Category: Soap Box

A frequent topic of discussion that I have with my friend Doug is disgust at businesses whose primary source of income is taking advantage of people who are already at a financial disadvantage and who suffer the most from their profiteering. We both get pretty disgusted at the legalized bottom feeders. In one of the wealthiest countries on the planet these businesses seem designed to keep a fair percentage of the population struggling from one paycheck to the next. No room to breath, no room to grow, no way out.

One example of this is check cashing businesses, especially ones that offer ‘payday advance’ programs that boil down to legalized extortion. The mob never had it this good, and these people don’t even have to break legs! Another one is the ‘reverse mortgage’, where you borrow against the value of your home but don’t have to repay it or make payments until the house is sold. Instead of just earning a fixed interest rate, they also ding you for the full appreciation of the property during the duration of the loan. You’ve essentially sold out any future value increases in your home. It’s just another way to get around the few usery laws still in effect.

So, what brings this up today? A lovely bit in the News of the Weird about a company that thought they would make a fortune out of bottom feeding, and are now trying to pressure a customer out of their agreements. Here is the specific entry from the 2006/04/30 issue of News of the Weird:

A Philadelphia woman who identified herself to reporters as “M. Smith” and who contracted AIDS and cancer more than 15 years ago, said recently that the company Life Partners has been threatening to back out of its contract to pay her health and life insurance premiums. She entered into a “viatical” contract in 1994, signing over her insurance death benefit to Life Partners in exchange for its promise to pay all premiums for her then-expectedly-short life. However, a new generation of drugs has kept her alive, rendering Life Partners quite unhappy with the deal it made. Although the company has not yet reneged on the contract, M. Smith reports that it constantly pressures her to begin paying the increasingly steep premiums herself. [CNN, 4-4-06]

Fifteen years ago AIDS was still mysterious, and the prognosis for someone diagnosed with AIDS was clear and simple: Death. Besides the eventual fatal conclusion of the diesease, people diagnosed with AIDS fifteen years ago often lost their jobs and were otherwise stigmatized due to the media hyped fear of this disease. Life Partners, which should have more honestly chosen the name Vultures Incorporated, was born to ‘come to the rescue’ of people diagnosed with AIDS, and often in financial straits due to poor aceptance of AIDS employees in the workplace, by offering to keep their health insurance paid in return for being made the beneficiary of the patient’s life insurance policy. Life Partners expected a fairly quick and profitable turnaround on their investment. While I am sure that their service did provide comfort to a lot of people who were terrified by the circumstances they found themselves in, their recent attempts to extract themselves from contracts with people who have ‘lived too long’ is what makes them a true bottom feeder.

-Chris

FDA Rejects Marijuana for Medical Uses

On the same day that sfgate.com ran a story on the Psychiatric DSM being largely written by drug company shills, they run a story stating that the FDA has found no medical use for marijuana. The FDA has approved every single drug the PharmCo’s are pushing in the DSM, so I have no problem imagining that politics has once again overridden reason and science. Large PharmCo interests pump a huge amount of money into the FDA approval process, and that amount of effort helps to promote the legitimacy of the FDA process. How can the FDA survive if natural remedies that are not backed by million/billion dollar development investments are acceptd by the public?

I love this… the FDA said, in regards to a number of states that have passed legislation allowing marijuana use for medical purposes: “These measures are inconsistent with efforts to ensure that medications undergo the rigorous scientific scrutiny of the FDA approval process and are proven safe and effective.”

I have a few rebuttles to this: Vioxx, Fen-Phen, Suicidal Antidepressants, Trovan, etc. The FDA is not my shining light of ‘rigorus scientific scrutiny‘ and the FDA process does not seem that effective at making sure drugs ‘are proven safe and effective‘. Profitable, yes; safe? Since when? One word: Thalidomide

Soap box time… I believe that Science is a useful tool. Tools are easily misused though. Our modern approach is to find something good, distill and purify it, and consume it in excess until a problem shows up. Fruit and sugar cane into Diamond Cane Sugar. Willow bark into aspirin. Cocoa leaves into cocaine. Coffee and tea into caffeine pills. These are all natural substances that have been used for thousands of years that in the last century have been subjected to scientific dissection until their active ingredients have been abused.

