Americans drowning in prescription drugs
Saturday, September 04, 2010
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)



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(NaturalNews) Nearly half of all Americans now use prescription drugs on a regular basis according to a CDC report that was just released (1). Nearly a third of Americans use two or more drugs, and more than one in ten use five or more prescription drugs regularly.

The report also revealed that one in five children are being regularly given prescription drugs, and nine out of ten seniors are on drugs.

All these drugs came at a cost of over $234 billion in 2008. The most commonly-used drugs were:

• Statin drugs for older people
• Asthma drugs for children
• Antidepressants for middle-aged people
• Amphetamine stimulants for children

America has become a nation of druggies. The seniors are being drugged for nearly every symptom a doctor can find, children are being doped up with (legalized) speed, and middle-aged soccer moms are popping suicide pills (antidepressants).

Prescription drug addictions are on the rise, too. Prescription drugs are so dangerous that now even the DEA is hosting "take back your pills" day allowing citizens to anonymously surrender their unused prescription painkillers to DEA agents. (http://www.herald-dispatch.com/news...)

Interestingly, DEA agents will only accept "legal" amphetamine drugs such as Ritalin but not "illegal" methamphetamine drugs. You're only off the hook if you paid monopoly prescription prices for your drugs.

And it's only going to get worse
The percentage of Americans taking prescription drugs is expected to rise even further as the health reform insurance regulations kick in. Much of the bill was specifically designed to favor pharmaceutical industry interests by putting even more people on medication. Expect to see more "screening" too -- a thinly disguised drug recruitment method that primarily seeks to ensnare new patients in a high-profit drug regimen.

The mass medication of American citizens has reached a disturbing tipping point where the future of the nation itself is at risk. That's because pharmaceuticals cause cognitive decline, and once you get to the point where over 50 percent of the voters can't think straight, you're trapped in a crumbling Democracy.

And that doesn't even take into consideration the financial cost of America's addiction to drugs: With nearly one out of every five dollars out of the entire U.S. economy now being spent on sickness and disease, America finds herself stuck in a cycle of high-cost drug treatments that cure no one.

That's right: No one gets healthier from taking prescription drugs. They don't cure anyone and they don't prevent disease. They only maintain patients in a kind of "pre-death stasis" where they're alive just enough to keep buying more medication. Drug companies don't want you dead because that would cut off their profits. But they don't want you healthy, either, because then they wouldn't have you as a customer. So their drugs are actually designed to keep you in a state of ongoing disease without curing your condition but also without killing you outright.

You sort of chemically limp along, shelling out dollars while your memory fades and your skin starts to show signs of severe toxicity. Big Pharma is not merely sapping the life out of you; it's also draining you financially.

Isn't it obvious that pharmaceuticals don't work?
If pharmaceuticals really worked to make people healthy, then the half of America currently taking pharmaceuticals would be the healthiest half, and the people who don't take pharmaceuticals would be unhealthy, right?

But in fact it's the other way around: People who take pharmaceuticals remain unhealthy and really never get cured of anything. Meanwhile, those who avoid taking pharmaceuticals are, by and large, far healthier individuals.

If America were running a grand experiment to determine whether pharmaceuticals really work -- and trust me, the country really is running precisely that experiment -- any reasonable observer would have to conclude that pharmaceuticals really don't improve the health of those who take them. The more pharmaceuticals you take, in fact, the sicker you will become. That's because drugs cause an imbalance in the body that soon leads to the emergence of other side effects.

At the same time, many of the drugs people take actually cause the very things they claim to prevent. Osteoporosis drugs cause hip fractures. Cancer drugs cause cancer. Antidepressants cause suicidal thoughts. The list goes on and on.

The people who are really, truly healthy in America are those who avoid pharmaceuticals. (http://www.naturalnews.com/028789_p...) They take care of their own health through regular exercise, time in nature, sensible sunshine exposure and healthy eating. They distrust the pharmaceutical industry and they don't let television advertising hypnotize them into making poor decisions like getting a flu shot (http://www.naturalnews.com/029641_v...).

