Look Ma, they're trying to kill us

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Note: forwarded message attached.

Look Ma, they're trying to kill us

Tatum, Wilbert A.. New York Amsterdam News. New York, N.Y.: Mar 3-Mar 9, 2005.Vol.96, Iss. 10; pg. 12

Copyright New York Amsterdam News Mar 3-Mar 9, 2005Take two aspirin and call me tomorrow morning. Take two aspirin and get a good night's sleep and call me tomorrow morning.

People I know have been taking this advice from physicians for longer than I can remember, and usually they were much better by tomorrow morning. It's not so much that way anymore. There is aspirin alright, but aspirin with a lot more juice. It seems that people are dying due to the aspirin-like doses that they have been either led to take by their physician or have taken themselves out of pure habit.

The truth is that a lot more people are living. The truth also is that a lot more people are dying too. Someone or something is to blame of course. And the good-old Americans forced us to believe that something is wrong somewhere, that putting all this stuff in the drugstore will kill us, calling it aspirin, painkiller or medicine derived from something that will kill pain.

We have often wondered how it is that you can take a pain killer and the pain subsides, the pain goes away completely. Hence, whatever you take kills you. The pain lessens because you die. It's a solution, but we do not think it's a very good one.

Death is the ultimate solution but I don't think we're quite ready for that step yet, considering how young we are. Most of us would rather wait awhile. The truth is that too many people are dying from taking into their bodies things that shouldn't be taken into their bodies in the first place. The people in the federal government who are supposed to be serving in an oversight capacity are allowing medicine to slip through the cracks without sufficient testing. That has happened for a long time of course, but it seems especially important that those in charge take a better look and take their time in the testing process so that so many of us will not have to feel the sting of death, in order to give us relief from a headache we endured a few minutes earlier.

Looking at reports from pharmaceutical companies, drug companies and the like, it is staggering the amount of money that can be made for companies that develop little white pills or green pills or gray pills. We're not quite sure where they were discovered and developed in the laboratories of these companies who are bought for a dime or two from researchers who just wanted a little money and peace and quiet while they allowed the drug companies to go through a process they knew to be difficult--pushing a discovery through a process of legalization that may take one to 10 years.

How wonderful it would be if the discovery could be approved by the Federal Drug Administration, peer reviews, trials and the like, in a matter of weeks or months, but the world isn't that way.

What we know is there has to be a better way than the way we're using now. Most of us have refrigerators crammed with prescription drugs, not to mention over-the-counter drugs that we stopped using long ago. Yet, these drugs hang around our houses, in our refrigerators and in our bedside drawers for ages until they are thrown out when we die or when one of our grandchildren or children find these pretty little pills and decide they would be nifty things to take, with, of course, death ensuing. Should we have suggestions on what should be done? The answer is yes. Although most of us are not lawyers, scientists, researchers or teachers, we know that something is wrong and something must be done about it.

We do not seem to have enough influence on the people who run our government to make them come with some of the answers. They seem to be so caught up in the personal money that they can make from favorable considerations from drug companies that they have forgotten their obligation to people. There are ways in which the people can stop government cold. When people believe they have been ill-advised, mistreated and screwed, they can take things into their own hands and rid the nation of the people and the things that offend.

We are speaking of something rather radical here. First there must be a decision from people that they and theirs are being murdered by a handful of greedy people who have so influenced committees of government that they are participating in the murder of all of us. We must not allow ourselves to be hustled into the idea that a new drug is only killing 2 to 10 people in a study of a thousand and find that acceptable. That is what goes on now. In other studies, it's 50 of 500 who die. And the comeback is, "Only 50 died out of 500. That's pretty good."

The answer is that it is not good. It is very bad. And people have to do something about it even if they have to shut down the drug companies and adjust just as department stores were shut down during the Civil Rights Movement. People must understand that life is too precious for it to be compromised because some two-bit politician says to a drug manufacturer that he'll make sure that the guys who voted for the passage of a particular drug law or substance get a dime or a quarter on the dollar for having done so, no matter what the consequences. There are those who would suggest that this kind of progress we're talking about these days with so many new drugs coming on line would stop the march on progress. But they also promote the march of death until monies are allocated to young scientists working for government who have the time and the talent to develop a new breed of medicines based primarily on substances found in nature that will serve as replacements for the chemicals that we are now ingesting into our bodies and calling them medicines.

Do not believe for one moment that government will do this of their own volition. Do not believe for one moment that drug companies would accept an idea of their making less money over less time, and then not getting a new drug to market on their timetable, or should it be put another way. on their CARE table. The sickest thing that one can watch is a civil suit in which drug manufacturers are called to account for having rushed a drug to market or having sent a drug to market that had not been sufficiently tested and the excuse they have to offer all ends with the idea: "We didn't tell these people to take this medicine, their doctors did."

The drug manufacturers forget to tell you: they paid the doctors to tell you what they told you and thus, you die. We have reached a point in this civilization where people are going to have to take the ball into their own hands again. What must be done must occur all over simultaneously and angrily, using a slogan made popular in a movie about television a quarter century ago: "I am mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."

These people are killing us. If we were allowed in a polite society to just suggest to people to go after these folks with guns, we would. But we don't know who to go after.

Therefore it's a much more civilized process beginning at the grassroots, where a mother gets a medicine for her baby and her baby dies because he or she took the medicine. Or an aging grandmother, aunt or uncle takes the medicine that was supposed to make them think more quickly but that winds up killing them more quickly than quick. Or a mother who seeks relief from menstrual cramps winds up with cancer.

There is no question that there has to be research; there has to be truth from the people we trust; there must be honesty from the people we elect; and there must be patience on our part to bear the pain just a little longer until we're sure from testing that the drugs we're taking will cure rather than kill.

There are no magic bullets except those that people may have to use to take out the drug manufacturers, the doctors and their hucksters.

Anyone want Americans to have to live like that? We don't think so.

Article copyright The Amsterdam News.