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Alternet
Dara Colwell
March 27, 2009

While Uncle Sam's scramble for new revenue sources has recently kicked up the marijuana debate -- to legalize and tax, or not? -- hemp's feasibility as a stimulus plan has received less airtime.

But with a North American market that exceeds $300 million in annual retail sales and continued rising demand, industrial hemp could generate thousands of sustainable new jobs, helping America to get back on track.

"We're in the midst of a dark economic transition, but I believe hemp is an important facet and has tremendous economic potential," says Patrick Goggin, a board member on the California Council for Vote Hemp, the nation's leading industrial hemp-farming advocacy group. "Economically and environmentally, industrial hemp is an important part of the sustainability pie."

With 25,000 known applications from paper, clothing and food products -- which, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal this January, is the fastest growing new food category in North America -- to construction and automotive materials, hemp could be just the crop to jump-start America's green economy.

Washington Post
Shankar Vedantam
March 18, 2009

The study would come to be called "cursed," but it started out just as Study 15.

It was a long-term trial of the antipsychotic drug Seroquel. The common wisdom in psychiatric circles was that newer drugs were far better than older drugs, but Study 15's results suggested otherwise.

As a result, newly unearthed documents show, Study 15 suffered the same fate as many industry-sponsored trials that yield data drugmakers don't like: It got buried. It took eight years before a taxpayer-funded study rediscovered what Study 15 had found -- and raised serious concerns about an entire new class of expensive drugs.

Study 15 was silenced in 1997, the same year Seroquel was approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat schizophrenia. The drug went on to be prescribed to hundreds of thousands of patients around the world and has earned billions for London-based AstraZeneca International-- including nearly $12 billion in the past three years.

Crimes against humanity and nature have been committed and hidden on the back pages of newspapers around the world. The Monsanto Corporation, with the help of corporation-friendly judiciaries around the world, has been systematically aiming for complete agricultural hegemony through abusive litigation, aggressive lobbying and questionable patent law interpretation.

In case you don't know who Monsanto is, they were founded in 1901 and helped introduce caffeine into Coca-Cola. Not too bad for the average college student, but their major spring board into becoming one of the top 10 chemical producers in the United States was the manufacture of DDT, which was a major cause in endangering the bald eagle, and Agent Orange, which was used in Vietnam and whose effects on both American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians are so notorious.

Monsanto is listed as being a "potentially responsible party" for 56 EPA "Superfund" sites, where there is a high risk of danger to human life due to toxic waste contamination, and that's just in the United States alone.

WDDTY
12 March 2009

A large consignment of seasonal flu vaccine, which was due to be circulated to 18 European countries, has been infected with deadly live avian flu virus. Had the contamination not been detected, the vaccines may have started an avian flu pandemic, killing hundreds of thousands of people.

The World Health Organization is carrying out investigations at the Austrian research facility of Baxter International, the pharmaceutical company, where the contamination happened. Baxter has confirmed that the consignment contained live H5N1 virus, which causes avian flu.

A researcher in the Czech Republic discovered the lethal contamination when laboratory ferrets that he had injected with the H3N2 flu vaccine suddenly died. The H5N1 virus becomes lethal as an injection only when it is mixed with H3N2, a process known as reassortment.

The WHO investigation team says it doesn’t have evidence to suggest that Baxter had deliberately reassorted the two viruses, but “what remains unanswered are the circumstances surrounding the incident in the Baxter facility,” a WHO official said.

NewsWithViews.com
By Byron J. Richards, CCN
March 6, 2009

In a stunning and unexpected 6-3 ruling the right-leaning Supreme Court went against the wishes of the last president, took the wind out of the sails of health care reform of the current president, sent irresponsible Big Pharma a major wake up call, and bluntly told the arrogant FDA that they are indeed not above the rule of law. It is a major victory for every American citizen.

