Time to break the prescription drug addiction cycle

Craig Sams offers an alternative perspective on the culture of prescription drug addiction, saying a natural solution could be more effective in treating depression

A conversation took place three years ago between a good friend of mine and her doctor. Her husband had left her and she was extremely depressed. She went to see her doctor.

The doctor gave her a prescription for a very addictive 30mg pill that she would have to take every day for the rest of her life. She would sometimes be more prone to suicidal thoughts and less inhibited about acting on them. If she ever tried to stop taking them because she couldn’t stand the side effects, the doctor would not be able or willing to help. She eventually went cold turkey and now experiences periodic electric shocks in her head; which other people who have given up call ‘the zapps.’ Some people reduce the level of addiction by gradually reducing the dose level from 30mg to 26mg to 24mg to 22mg, right down to 6mg or 4mg, at which point it is much easier to get off. But no drug company provides that means of escape. If you go on the internet, there are some people in Holland who will provide you with reduced dose pills that make it a lot easier and safer to give up, but neither the NHS nor any drug company or doctor will help you with that.

What the doctor could have said: “Go out to a field and select half a dozen psilocybe cubensis mushrooms and eat them. Sit down in a comfortable spot and let them take effect and enjoy the journey. If that doesn’t do the trick completely, repeat after five weeks and you should be fine.”

Of people who take psilocybe just once, 94% experience a dramatic remission of anxiety and depression. The New Scientist recently called on the government to allow mental health researchers to study psilocybin. They do now, but the subjects have to buy it on the black market which invalidates the clinical results. If everybody who was depressed just took a few mushrooms the drug companies would be out of business.

Patrick Holford, the nutritionist, therapist and columnist in NPN, has just released a compelling rap called ‘Big Pharma Man: it’s a grand scam – he don’t give a damn’. It describes the criminality, fines, fraudulent research and cover-ups that have led to millions of lives being ruined by drugs that don’t work and are addictive. Just Google ‘Drug rap Patrick Holford’ and enjoy.

President Trump didn’t get any money from Big Pharma to get elected and so he has dared to say he’ll take action to deal with America’s opioid epidemic, where four out of five heroin addicts started on prescription opiods; drugs that are more addictive, expensive and dangerous than heroin. Meanwhile, Americans will continue to die at a rate of more than 1,000 a week from opioid overdoses. The makers of the drugs keep a database of doctors. Special attention goes to the ones who run ‘pill mills’, dispensing drugs at huge profit for themselves. These are doctors who swore the Hippocratic Oath: first do no harm. Hah! When Purdue, manufacturers of the opiod medication, ended up in court it paid $600 million in fines, and the executives who were found guilty of the criminal charge of selling OxyContin ‘with the intent to defraud or mislead’ paid $35 million. If someone sold $50 worth of heroin they would go to jail for a few years. These pharma guys get off light; the fines are insignificant compared to the billions of dollars they continue to make.

In my view it’s time to legalize all drugs, make them all available on the NHS, then let informed people choose how they want to get well instead of spending lives of misery hooked on drugs that have terrible side effects, which are treated with more drugs that also have terrible side effects. The alternatives are safer and cheaper.

Is it any wonder that I haven’t been to a doctor since 1965? I just say no to prescription drugs.

Dear President Trump

Dear President Trump

Now that you have been elected on a platform of freeing the world from the grip of monopolies, lobbyists, bankers and their ilk I submit herewith my 7 proposals on how you can come good on your promises to make America great again

1.   Make America Healthy Again.  This will save you a fortune on whatever modified form of Obamacare you come up with.  It will upset Big Pharma and the American Medical Association, but so what?  Stop autism by honouring your promise to give people freedom to choose vaccination or not, or do it slowly, like you did with Baron.  Scrap restrictions on alternative therapies and nutrient supplementation and let people engage fully with preventive medicine. “Prevention is better than cure”. 

2.   Legalise all Drugs and Medicines – now more than half of US states allow marijuana use, why not go all the way?  Bayer marketed heroin in the 1900s as the non-addictive alternative to opium.  Now the epidemic of legally prescribed opioid addiction is killing far more Americans than heroin.  2 million Americans are addicted to opioids prescribed through Obamacare and it costs them twice as much money as less addictive heroin.  Let the free market prevail over which painkillers people use.

3.   Make America’s Soils Great Again. Stop the ethanol racket.  It was encouraging to see biofuel shares dropping and staying down after your election.  Why on earth is half of America’s corn crop subsidised and forcibly converted to ethanol to be burned? Our pioneer ancestors plowed the rich fertile soils of the Midwest and trashed them.  You are a builder.  Help America rebuild its soils by stopping the huge waste of resources involved in growing corn and then burning it.  If you took away the subsidies then farmers would diversity and grow real food for real people.  They could grow trees for the new technologies of wood-based architecture.

4.   Get Independent Advice on Climate.  The French proposal of ‘4 per 1000’ says that if you rebuild soil organic matter by 0.04% each year that is enough to completely offset the annual increase in greenhouse gas.  Organic farmers increase soil organic matter by 7 per 1000.  Let the carbon markets pay farmers to rebuild soil for future generations and use farm subsidy money to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure.  You can keep on burning oil and gas and still see greenhouse gas levels drop.

