How a Pain Reliever Killed as Many Americans in 3 Years as the Vietnam War Killed in 12
🔴 WATCH THE FULL EPISODE: https://ept.ms/49rAGggShow more “American medicine is on steroids,” says drug policy researcher Alan Cassels, co-author of “Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients.”
America is one of only two countries that allow direct-to-consumer drug advertising, which works in two ways: it exposes millions of Americans to constant disease mongering, and it makes mainstream media heavily reliant upon pharma ad dollars. This then affects editorial decisions in the newsroom, he says.
And this explains why few Americans know the story of the pain reliever drug Vioxx, Cassels says. Show less
It's a very, we live in a very commercial culture.
Public health, for the most part, I mean, in terms of where compared to other countries, the U.S. has a system which is very fractured.
It's very private.
And you allow certain things in the U.S. that you don't allow in other countries.
And one example is drug advertising.
So you see if you're exposed to television or possibly the internet, there are a lot of drug ads.
And a lot of times these drugs are for very rare and sometimes unheard of conditions.
And the powerful effect of a drug ad on consumers, it works in two ways.
One is that there's the suggestion that a person might be ill and could benefit from a treatment.
The pharmaceutical industry would defend that and say, oh, we're just doing disease awareness advertising.
Okay, well, sure.
Grant, that might be helpful for some people, but generally you're increasing the pool of people who are exposed to disease mongering.
There's that happening.
But at the same time, when you allow that amount of pharmaceutical advertising to influence the media, you find that the media does not really, they cannot do the kind of hard-hitting journalism that you want to see because of the influence of the advertisers.
And people would say, well, what do you mean?
Major journals like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, they get drug ads, but also they have critiques.
Critiques.
Yeah.
I would say that if you had no drug advertising or no influence of the pharmaceutical industry on the editorial decisions of any news outlet, you would see a whole different range of reporting.
Look what happened during COVID.
Virtually those who were dissidents or those scientists who were questioning a lot of the public health measures, including vaccines, were censored, not allowed to give their opinions in a lot of the mainstream medical or mainstream media organizations.
And so the influence of the drug advertising in the U.S. is quite pernicious, not only in disease mongering, but also in influencing editorial decisions around what kind of critiques Americans get.
So I did this little experiment with friends of mine a few months ago.
I went to a reunion of a bunch of old Navy buddies, right?
So these are guys, we're in our 60s, successful businessmen.
Some are doctors, some are lawyers, businessmen, and so on.
And I asked them, I think in a small group, because they asked me, what do you do for a living?
I said, did you guys ever heard of the term Vioxx?
And they said, well, what's that?
What's that?
I said, Viox.
I said, have you ever heard of the Vietnam War?
Oh, yeah, of course you've heard of the Vietnam.
Everyone's heard of the Vietnam War.
Well, did you know that Vioxx, which was a major pharmaceutical in the early 2000s that was taken by hundreds of thousands of Americans, killed 60,000 Americans in three years from excess heart attacks and strokes.
The Vietnam War took 12 years of American involvement to kill about 60,000 Americans.
So Vioxx did in three years what took the Viet Cong 12 years in terms of killing Americans.
And what was so astonishing about this is that this was probably the most, the biggest drug disaster probably in our lifetime.