the government’s blackbird poison only kill blackbirds.

“APHIS makes sure that the poisoned banquet is especially tempting for wildlife by laying the food out in the spring. This attracts birds and other wildlife  because food sources, especially insects, are limited in early spring,” says the National Audubon Society. “The poisoned rice also looks very tasty because the birds are migrating. The poisoned rice is a ready buffet for any bird to eat, but especially those who are tired and hungry from flying.”

The government used the chemical DRC-1339 to poison the over million blackbirds it killed in 2009, including in Louisiana. The avicide, called Starlicide causes “irreversible kidney and heart damage” says APHIS. “A quiet and apparent painless death normally occurs 1-3 days following ingestion,” writes an APHIS spokesman on the site, probably secure in the fact that his death won’t take three days.

Government wildlife officials may also feel hypocritical about the thousands of dead drum fish that appeared in the Arkansas River a few days before the red-winged blackbirds fell from the sky on New Year’s Eve.

That’s because wildlife agencies also kill entire waterways of fish when it serves their purpose.

Last year, Illinois wildlife officials poisoned 90 tons of goldfish, gizzard and shad in the Chicago Sanitary and Shipping Canal with the chemical Rotenone, which suffocates fish, to support the sport fishing industry. A year earlier they poisoned tens of thousands of goldfish, koi, bass, crappie, catfish and sunfish/bluegill hybrids in Chicago’s Lincoln Park to rehab the pond.

Whether killing fish to save a pond or blackbirds to help farmers, government wildlife officials honor neither the “public” or “trust” in the Public Trust Doctrine they are sworn to. And wildlife has a lot more to fear than New Year’s Eve.

But it was also the year the Justice Department filed the first criminal, not civil, charges against a drug company executive, former GSK VP and assistant general counsel Lauren Stevens.

And the year prominent psychiatrists, Charles Nemeroff and Alan Schatzberg, were accused of writing an entire book to teach primary care physicians p$ychopharmacology.

Still most of the action was still the promotion of dangerous pills, many of which should never have been approved.

Here is 2010′s Hall of Shame.

Yaz and Yasmin

Soon after Bayer launched the pill Yaz in 2006, billing it as going “beyond birth control,” 18-year-olds were coming down with blood clots, gall bladder disease, heart attacks and even strokes. FDA ordered Bayer to run correction ads that detail the drugs’ risks though Yaz sales are still brisk. In fact, financial analysts attribute a third quarter slump to a Yaz generic coming online, not dangerous side effects.

Lyrica, Topamax and Lamictal

In August FDA ordered a warning on the seizure drug Lamictal for aseptic meningitis (brain inflammation) but it is still the darling of military and civilian doctors for unapproved pain and migraine uses. All three drugs increase the risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors according to their mandated labels, in addition to the memory and hair loss patients report.

Humira, Prolia and TNF Blockers

The drug industry’s highly promoted biologic drugs are made from genetically engineered hamster cells and suppress the immune system, inviting tuberculosis and several cancers. Yet Humira is advertised to healthy people for “clearer skin” and Prolia is advertised to prevent osteoporosis in healthy women.

Chantix

After 397 FDA cases of possible psychosis, 227 domestic reports of suicidal behaviors and 28 actual suicides, the government banned pilots, air-traffic controllers and interstate truck and bus drivers from taking the antismoking drug Chantix in 2008. Its neuropsychiatric effects were immortalized when New Bohemians musician, Carter Albrecht, was shot to death in 2007 in Texas by a neighbor after acting aggressively on the Chantix.

Ambien

The sleeping pill Ambien was immortalized as the drug Tiger Woods reportedly cavorted with his consorts on and former US Rep. Patrick Kennedy crashed his Ford Mustang on, while driving to Capitol Hill in the middle of the night to “vote” in 2006. Law enforcement officials say it has increased traffic accidents from people who drive in a black out and don’t even recognize arresting officers.