Central to the issue is a power struggle between the federal government and states, which in this situation meant the federal government authority to pre-empt your state rights to sue if you are injured by a drug. The FDA, acting on behalf of the Bush administration and on the side of Big Pharma, has helped tie up thousands of drug injury lawsuits across the country. The FDA, who is supposed to be protecting consumers from drug injury and ensuring a correct risk/safety picture for any person taking a drug, was instead trying to shirk their responsibility and simply claim that Americans had no right to sue.

The New York Times
By GARDINER HARRIS
March 4, 2009

WASHINGTON — Federal health officials and prosecutors, frustrated that they have been unable to stop illegal kickbacks to doctors from drug and device companies, are investigating doctors who take money for using these products.

For years, prosecutors rarely pursued doctors because they believed that juries would sympathize with respected clinicians. But within a few months, officials plan to file civil and criminal charges against a number of surgeons who they say demanded profitable consulting agreements from device makers in exchange for using their products.

“What we need to do is make examples of a couple of doctors so that their colleagues see that this isn’t worth it,” said Lewis Morris, chief counsel to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. “We want to send the message to the physician community — particularly surgeons — that you can’t do this.”

The move against doctors is part of a diverse campaign to curb industry marketing tactics that enrich doctors but increase health care costs and sometimes endanger patients. Taken together, the new measures are likely to transform the relationship between medicine and industry.

By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet
February 28, 2009

Pfizer is planting fake medical articles and issuing unbranded "PSAs" to push pills? Again? Say it ain't so.

Even as new reports surface about alleged fake medical articles Pfizer planted to sell seizure drug Neurontin for unapproved uses from 1995 to 2002, it looks like deja vu all over again.

Pfizer gave nonprofits $2.1 million in grants in 2008 for medical courses about the pain-and-fatigue ailment fibromyalgia for which its Neurontin follow-up pill, Lyrica, just happens to be approved.

Lyrica (pregablin), facetiously called Son of Neurontin at Pfizer, was discovered by Northwestern University chemist Richard Silverman in 1989, earning the university a cool $700 million when it sold royalties in late 2007.

It is funding the $100 million Richard and Barbara Silverman Hall for Molecular Therapeutics & Diagnostics, under construction now, which will employ 245 faculty, staff and research assistants and hopefully lead to other promising molecules.

Like Neurontin (gabapentin), Lyrica (Pregablin) is an antiepilepsy drug (AED) that modulates calcium channels to dampen the excitability of nerve endings and seizure activity. And, like Neurontin which made $3 billion a year from unapproved uses like bipolar disorder, attention deficit disorder and restless legs syndrome, Pfizer has high hopes for its "crossover appeal."

AlterNet
By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet
February 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/127393/

Many are outraged that Eli Lilly gave nonprofits $3.9 million in grants last year for medical courses to "educate" doctors about the pain-and-fatigue ailment fibromyalgia--more than it spent for diabetes and Alzheimer's which people already know they have.

But finding new diseases to justify a drug's existence is the normal way pharma operates.

Especially Lilly who agreed to pay $1.42 billion for illegal marketing of its anti-psychotic Zyprexa last month--$615 million for criminally promoting it for dementia--another $62 million to 32 states for illegal pediatric marketing and agreed to resolve Medicaid fraud investigations into "rebates" at the same time. (And how was your year?)

And whose diabetes treatment Byetta is tanking since reports last summer of six deaths, at least two from pancreatitis.

Planet Chiropractic News
June 9, 2008
By Michael Dorausch, DC

Call it a psycho conflict of interest affecting the health and lives of thousands of children, an Iowa senator has discovered 3 Harvard researchers earned millions of dollars in consulting fees from drug companies, for performing research and evangelizing antipsychotic drug use in children.

Charles Ernest "Chuck" Grassley, a senior United States Senator from Iowa, launched a congressional investigation to determine whether research psychiatrists were receiving drug money payments and failing to disclose that information to the federal government and university departments.

According to congressional investigators, researchers failed to report millions of dollars in income earned while consulting for various drug companies. According to news reports, these were well-known child psychiatrists practicing research out of Harvard University. Among the research doctors were psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Biederman, of the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School. Investigators believe the three psychiatrists may have violated federal rules created to vet out potential conflicts of interest in pharmaceutical research, some of which is financed by government grants.

