Free Articles on Freedom Plaza
by Kieron McFadden
A glimpse at the financial relationship between groups such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the drug makers gives us a clue as to how the psycho-pharmaceutical axis achieves a kind of mind control over governments and has even the White House dancing to its tune.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is one of the United States’ most influential disease advocacy groups. Congressional investigators have discovered that a majority of the donations made to the NAMI come from drug manufacturers.
NAMI is not unique in its enrichment by psycho-pharmacy money, far from it, but it serves as an example by which we can see how the psycho-pharmaceutical axis buys undue influence over other groups, including governments and media.
The purpose of the manufacturers of psychiatric drugs is to sell psychiatric drugs and part and parcel of selling a drug is to convince all and sundry that they need them. The assiduousness and indeed ruthlessness with which the drug corporations pursue that agendum is well documented. Indeed, their success in working hand in glove with psychiatry to convince the population to pop a pill at every opportunity has effectively herded the culture into a mire of drug dependency from which it may not recover. It is a great tragedy that the products being pushed off on the rest of us, drugs, do such devastating harm.
This is no more epitomized than by revelations that drug companies may be designing their drugs to be addictive. Certainly the addictiveness of a drug enables more to be sold and greater long-term profits to be made.
One would have thought that advocacy of mental health would include real efforts to get people off drugs or steer them away from them, considering the damage they do to physical and mental health, yet NAMI has long been criticized for coordinating its lobbying efforts with drug makers and for pushing legislation that benefits the drugs industry.
There is little if any campaigning, for instance, to address known causes of the difficulties labelled "mental illness," such as poor nutrition, to take one key example. Almost any nutritional deficiency can produce depression and the list of physical illnesses that can have depression as a symptom is a very long one. Yet the handling of the underlying medical condition is rarely, if ever, promoted by the psycho-pharmacy.
There is no profit, let’s face it, for the drugs makers in advocating proper nutrition or making someone truly well. The poor patient is then drugged instead, setting in train complications with ill health, brain damage, addiction and so forth. Those complications are of course profitable for the psycho-pharmacy.
As part of his investigation into the drugs industry’s influence on the practice of medicine, Senator Charles E. Grassley (Republican Iowa) last spring sent letters to the NAMI and about a dozen similar organizations, enquiring about their connections to drug makers.
The NAMI, which exerts considerable influence in many state capitols, has refused for years to disclose specifics of its fund-raising, claiming the details were private. However, investigators in Mr. Grassley’s office and The New York Times were able to expose the fact that from 2006 to 2008 drug makers contributed nearly $23 million to NAMI, which is a staggering three quarters of all its donations.
This is an excessive level of donations from a vested interest private-profit corporation whose objective is to sell as many drugs as possible. It is difficult to see how an organization such as NAMI, which would be four times poorer without this stream of drug company money, would not be influenced by it and one cannot imagine the drugs companies would part with so many millions if they were not receiving, in their perception, their money’s worth.
Even the NAMI’s executive director, Michael Fitzpatrick, admitted in an interview that the drug companies’ donations were excessive and that things would change.
"For at least three years of ’07, ’08 and ’09, the percentage of money from pharma has been higher than we have wanted it to be," he said and promised that the industry’s share of the NAMI’s fund-raising would drop "significantly" next year. What "significantly" means exactly is unclear and remains to be seen.
"I understand that NAMI gets painted as being in the pockets of pharmaceutical companies, and somehow that all we care about is pharmaceuticals," Mr. Fitzpatrick said, recognizing the legitimate concerns of many. "It’s simply not true."
That might be more believable were NAMI to see fit to extricate itself from the failed pycho-pharma model, which has brought in train untold ill-health and rapidly increasing "mental illness" (after all if psycho-pharmacy interventions worked, the billions spent on them should be producing a decline in mental health problems not an increase). From this writer’s perspective at least, NAMI appears for the time being to be hopelessly entangled with the psycho-pharma marketing drive.
Mr. Fitzpatrick described Mr. Grassley’s scrutiny as understandable, given the potential conflicts of interest, and this had prompted NAMI to begin posting on its web site the names of companies that donate $5,000 or more.
In a statement, Mr. Grassley said: "It’d be good for the system for other patient groups to do what NAMI has done," he said.