Tamoxifen

Is it a coincidence that Tamoxifen maker AstraZeneca founded Breast Cancer Awareness Month and makes carcinogenic agrochemicals that cause breast cancer? As a breast cancer prevention drug, an American Journal of Medicine study found the average life expectancy increase from Tamoxifen was nine days. Public Citizen says for every case of breast cancer prevented on Tamoxifen there is a life-threatening case of blood clots, stroke or endometrial cancer.

Lipitor and Crestor

Why is Lipitor the best selling drug in the world? Because every adult with high LDL or fear of high LDL is on it. And also 2.8 million children, says Consumer Reports. All statins can cause muscle breakdown called rhabdomyolysis. And Crestor is so linked to the side effect, Public Citizen calls it a Do Not Use and the FDA’s David Graham named it one of the five most dangerous drugs before at a Congressional hearing.

Boniva

Boniva and other bisphosphonate bone drugs are a good example of FDA approving once unapprovable drugs by transferring risk onto the public’s shoulders. The list of dangers on the label includes waiting 60 minutes before eating or drinking anything except plain water, never taking the drug with mineral water, sparkling water, coffee, tea, milk, juice or other oral medicine, including calcium, antacids, or vitamins and not lying down after you take it.

Prempro

Pfizer’s hormone drug Prempro is linked to a 26 percent increase in breast cancer, 41 percent increase in strokes, 29 percent increase in heart attacks, 22 percent increase in cardiovascular disease and double the rate of blood clots. But its cognitive and cardiovascular “benefits” are being tested right now at major universities to debut an HT “Light,” hoping the public has a short memory.

Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, SSRIs

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRIs) antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and Lexapro probably did more to inflate drug industry profits than Viagra. But many say the drugs have also inflated police blotters. In addition to 4,200 published reports of SSRI-related violence, including the Columbine, Red Lake and NIU shootings, SSRIs can cause serotonin syndrome and gastrointestinal bleeding when taken with certain drugs. Paxil is linked to birth defects.

Effexor, Cymbalta, Pristiq, SNRIs

Selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) are like their SSRIs chemical cousins except their norepinephrine effects can modulate pain, which has ushered in your-depression-is-really-pain, your-pain-is-really-depression and other crossover marketing. SNRI’s are also harder to quit than SSRIs. 739,000 web sites address “Effexor” and “withdrawal.”

Seroquel, Zyprexa, Geodon, atypical antipsychotics

The antipsychotic Seroquel tops 71 drugs on the FDA’s January 2010 adverse event report and is linked to unexplained troop deaths and many research scandals. But it’s the fifth biggest-selling drug in the world. Atypical antipsychotics cause weight gain and diabetes, the tardive dyskinesia they are marketed to prevent and death in the demented elderly. Yet FDA approved Zyprexa and Seroquel for children last year and the new atypical antipsychotic, Latuda this year. Maybe the FDA is bipolar.

Ritalin, Concerta, Strattera, Adderall and ADHD drugs

ADHD drugs rob “kids of their right to be kids, their right to grow, their right to experience their full range of emotions, and their right to experience the world in its full hue of colors,” says Anatomy of an Epidemic author Robert Whitaker. But they are a gold mine for the drug industry. During an August conference call with financial analysts, Shire specialty pharmaceuticals president, Mike Cola, lauded the “very dynamic ADHD market,” and the “co-administration market” (in which kids don’t need one drug but several).

Gardasil and Cervarix Vaccines

A pharma-government plot to inoculate the public with dangerous vaccines? Maybe not but why are governors like Texas’ Rick Perry mandating vaccination of girls for HPV? And why was University of Queensland lecturer, Andrew Gunn, silenced when he questioned the Gardasil vaccine? The HPV vaccine doesn’t work for all viral strains, requires a boo$ter and is linked to 56 US girls’ deaths as of September, according to the CDC.

Foradil Aerolizer, Serevent Diskus, Advair and Symbicort

Unlike drugs that look safe in trials and develop “safety signals” postmarketing, the long-acting beta agonists (LABA), salmeterol and formoterol, found in many asthma drugs, never looked safe. Studies link them to an increase in asthma deaths, especially in African-Americans and children. They may have contributed to 5,000 deaths said Dr. David Graham at FDA hearings about the controversial asthma drugs.