AlterNet
By Scott Thill
February 14, 2008

The media pounced on his admitted love of weed and coke but did little to investigate the prescription drugs that did him in.

"This would have never happened with weed."

I made that declaration for back in May 2007, when Oxycontin maker Purdue Pharma pled guilty to criminal charges of misleading customers about the lethality of their product, promising to pay $600-plus million and be real good people going forward. But with the accidental overdose of Heath Ledger, the first sentence of this article is proving to be a tag line with serious staying power.

Last year was the latest in a series of banner years for Oxycontin, which kicked heroin and cocaine to the metaphorical curb to become one of the most popularly abused substances of the 21st century. Of course, it has been joined by painkillers like Vicodin, sleeping pills like Restoril, anti-anxiety poppers like Valium and Xanax, and even antihistamines like Unisom, all of which were found in Ledger's system during his autopsy. The official verdict, sent in written form by medical examiner spokeswoman Ellen Borakove, avoided marketing buzzwords in favor of designations more scientific, which is to say obscure: "Mr. Heath Ledger died as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine. We have concluded that the manner of death is accident, resulting from the abuse of prescription medications."

What's in a name, you ask? Oblivion. Wait until you hear the numbers.

OpEdNews
January 23, 2008
By F. William Engdahl
Global Research
December 4, 2007

One thing Microsoft founder Bill Gates can't be accused of is sloth. He was already programming at 14, founded Microsoft at age 20 while still a student at Harvard. By 1995 he had been listed by Forbes as the world's richest man from being the largest shareholder in his Microsoft, a company which his relentless drive built into a de facto monopoly in software systems for personal computers.

In 2006 when most people in such a situation might think of retiring to a quiet Pacific island, Bill Gates decided to devote his energies to his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest 'transparent' private foundation as it says, with a whopping $34.6 billion endowment and a legal necessity to spend $1.5 billion a year on charitable projects around the world to maintain its tax free charitable status. A gift from friend and business associate, mega-investor Warren Buffett in 2006, of some $30 billion worth of shares in Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway put the Gates' foundation into the league where it spends almost the amount of the entire annual budget of the United Nations' World Health Organization.

Global Research
December 4, 2007
By F. William Engdahl

One thing Microsoft founder Bill Gates can’t be accused of is sloth. He was already programming at 14, founded Microsoft at age 20 while still a student at Harvard. By 1995 he had been listed by Forbes as the world’s richest man from being the largest shareholder in his Microsoft, a company which his relentless drive built into a de facto monopoly in software systems for personal computers.

By Byron J. Richards, CCN
April 5, 2007
NewsWithViews.com

Americans are up in arms that our pets are being injured and killed by a toxin sent to America by a Chinese company. Melamine, a toxic fertilizer used in China, is the suspected culprit behind the deaths and injuries to potentially hundreds of thousands of our pets. The FDA assures us that this toxin has not entered the human food supply – does anyone believe in the competence of the FDA? It is only a matter of time before this type of problem happens to humans, as the inept FDA has no control over imported food intended for humans, let alone pets.

Melamine was used to help grow wheat, a practice that is legal in China and illegal in the U.S. This poison ended up in wheat gluten used as a protein source and thickening agent in pet food. Why were all these pet food companies, many claiming to be producers of fine quality pet food, buying wheat gluten from China when the U.S. is one of the top producers of wheat in the world? These companies sacrificed the health of your pet to make a profit, buying the cheapest source of wheat gluten they could find. This is the new way of the global economy, find the cheapest price and forget about health implications.

NewsTarget.com
April 4 2006
By Mike Adams

This is an article about the disease economy. That's a term I coined because I could find no other existing term to describe what I'm observing in our economy today. I call it the disease economy because such a huge percentage of the economic activity and economic growth I see in this country is based on the manufacturing, marketing and selling of products and services based on disease. That is, products and services that either cause diseases or "treat" those diseases.