Patient and disease advocacy groups are often filled with sincere people who are either afflicted with serious mental and emotional difficulties themselves or have family members who have been affected. Many people join such groups in the hope of understanding their misfortune, finding a solution or in some way helping others. Drug makers can appear to them to be natural allies in these endeavors since they find themselves in a culture shaped by the psychiatric-pharmaceutical axis from the fabrication of made-up "diseases" to the relentless drugging touted as "cures" to the marginalization or exclusion of solutions that might jeopardize pharmaceutical profits, such as safe, nutrition-based cures and understandings.
Such advocacy groups, if they can be gotten and kept onboard the drug makers’ wagon, unwittingly become their proxies in the drive to engineer change in a direction favorable to their marketing agenda, as indeed do many politicians and media entities under similar inducements.
The drugs industry’s money helps finance public service campaigns and fund-raising dinners but this can have an insidious effect in turning patient organizations unwittingly into little more than front groups lobbying on issues that affect drugs industry profits and psychiatric influence. Drug makers are not, after all, going to flow large sums of money at organizations who do not help their agenda.
Few have been more scrutinized for their drugs industry ties than the NAMI, which has, for example, fought for years the states’ legislative efforts to limit doctors’ freedom to prescribe drugs, no matter how expensive, for patients under government health care programs like Medicaid, obliging states to provide the most expensive drugs for their poorest patients.
By way of another example, the close ties between the NAMI and the drugs makers were glaringly evident when NAMI held its annual gala in Washington. Tickets were $300 each and before the sumptuous dinner the president of the NAMI’s board thanked the pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb:
"For the past five years, Bristol-Myers has sponsored this dinner at the highest level," he said and then introduced the chief of neuroscience research at Bristol-Myers, who told the audience that "now, more than ever, our enduring relationship with NAMI must remain strong."
Documents obtained by The New York Times reveal that along with millions of dollars in donations, drug makers have over the years given the NAMI direct advice about how to advocate forcefully for issues that affect drugs industry profits, including urging NAMI to "play hard ball" to resist state efforts to limit access to mental health drugs.
What happens here is that drug company money enables them to tilt the mental health playing field in favour of psycho-pharmaceutical "explanations" and "cures" for mental illnesses at the exclusion of other more workable, safe and less expensive paradigms.
Steeped in the psycho-pharmacy culture, boosted and empowered by drug company money and obligated to those who make it available, groups like NAMI cannot help but dance to the psycho-pharmacy tune.
It is time to level the playing field and quell the power of the drugs giants to dominate the market place not on their ability to affect cures but on their ability to buy influence.
NAMI is not unique in its enrichment by psycho-pharmacy money, far from it, but it serves as an example by which we can see how the psycho-pharmaceutical axis buys undue influence over other groups, including governments and media.
The purpose of the manufacturers of psychiatric drugs is to sell psychiatric drugs and part and parcel of selling a drug is to convince all and sundry that they need them. The assiduousness and indeed ruthlessness with which the drug corporations pursue that agendum is well documented. Indeed, their success in working hand in glove with psychiatry to convince the population to pop a pill at every opportunity has effectively herded the culture into a mire of drug dependency from which it may not recover. It is a great tragedy that the products being pushed off on the rest of us, drugs, do such devastating harm.
This is no more epitomized than by revelations that drug companies may be designing their drugs to be addictive. Certainly the addictiveness of a drug enables more to be sold and greater long-term profits to be made.
One would have thought that advocacy of mental health would include real efforts to get people off drugs or steer them away from them, considering the damage they do to physical and mental health, yet NAMI has long been criticized for coordinating its lobbying efforts with drug makers and for pushing legislation that benefits the drugs industry.
There is little if any campaigning, for instance, to address known causes of the difficulties labelled "mental illness," such as poor nutrition, to take one key example. Almost any nutritional deficiency can produce depression and the list of physical illnesses that can have depression as a symptom is a very long one. Yet the handling of the underlying medical condition is rarely, if ever, promoted by the psycho-pharmacy.
There is no profit, let’s face it, for the drugs makers in advocating proper nutrition or making someone truly well. The poor patient is then drugged instead, setting in train complications with ill health, brain damage, addiction and so forth. Those complications are of course profitable for the psycho-pharmacy.
As part of his investigation into the drugs industry’s influence on the practice of medicine, Senator Charles E. Grassley (Republican Iowa) last spring sent letters to the NAMI and about a dozen similar organizations, enquiring about their connections to drug makers.
