Big Tobacco and Big Pharma: same tactics, different chemicals

Have you ever thought about the similarities between pharmaceutical and tobacco companies? They’re striking. Both sell products that kill people when used as directed. The statistics are readily available for pharmaceuticals, which kill around 100,000 Americans each year according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Big Tobacco, which makes tobacco products that are partly responsible for hundreds of thousands of cases of cancer in the United States each year. These are the facts from industry. Industry critics (such as myself) would argue that those numbers are actually much higher.

But let’s look at other similarities. Aside from marketing products that actually kill people when used as directed, both industries are engaged in the blatant distortion of scientific evidence in order to mislead regulators and the public.

With Big Tobacco we saw the suppression of studies that said nicotine was addictive, or of studies linking the inhalation of tobacco smoke to lung cancer. In the pharmaceutical industry, we see even worse distortions of clinical studies. We see studies that are designed to minimize the appearance of negative risks associated with these drugs, such as heart attacks, stroke, mental disorders, suicide attempts, and violent behavior. Even after studies are completed, the results are highly distorted as well. Drug companies pick and choose which studies they want to publish. They may do twelve different studies on a particular drug, and if six of them say the drug is safe and effective, while the other six studies say the drug is dangerous and useless from a medicinal point of view, they pick the six they want and bury the others. They forward the six they want to the FDA. The FDA looks at those six and says, “This sure is scientific!”, and they approve that drug application. I’m not making this up.

In the late 1990’s, drug advertising appeared on television. That is, of course, another similarity between Big Tobacco and Big Pharma: they both use direct-to-consumer advertising to create demand for their products. For many years, tobacco companies sponsored sporting events; in fact, they still attempt to sponsor many sporting events. In the pharmaceutical industry, we see heavy magazine and television advertising, and hundreds of millions of dollars spent lobbying doctors, buying them gifts, trips (to Hawaii, believe it or not), air tickets, and stays in luxurious resorts. All doctors have to do is show up, sign in, and act like they’re attending a continuing medical education course. They then can leave for the entire day, and go on the beach, go fishing, go surfing, LuckyStrike, and do whatever they want. It’s an all-expenses-paid vacation.

Some people say, “No, that’s ridiculous. That doesn’t happen.” I’ve actually been in Hawaii, talking to doctors who were attending such an event. I saw the entire room of about four hundred MD’s, and these people just signed in, then they left to go surfing with me! So I know how the system works, I’ve seen it firsthand. All the doctors out there who might be listening to this, you know how it works too. A lot of these continuing medical education courses are really just a joke.

The Big Lie of the pharmaceutical industry

It’s a big lie that you can cure cancer or diabetes by coming up with the right chemical, or that you can even cure depression by altering brain chemistry with the right chemical. This is a big lie. It’s as if medical science has gone down the wrong pathway for so long that they can’t even see the fact that they’re lost. They’re lost in the forest, and they can’t even see the trees. All they can do is continue to try to come up with more and more chemicals they think are treating these diseases.

They think the only reason they haven’t cured cancer yet is because they don’t have enough money, that it’s just a money problem. “Give us more money and in a couple more years, and we’ll have cancer cured.” That’s been the promise they’ve held out for decades. The reason they think they can cure these diseases if they just have enough money and enough time is because conventional medicine remains stuck in the paradigm of germ theory. And the germ theory says that every disease is based on an organism or an invading element, whether it is a virus or bacteria, and if you just have the right chemical compound, then you can cure that infectious disease.

Of course, this was quite valid in the day of penicillin, and it’s still valid today for basic, simple infections. But the germ theory does not apply to chronic, degenerative diseases such as cancer, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease, arthritis, diabetes, cardiovascular heart disease, Crohn’s disease, clinical depression, inflammatory diseases, and so on.

Chemical-based medicine is a Newtonian view of health

That model of germ theory simply does not apply today. It doesn’t mean that germ theory is false, but these chronic degenerative diseases exist in a different realm. For example, regarding physics and the laws of motion, Newtonian physics operate on a large scale; it talks about the interaction between the motion of objects and gravity and momentum. That is a very valid realm of physics and science. And it creates predictable observations and outcomes that match the mathematics. But when you go into quantum mechanics, or when you get to the subatomic level, the rules begin to change. You’re now dealing with quantum physics. Quantum physics disagrees with Newtonian physics. But it doesn’t mean that quantum physics is wrong, or that Newtonian physics is wrong, it’s only that it’s applied in a different context. The same is true with medicine.

We still have the old germ theory, which I equate to Newtonian physics, trying to be applied to today’s epidemic diseases, which shouldn’t even be called diseases, because invading microorganisms do not cause them. They are created as a result of many different inputs, or causes that the patient undergoes, or those which the patient chooses to engage in. To call them diseases is really not accurate. Therefore, the idea that you can cure or reverse these fictitious diseases is invalid at its very premise.