Comments on the John le Carre article In Place of Nations by Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD (4/2/01)

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
Herein, I have reproduced excerpts of famed novelist, John le Carre’s In
Place of Nations, an essay appearing in The Nation of April 9, 2001
(page 11). My comments appear within.]

  le Carre:

  "BIG PHARMA (the multinational pharmaceutical world), as it is known,
  offered everything: the hopes and dreams we have of it; its vast, partly
  realized potential for good; and it’s pitch-dark underside, sustained by
  huge wealth, pathological secrecy, corruption and greed."

  "And of all these crimes of unbridled capitalism, it seemed to me, as I
  began to cast round for a story to illustrate this argument in my most
  recent novel, that the pharmaceutical industry offered me the most
  eloquent example."

  "Do I hear you offering the drug companies’ time-worn excuse that they
  need to make huge profits on one drug in order to finance the research
  and development of others?  Then kindly tell me, please, how come they
  spend twice as much on marketing as they do on research and
  development."

  "But Big Pharma is also engaged in the deliberate seduction of the
  medical profession, country by country, worldwide.  It is spending a
  fortune on influencing, hiring and purchasing academic judgment to a
  point where, in a few years’ time, if Big Pharma continues unchecked on
  it present happy path, unbought medical opinion will be hard to find."

  "And consider what happens to supposedly impartial academic medical
  research when giant pharmaceutical companies donate whole biotech
  buildings and endow professorships at universities and teaching
  hospitals where their products are tested and developed.  There has been
  a steady flow of alarming cases in recent years where inconvenient
  scientific finding have been suppressed or rewritten, and those
  responsible for them hounded off their campuses with their professional
  and personal reputations systematically trashed by the machinations of
  public relations agencies in the pay of the pharmas.

  The last bastion, you might hope, would be the "objective" scientific
  journals.  …The New England Journal of Medicine, America’s most
  prestigious, recently confessed to its chagrin that some of its
  contributors have turned out to have had undeclared connections with the
  pharmaceutical industry.  As to the less august journals, who have
  neither the clout nor the resources to check on the hidden interest of
  their contributors, man have become little more than shop window for
  pharmas peddling their wares."

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
le Carre, in my opinion, vastly understates the degradation of US
medical academia and it’s medical/scientific journals. They rush to
serve their pharm paymasters who write, not just the ads, but pivotal
articles as well. I doubt their is a psychiatric drug trial (virtually
all paid for by Big Pharm), the outcome of which, is not foreordained.
Only extraordinarily lethal drugs, I suspect, are ruled out by the joint
industry-FDA process. While the corruption of psychiatry is complete,
all (specialty) departments within medical academia are critically
influenced, if not owned and operated, by Big Pharm. Consider that by
design, all psychiatric disorders are referred to as ‘diseases’ due to
‘chemical imbalances of the brain’ when not one of them actually is.
All others in the house of medical academia know of this sham, but speak
not a word of it. In fact, most, like neurology, pediatrics and family
practice, co-opt ‘mental health’ diagnosis and treatment into their
practices, diagnosing the same illusory ‘diseases.’

William Carey of the University of Pennsylvania, spoke of such things at
the November 16-18, 1998, National Institutes of Health Consensus
Conference on so-called Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder –ADHD:
“What is now most often described as ADHD in the United States appears
to be a set of normal behavioral variations… This discrepancy leaves the
validity of the construct in doubt…”

Having as much as said ADHD was an invention, Carey observed: “ADHD
behaviors are assumed to be largely or entirely due to abnormal brain
function.” The DSM-IV does not say so, but textbooks and journals do.”

While Carey errs in exonerating the DSM-IV of claims that ADHD is a
‘brain disease’ due to ‘abnormal brain function,’ he is correct
observing that the textbooks and journals of the day call it just that,
without benefit of scientific proof. They have orchestrated a scam for
the joint benefit of Big Pharm and for all physicians choosing to add
‘mental health’ to their practices.