5.   Crush ISIS.  This monster was created by an unholy alliance of the CIA, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to fulfil Hillary’s stated goal of supporting Israel by weakening Iranian influence in Syria. It has backfired. The easiest way to stop ISIS is to stop financing them.  In the debates you were clear that your priority is to stop ISIS, while Hillary prevaricated.  Make sure that no more American money or NATO money goes to fund terrorist organisations.  Let people of the Middle East get back to normal life. The refugees from this meaningless conflict would rather go home.

6.   Make Nice with Russia.  Gorbachev opened the doors to a new era of peaceful relations with the United States but now they’re the enemy again. President Putin has banned GMOs and announced that he plans to make Russia the world’s most organic nation.  He’s no dummy.   Ask him why he’s doing this. We don’t need to create more enemies, best to make friends, as you said in your victory speech.

7.   Make War on Poverty and Decay.  You promised to rebuild America’s infrastructure, its highways, bridges, tunnels, airports and schools.  You have 2 million men and women in the armed forces who aren’t particularly busy making America great.  Put them to work rebuilding infrastructure. That’s what China’s 2.3 million army do.  President Roosevelt created the 3 million-man Civilian Conservation Corps that built America’s dams and highways in the 1930s and planted 10 billion trees that helped restore the Dust Bowl land.  Get the missile and bomb factories to reconfigure to make something that people want instead of picking fights with faraway countries in order to use up their output. Make forests not deserts.

You are the only politician who can give the finger to the lobbyists from the military, pharmaceutical, oil and financial industries who called you a jerk and your supporters ‘morons’ and ‘deplorables.’ They all supported your opponent.   You owe them nothing.  You owe it to the American people to cast off the baleful influence of these parasites and let people freely choose if they want peace, good health, clean air and economic stability.

Just Gimme the Drugs,Man - a critique of Big Pharma

Every now and then I clear my spam filter of missives from American lawyers offering me the opportunity to cash in on a bonanza from a class action lawsuit against one of the big drug companies. Huge amounts of money are being made by suing Big Pharma for peddling drugs that don't work, that they knew didn't work and that have awful life-destroying side effects. Respected scientists and medical researchers are shown to have conspired to distort the results so that patented drugs with few beneficial effects were prescribed to millions of gullible patients who wrongly assumed that they could trust their doctor. Just go to www.legaltube.com/breaking-news-hot-list.aspx for all the latest opportunities to get redress.

I'd love to cash in but I haven't taken a prescription drug in more than 45 years, apart from a handful of aspirin and whatever local anaesthetic my dentist uses to numb my gums. I suppose knowing that the life expectancy of doctors is just 58 years and that they are the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA (225,000 deaths a year) is enough to make me wary. But you can’t blame them for dishing out drugs that are backed by peer-reviewed research and articles in prestigious medical journals.

The EU authorities have approved drugs that are submitted on the basis of obfuscation (not mentioning negative outcomes in trials) and on pure fabrication of data. Research data and methodology are distorted to achieve the desired result or you can just make a false assertion and hope to get away with it. All the evidence, in the EU and the US, is that a lot of drugs get approved that are worthless or dangerous.

There is a show at the Wellcome Museum called High Society. It shows a great 1895 ad in which Bayer heroin and aspirin are advertised side by side - heroin being their ‘heroic’ non-addictive replacement for morphine. Selling drugs can be a nasty business, whether they’re legal or illegal.

WikiLeaks revealed that Pfizer paid $75 million to settle claims in Nigeria over killing 11 children and leaving dozens disabled by trialling Trovan on kids with meningitis. Hernia sufferers who had the Kugel mesh patch ended up with all sorts of horrible bowel injuries. Denture creams can cause zinc poisoning. Drugs for diabetes and acne are linked with worsening rather than restoring health. GlaxoSmithKline paid out £475 million last October including £60 million to the whistleblower who alerted authorities to problems with their antidepressant manufacture. More than 13000 lawsuits have been filed against them over their anti-diabetic drug, Avandia, amid claims that at least 83000 heart attacks by 2007 arose from a drug that was known to cause heart attacks as long ago as 1999.

So what does the EU do to improve its control over these scandalous risks? It collaborates with drug companies to crack down on herbal medicines, Ayurvedic and Chinese Traditional Medicines that have been used with remarkably few if any negative side effects for hundreds of years.

Why not crack down on the drug company CEOs? Fines are not enough. They make a fortune out of selling drugs to state-controlled health services. They can easily take the occasional fine in their stride. If a customer of a dope dealer dies it’s front page news and the evildoer has his money confiscated and goes down for a 5 stretch. Why not chief execs?

The Alliance for Natural Health is doing its best to stop this nonsense. Give them money. Sadly, our own Government has no power in this arena - drugs, like agriculture, are controlled in Brussels by unelected Commissioners (in Russia they used to call them Commissars) who collude with drug companies to make sure that your health is under their control, not yours. Read Big Pharma by Jacky Law for an insider’s view into how the drugs business works.

From time to time I take home-grown drugs: comfrey, nettles, viola, hawthorn, wormwood, fennel, melissa lemon balm, to name just a few illicit or potentially illicit medications that help support my generally reliable good health. I grow them myself in my garden, organically. Soon I may face prison if I don’t cease and desist from what could become criminal activity. To the barricades, comrades!