A Justice of the peace in the southern Italian town Lecce has decided that the Italian Central Bank's practice to retain the seignorage on paper money for its own profit is illegal and that the money should be turned over to its rightful owners - the citizens of Italy. The amount in question is a total of 5 billion Euro for Italian Lira paper-money issued in the time period from 1996 to 2003. After 2003, the issue of paper money became part of the European Central Bank's mandate. Seignorage is the difference between the cost of producing banknotes and the nominal value of the notes.

The legal case was sustained by the Italian consumers association ADUSBEF, which deals especially with consumer implications of banking, financial and postal services as well as insurances. Elio Lannutti, the president of the association says that while the case is for one individual only, it opens a way for restitution of all the money illegally put into its own coffers by the Italian Central Bank, which is owned by Italian commercial banks. Lannutti says "we would like the money to go to the victims of financial cracks" adding that the government fund for that purpose is woefully lacking behind.

Drug Companies Wooing GOP Pols at RNC
Wednesday September 1, 2004 11:46 AM
By SHARON THEIMER
Associated Press Writer
Source: The Guardian

NEW YORK (AP) - The pharmaceutical industry, fighting to defeat proposals that would give U.S. patients easier access to cheaper Canadian drugs, is making the most of its chance for face time with lawmakers at the GOP convention.

Drug companies are well-represented on the social calendar in New York with events large and small.

They include an afternoon tea with New York state first lady Libby Pataki, sponsored by AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals; a nomination-night party for top members of President Bush's re-election team, co-sponsored by Bristol-Myers Squibb; and a breast-cancer awareness luncheon funded by Novartis Pharmaceuticals.

Pfizer is one of the most active drug makers. Its events include a supper for the Colorado delegation at Tavern on the Green and an evening reception at the landmark Rainbow Room in honor of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

What are the Main Problems with the Present Money System?

Richard Douthwaite
18th January 2003
Source: Global Public Media

Most people don't realize that we are using a particular sort of money at the moment. We are using a debt-based money. That is, virtually all free money that is used in industrialized countries at the moment only exists because somebody has borrowed it. So, for example, if you have paid off all your debts, you don't owe anything on your house or your car, you don't owe anything to the bank and you've got a positive bank balance, then you have money because someone somewhere has borrowed that money and he's paying interest on it.

The Italian Daily La Repubblica carried an article on 17 December which announces an officially sanctioned experiment with a local currency - the Eco-Aspromonte - intended to lift the economic fortunes of one of the most economically depressed areas of the Italian South, the Aspromonte region.

Usury-free community currencies have been the subject of discussion of the recent International Seminar About Financial Responsibilities and UsuryFree Community Currencies at the University of Quebec in Montreal.

We may need to expand upon this idea, if we ever are to restore balance in this world's economics.

Here is an English translation of the article:

Our current monetary system is deeply inequitable, leaving the producers of value with crumbs, while a large part of what is produced is automatically transferred to those who happen to have accumulated great piles of monetary resources.

Tommy-Usury: Free reports from the ongoing International Seminar About Financial Responsibilities and UsuryFree Community Currencies at UQAM, the University of Quebec in Montreal.

22 November 2003
In the first interim report, Tommy says Bernard Lietaer presented the concept of complementary community currencies. Litaer's prediction: "Orthodox economics will fight complementary community currencies just like conventional medicine fights the introduction of acupuncture and other alternative healing methods."

27 November 2003
A second interim report on the presentation of Molly Scott, Professor at the University of Wales, who relates of experiments with local currencies, designed to liven up the economies of villages that suffered from the closure of coal mines - their former principal source of income and economic activity.

28 November 2003
The third interim report relates the talk of Michael Linton, the software engineer who designed the original usuryfree LETS (Local Employment Trading System) software in the early 1980's. Tommy also adds his own thoughts on how to expand the local employment trading system into an internet-based world wide exchange of "hours", the currency LETS are based on.