Singulair and Accolate, Leukotriene Receptor Antagonists

Leukotriene receptor antagonists also never looked safe. Original FDA reviewers said asthma control “deteriorates” on Singulair and it may not be safe in children. Last month, Fox TV reported Singulair, Merck’s top selling drug, is suspected of producing aggression, hostility, irritability, anxiety, hallucinations and night-terrors in kids, symptoms that are being diagnosed as ADHD. It is huckstered to parents by the trusted educational service Scholastic, Inc. and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

During an earlier episode, she gunned down a docile, unresisting female caribou with six shots, two rifles and help from her dad, recounts Maureen Dowd, also in the New York Times. “The poor caribou in the Arctic Circle, a cousin to Santa’s reindeer, had to die so Palin could show off her toughness to voters,” writes Dowd.

Of course, Palin’s point, that “if you want to have wild, organic, healthy food you’re gonna go out there and hunt yourself,” is sanctimonious and privileged.

“Does Palin really think the average housewife in Ohio who can’t pay her bills is going to load up on ammo, board two different planes, camp out for two nights with a film crew and shoot a caribou so she can feed her family organic food?” asks Dowd.

It is also wrong.

Lead and wildlife diseases including the Mad Cow-like Chronic Wasting Disease make eating the caribou less safe than other meat, not more.

Department of Natural Resources officials increasingly warn against lead in hunted meat, some barely detectable, leading some food pantries to refuse donations altogether. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention detected “fatal degenerative neurologic illnesses in men who participated in wild game feasts,” who all died, in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly report.

But do-it-yourself-slaughter to prove you’re not squeamish or in denial about where your meal came from, is increasingly popular in warmer climes too, often coached by gourmet chefs and foodies.

Last month, New York Times City Critic, Ariel Kaminer, describes her decision to take the life of a turkey, “a beautiful bird, a Bourbon Red turkey whose rich brown feathers were flecked with white,” at the Islamic slaughterhouse Madani Halal, in Ozone Park, Queens.

Imran Uddin, who helped hold the knife, “pronounced, ‘Bismillah Allahu Akbar,’ Arabic for ‘In the name of Allah the great,’” recounts Kaminer. “Then, in one swift movement, we cut her throat. The bird’s body went slack, and her head — still attached — sank slowly into the blood-lined tray beneath. After a few moments, she roused again for a quick bout of flapping.”

Earlier this year, the New York Times‘ Christine Muhlke witnessed the first use of a mobile slaughterhouse in Stamford, NY. Even though she describes herself as a “meat hipster who serves pickled pigs’ tongues,” Muhlke registers horror at the frenetic “wild thrashing.”

And last year a New York Times article about do-it-yourself slaughter recounts University of Illinois student, Jake Lahne, observing: “Animals do not want to die.They can feel pain and fear, and, just like us, will struggle to breathe for even one single more second. If you’re about to run 250 volts through a pig, do not look it in the eyes. It is not going to absolve you.”

Killing your own meat could spare the animal the horrors of factory farming, inhumane transport, and the disassembly line on the killing floor.

But while it is more honest than letting someone else do it, the act is also not just about you.

“Enlightened carnivorousness,” — being okay with the deaths — is irrelevant to the pain of animal, notes Pete Singer, the father of the animal rights movement, also in the New York Times.

While Palin delights in the fact that liberals “get all wee-wee’d up” about her baby shower, held at a shooting range, and her teenage daughter gutting salmon, is it really about liberal squeamishness?

Squeamishness implies necessary evils like giving blood, drawing blood, cleaning up noxious fluids or even euthanasia — not voluntary and unnecessary cruelty.

After all, people could overcome squeamishness at watching a stoning too.

It also used to govern pharmaceutical conflicts of interest policies at hospitals, universities, medical schools and scientific journals about doctors’ and researchers’ financial links.

But pharma-related conflicts of interest (COI) at Harvard and other universities, medical journals, professional groups and at the FDA itself have ushered in a kind of disclosure fever. In addition to the Physician Payment Sunshine Act which requires drug and device makers to report physician payments yearly, medical schools are starting to reject industry money that traditionally funded Continuing Medical Education (CMEs).