The NAMI, which exerts considerable influence in many state capitols, has refused for years to disclose specifics of its fund-raising, claiming the details were private. However, investigators in Mr. Grassley’s office and The New York Times were able to expose the fact that from 2006 to 2008 drug makers contributed nearly $23 million to NAMI, which is a staggering three quarters of all its donations.
This is an excessive level of donations from a vested interest private-profit corporation whose objective is to sell as many drugs as possible. It is difficult to see how an organization such as NAMI, which would be four times poorer without this stream of drug company money, would not be influenced by it and one cannot imagine the drugs companies would part with so many millions if they were not receiving, in their perception, their money’s worth.
Even the NAMI’s executive director, Michael Fitzpatrick, admitted in an interview that the drug companies’ donations were excessive and that things would change.
"For at least three years of ’07, ’08 and ’09, the percentage of money from pharma has been higher than we have wanted it to be," he said and promised that the industry’s share of the NAMI’s fund-raising would drop "significantly" next year. What "significantly" means exactly is unclear and remains to be seen.
"I understand that NAMI gets painted as being in the pockets of pharmaceutical companies, and somehow that all we care about is pharmaceuticals," Mr. Fitzpatrick said, recognizing the legitimate concerns of many. "It’s simply not true."
That might be more believable were NAMI to see fit to extricate itself from the failed pycho-pharma model, which has brought in train untold ill-health and rapidly increasing "mental illness" (after all if psycho-pharmacy interventions worked, the billions spent on them should be producing a decline in mental health problems not an increase). From this writer’s perspective at least, NAMI appears for the time being to be hopelessly entangled with the psycho-pharma marketing drive.
Mr. Fitzpatrick described Mr. Grassley’s scrutiny as understandable, given the potential conflicts of interest, and this had prompted NAMI to begin posting on its web site the names of companies that donate $5,000 or more.
In a statement, Mr. Grassley said: "It’d be good for the system for other patient groups to do what NAMI has done," he said.
Patient and disease advocacy groups are often filled with sincere people who are either afflicted with serious mental and emotional difficulties themselves or have family members who have been affected. Many people join such groups in the hope of understanding their misfortune, finding a solution or in some way helping others. Drug makers can appear to them to be natural allies in these endeavors since they find themselves in a culture shaped by the psychiatric-pharmaceutical axis from the fabrication of made-up "diseases" to the relentless drugging touted as "cures" to the marginalization or exclusion of solutions that might jeopardize pharmaceutical profits, such as safe, nutrition-based cures and understandings.
Such advocacy groups, if they can be gotten and kept onboard the drug makers’ wagon, unwittingly become their proxies in the drive to engineer change in a direction favorable to their marketing agenda, as indeed do many politicians and media entities under similar inducements.
The drugs industry’s money helps finance public service campaigns and fund-raising dinners but this can have an insidious effect in turning patient organizations unwittingly into little more than front groups lobbying on issues that affect drugs industry profits and psychiatric influence. Drug makers are not, after all, going to flow large sums of money at organizations who do not help their agenda.
Few have been more scrutinized for their drugs industry ties than the NAMI, which has, for example, fought for years the states’ legislative efforts to limit doctors’ freedom to prescribe drugs, no matter how expensive, for patients under government health care programs like Medicaid, obliging states to provide the most expensive drugs for their poorest patients.
By way of another example, the close ties between the NAMI and the drugs makers were glaringly evident when NAMI held its annual gala in Washington. Tickets were $300 each and before the sumptuous dinner the president of the NAMI’s board thanked the pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb:
"For the past five years, Bristol-Myers has sponsored this dinner at the highest level," he said and then introduced the chief of neuroscience research at Bristol-Myers, who told the audience that "now, more than ever, our enduring relationship with NAMI must remain strong."
Documents obtained by The New York Times reveal that along with millions of dollars in donations, drug makers have over the years given the NAMI direct advice about how to advocate forcefully for issues that affect drugs industry profits, including urging NAMI to "play hard ball" to resist state efforts to limit access to mental health drugs.
What happens here is that drug company money enables them to tilt the mental health playing field in favour of psycho-pharmaceutical "explanations" and "cures" for mental illnesses at the exclusion of other more workable, safe and less expensive paradigms.
Steeped in the psycho-pharmacy culture, boosted and empowered by drug company money and obligated to those who make it available, groups like NAMI cannot help but dance to the psycho-pharmacy tune.
It is time to level the playing field and quell the power of the drugs giants to dominate the market place not on their ability to affect cures but on their ability to buy influence.