If you believe in evolution, jump to the next paragraph. OK, the godless heathens jumped ahead and are not reading this part… According to the bible, God created the Heavens and the Earth and everything in between. That means that God created both Man and Marijuana. The interactions between the two are part of The Plan. Who is the FDA to stand between the ill and a God given natural medicine that eases their pain?

Unless you are a fan of the Stokes Monkey Trial, please skip ahead to the next paragraph since this deals with accepting the facts that in front of your face… If life on this Earth evolved to the place where it is now, there have been million of years of selective breeding and survival of the fittest that have resulted in a balanced ecosystem. Life has had an unimaginable amount of time to establish balance. That which does not kill us makes us stronger, or at least kills our pain. If a natural medicine works, it is because we have had millions of years to adapt to it. How can any drug developed in a lab over the past ten years compare to a drug to which we have been adapting for thousands, if not millions, of years? We’ve come a long way scientifically in the past thousand years, but not far enough. Our own biology is a mystery to us, and our lab work in pharmaceuticals is still largely trial and error, with a little luck thrown in for spice.

Alcohol is a poison in large doses, and legal form of entertainment in slightly smaller doses. Nicotine can kill in doses as small as a drop, but can be purchased at every convenience store in the country. Pot makes people giggle, but can land you in jail for years; and I don’t think there is a known toxic dose. Why does the FDA allow poisons to be sold at the grocery store, but limits a natural drug with proven benefits?

The Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, reported that “marijuana’s active components are potentially effective in treating pain, nausea, the anorexia of AIDS wasting and other symptoms, and should be tested rigorously in clinical trials.”

The answer is simple: Money. Is this any surprise in a socio-economic society where Capitalism is the real God? The FDA’s mandate is to protect consumers from products sold with false claims, such as the snake-oil remidies of old. Since when is their mandate to protect us from that which grows in the wild? I guess it is when it puts the PharmCo’s at risk…

-Chris

Psychiatric experts found to have financial links to drugmakers / All who worked with mood and psychotic disorders had such ties

Before I go any further, I just want to state for the record that I think Scientology is a joke. There is an urban legend that Scientology is the result fo a dare between Heinlein and Hubbard; even if it isn’t true it is more plausible than anything in Dianetics. So, Tom Cruise joke in the title aside…

I find it incredible that the over half of the doctors who contribute to the DSM are in the pocket of drug companies. This pretty much destroys the credibility of the DSM, and of any medication therapy recommended within its paid for pages. I found this shocking:

“Cosgrove said she began her research after discovering that five of six panel members studying whether certain premenstrual problems were a psychiatric disorder had ties to Eli Lilly & Co., which was seeking to market Prozac to treat that very problem.”

When you have a problem with your car, do you take it to the mechanic or do you take your problem to a salesman at a car dealership. Who do you think is going to give you a more honest answer? Do you really think the salesman can be objective and free of interest conflicts? Salesmen are not mechanics, governments should not write history books, and corporate shills should not write diagnostic manuals. One doesn’t have to know the history of psychology to see that the writers of the DSM are not beyond reproach or above suspicion. I’m not saying that every psychologist/psychiatrist is corrupt; but when doctors rely on the DSM to keep up to date with recent advances and that information is tainted their treatments will be tainted as well.

“I am not surprised that the key people who participate have these kinds of relationships,” Steven Sharfstein said. “They are the major researchers in the field and are very much on the cutting edge and will have some kind of relationship — but there should be full disclosure.”

While the conflict of interest may not always be directly financial, Steven Sharfstein inadvertently raises the point of another type of interest conflict. If a researcher has dedicated years of work to a specific drug or treatment regime can you be absolutely sure they will be objective when on a panel deciding whether to promote that treatment in the industry bible? It’s not like researchers ever have egos, or get political about promoting their own solution to a problem…

The process of defining such disorders is far from scientific, Cosgrove added: “You would be dismayed at how political the process can be.”

Ah, yes… Let’s trust the future of our brain chemistry to ego tainted researchers who will use politics to promote a treatment. Street drugs are worse than this how?