Yet even though it is blatantly obvious that pharmaceuticals really don't work to improve the health of any population, the drug industry insists the only thing wrong with America's health is that not enough people are taking medication!

If we could only get 100% of the population on drugs instead of 50%, they seem to be saying, then we'd all be healthy!

The logic is absurd, of course. And that goal has nothing to do with actual health but everything to do with increasing drug company profits. While drug companies may not know much at all about health, they do know one thing: How to commit marketing fraud by making outrageous benefit claims for their drugs while whitewashing the very real dangerous side effects.

Big Pharma will bankrupt America
Mark my words: Big Pharma will bankrupt America. And quite possibly the UK as well. Any nation that hands over its health care system to the drug industry is committing financial suicide.

That's because Big Pharma absolutely will not halt its single-minded mission to extract as much money as possible from the population, corporations and governments. It will do anything and everything it can to accomplish this goal: Bribe researchers to commit research fraud, engage in false and fraudulent marketing, lie to the public, hide negative study results, conduct experiments on children in third-world countries, pollute the planet with drug factory runoff, influence legislators with campaign finance contributions, dominate the pages of medical journals with false and misleading advertising, submit "scientific" articles to the journals ghost-written by the drug companies themselves... this list never ends.

Drug companies will knowingly keep dangerous drugs on the market that kill tens of thousands of people. They will knowingly withhold research from the FDA if it might make their drugs look bad. They will knowingly distort clinical trial data to eliminate whatever outcome they don't want to see.

This is all "routine" in the drug industry. These aren't exceptions, mind you: They are the way the drug industry operates on a daily basis.

The worst part of it is that Big Government is now fully in bed with Big Pharma. I already exposed Sen Harry Reid's efforts to swing a sweet deal for Big Pharma in the recent health care reforms (http://www.naturalnews.com/029450_H...). The FDA's collusion with drug companies, meanwhile, is legendary: There is hardly a decision made by the FDA that doesn't in some way protect drug company profits.

The med schools and science journals have been overrun by drug company influence. Drug companies are so large and powerful now that the U.S. government considers them "too big to nail." When Pfizer was recently found guilty of felony crimes, the government allowed it to create a shell company to take the hit so that Pfizer itself could remain in business and keep selling drugs to the government. (http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/0...)

A federal prosecutor actually went on the record saying, "If we prosecute Pfizer... a lot of people who work for the company who haven't engaged in criminal activity would get hurt."

Therefore, the logic goes, they have to let Pfizer off the hook.

And so it goes; Big Government protecting the criminals in the drug industry, making excuses for looking the other way when scientific fraud and marketing fraud is routinely being carried out right under their noses. The Dept of Justice isn't even interested in taking down criminal drug companies!

How this will end
So where does this medication madness ever end? It will end, I predict, with the economic downfall of the United States of America. When the nation is too broke, too medicated and too chemically compromised to stay afloat, it will suffer an enormous economic collapse.

Following the financial failure of big government, Big Pharma will implode virtually overnight. Without the government buying its products, Big Pharma will find few willing private customers. Ordinary people will seek out affordable and safer natural remedies, and the drug industry will collapse to perhaps 10% of its current size.

This will be a great day for the health of all Americans who have suffered under the chemical assault of Big Pharma. To live without the daily onslaught of Big Pharma's chemicals is to live a healthier life with improved brain function and awareness. Once people get off all their drugs, we might have hope to thoughtfully rebuild a nation based on nutrition rather than monopoly-priced medications.

I've said this at least a hundred times, and I'll say it again: No nation that ignores the nutritional health of its citizens has any real future. A successful long-term society MUST, at its core, invest in real nutrition and the holistic health education of its citizens. Without good nutrition, every society is ultimately doomed to fail.

Modern medicine, in other words, is destroying our country. And the "cure" for this disease is to throw out what doesn't work (pharmaceuticals) and start embracing the things that do work (nutrition and superfoods) to keep people healthy.

Additional sources:
(1) National Center for Health Statistics: "NCHS Data Brief No. 42, September 2010."