Later in the conference, Carey issued the plea: ” … we see…that the
causes of these behaviors called ADHD are entirely speculative. And yet…
parents and children are being told that these behaviors are due to a
brain malfunction. Can you not please strengthen the statement to
discourage practitioners from making this statement when there is not
adequate proof to support that at this time?”

Physicians go to medical school to learn what diseases are and how to
tell them from normal. They know there is no demonstrable abnormality
and that in diagnosing such things that they are making ‘patients’/
‘clients’ of normal children and adults.

Without the immensely successful, invented disease, ADHD,
Ciba-Geigy/Novatis and the rest of Big Pharma would have nothing for
which to prescribe Ritalin, Dexedrine, Adderall, Concerta, etc., and the
rest of the dangerous, addictive, psychostimulants. Despite the white
coats they sport—even Big Pharm researchers–you have to get cynical to
imagine how low they will stoop to to turn a buck. Not a single
psychiatric/psychologic/mental illness is an actual disease and yet all
of them, without exception are represented to the public as ‘brain
diseases’ due to ‘chemical imbalances of the brain’ needing ‘chemical
balancers’—pills. And who makes the pills. And yet it is the
‘messenger,’ every time, who gets shot. People can’t bring themselves
to believe that Big Pharm and doctors everywhere, including medical
academia—would be conspirators in such a scam.

As for the laws that mandate such diagnosing, making a failure to treat,
parental negect—they come direct from the Congress, Senate and even the
White House, paid for by—you guessed it—Big Pharma!

  le Carre:

  "George W. Bush came to power on the back of a lot of very
  greedy people, not least Big Pharma, which poured  millions into his
  campaign, more than twice the sums it gave the Democrats…Clinton, by the
  end of his second term, had started to resist Big Pharma’s  draconian
  Washington lobby and was even timidly advocating the release of generic
  AIDS drugs to people who were dying by the million for want of them.
  But a huge court case, brought by Big Pharma in South Africa and now
  imminent, proposes to entrench patent law at any price.  The price of
  course, is the lives of millions of the Third World’s citizens. … Do
  governments run countries anymore? …But that wishful dream (‘…to take on
  the world’s real enemies: starvation, plague, poverty, ecological
  devastation, despotism and colonialism by all its other names.’)
  supposed that enlightened nations spoke as enlightened nations, not as
  the hired mouthpieces of multibillion-dollar multinational corporations
  that view the exploitation of the world sick and dying as a sacred duty
  to their shareholders."

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
Do you doubt any longer that they would invent ‘brain diseases’/
‘chemical imbalances’ for no reason other than to have something for
which to prescribe their ‘chemical balancers’—their pills. Do you doubt
they would make it illegal to resist treating your child for such
‘diseases’ or that they would take your children and make them wards of
psychiatry to assure—not that they get a proper education, not that they
get fed, not that they are properly disciplined, but to assure that they
get their ‘chemical balancers’ every day, without fail. And all foster
children and all of those in juvenile hall and all prisoners, too, awash
in ‘chemical imbalances of their brains’ get court-ordered ‘chemical
balancers’ too. And others, with other ‘diseases’(more invented by the
month) will get their court-ordered depot injections that last from
month to month or their court-ordered ECT, their electric ‘jump start,’
to re-align their ‘chemical imbalances,’ none of them—not a single
one—validated by science. Big Pharm is all around us—wherever there is
government. Didn’t Adolph start like this?

I am just back from Minnesota where I spoke to their legislature of Big
Pharma and of their fraudulent psychiatric ‘diseases.’ While there I
was asked to review the records of a child whose ‘treatment’ for ADHD
began at three and a half years of age. His only real diseases were
concurrent intoxications caused by the 2-4 psychiatric drugs he was on
every day of his life until he was found dead of cardiac arrest one day
after his 8th birthday. He was in an iatrogenic, drug-induced fog most
of his tragic, short life.

5-6 million of our children have been confiscated to ‘treat’ their
ADHD. We have been invaded and it has not been by China.