And it’s about time.

This week, the New York Times‘ Duff Wilson reports Alan Schatzberg, MD, former president of the American Psychiatric Association and Charles Nemeroff, MD, chairman of psychiatry at the University of Miami medical school, wrote an entire textbook funded and directed by drug giant GSK called Recognition and Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders. In May, the duo sat side by side, beaming, at the APA’s annual meeting in New Orleans, as they signed another book they co-wrote, Textbook of Psychopharmacology, even as the meeting’s daily newspaper reported Schatzberg’s links to Eli Lilly, GSK, Merck, Pfizer, Forest, Takeda, Sanofi-Aventis and eight other companies.

Both psychiatrists were investigated by Congress and stripped of National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants. But in June, Nemeroff colleague Thomas Insel, MD, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), assured University of Miami officials Nemeroff could still pull federal grant money, according to the Chronicle of Higher Learning.

The pediatric depression expert, Joan Luby, MD was heavily quoted  in the New York Times magazine’s August article “Can Preschoolders be Depressed?” despite her undisclosed ties to AstraZeneca and other pharma companies. In the March Archives of General Psychiatry she writes that she didn’t previously disclose ties “because they were not relevant to the subject of the article.”

And Harvard’s, Paul Ridker, MD who put everyday use of statins for people with no heart disease on the map is co-patent holder/inventor of the C-reactive protein (CRP) test which “proves” Crestor’s effectiveness. He apologized to JAMA readers in 2006 for an incomplete financial disclosure for an article about cardiovascular clinical trials. He thought he only had to report funding for the “study at hand” and had omitted mentioning funding from AstraZeneca, Bayer, Novartis, Roche, Sanofi-Aventis and five other pharmaceutical companies.

Only a few years ago, top medical journals ran Why Our Drug Is Best studies written unabashedly by manufacturers. (And 12 years ago the top advertised drugs were Trovan, and Meridia, now withdrawn and Singulair and Evista, heavily restricted.) Then, ghostwriting took over — with pharma getting doctors to “author” pre-written content — and almost none of it was retracted after Congressional investigations.

Now journals comply with conflicts of interest but still have a few tricks up their sleeve.

1) Omnibus disclosure. All of a study’s authors are listed with all the pharma links in one block of solid type. Who goes with whom? You’ll never know — but the author with no links sure isn’t happy about shared guilt.

2) Initials. “R.L.T. has consulted for Merck” is set in 8 point type at the end of the article. Will readers return to the study’s start, five pages ago where there are eight authors, four with first names that begin with R?

3) Disclosures You Have To Work For. COIs of CME faculty are often given online but the information is tucked away in a pull-down, scroll menu. It is user-unfriendly like the drug side-effects found on the scrolling ads on the same site.

4) One Disclosure is Enough. When a previous article is cited in journal letters sections, the author disclosures are said to “be found with the original article.” Surely you have that issue, published four months ago, on your desk.

5) Protective Coloring. Disclosures of drug company links are embedded between government grants and charitable foundations. Government grants and charitable foundations are not conflicts of interest — though some say taking government money along with industry should be.

6) Paying Customers Only. 20 million citations of medical literature appear on the US National Library of Medicine web site. Many have author’s institutions and email. But do the abstracts show COIs? Not unless you’re a paid subscriber. Password, please.

7) Paying Customers Only…Even When You Are Reading A Hard Copy. In hard copies of the August 5 New England Journal of Medicine, the disclosures of authors of “Suicide-Related Events in Patients Treated with Antiepileptic Drugs” are absent and said to be found with the “full text” of the article at NEJM.org.

When we asked Karen Pedersen Buckley, NEJM manager of media relations, why disclosure information about doctors who challenge an 2008 FDA warning¹ were not available in the journal’s hard copy, she said the web site was being redesigned. “We hope that many of our readers will have access to the full text and disclosure forms through an institutional subscription at their hospital, university or library,” she added.

And for those who don’t? Trust us.

1. FDA warned about seizure drugs’ suicide side effects. The authors largely find the drugs safe.