A few months ago, I read a book on BARD called "Bottle of Lies" which
described, in detail, what this article is talking about. The problem is
that some of our name brand drugs are also being manufactured in India.
Miriam
Big Pharma Is Literally Poisoning Us
A. / Flickr
Big Pharma spends a small fortune every year buying politicians to make sure
we can't import prescription drugs from Canada, but they're more than happy
to sell us contaminated medications from countries with weak manufacturing
controls and exploitable labor that ensure high profit margins.
A toxic compound that doesn't belong anywhere near medicine known as NDMA
was first discovered in some blood pressure medications in 2018, and the FDA
issued an alert and wrote a complaint letter to the raw materials supplier
to Big Pharma companies. It turns out the meds follow the very common
pattern of being made in India with raw ingredients coming from China. And
they are sold by big companies for obscenely high prices to U.S. consumers.
More recently, NDMA contamination provoked a nationwide recall of the
popular anti-heartburn medication Zantac and all its generic versions.
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And now the world's most widely prescribed drug of all, which is used to
treat and prevent Type 2 diabetes called metformin, is contaminated with
NDMA.
NDMA (N-Nitrosodimethylamine) is, according to the World Health
Organization, produced by "the degradation of dimethylhydrazine (a component
of rocket fuel) as well as from several other industrial processes. It is
also a contaminant of certain pesticides."
And it's one of the world's most potent carcinogens, at least for humans and
other mammals. Our livers produce an enzyme that converts it to
methyldiazonium that then leads to O6-methylguanine, both of which alter a
process at the cellular level called methylation that is a cancer
turbocharger.
Because it's such a potent biological agent, NDMA is also extremely
poisonous; a Chinese medical student put a few drops in his roommate's water
and killed him. Ditto for a Canadian grad student, who injected it into a
colleague's apple pie.
It's so poisonous that the FDA has set the "acceptable" amount for human
daily intake at 96 nanograms, or 0.000096 of 1 milligram (a single grain of
salt is about a milligram). In some of the generic brands of the blood
pressure medication, just one tablet was found to have NDMA levels almost 20
times higher than the "acceptable" 96 nanograms, and nearly all were drugs
that are taken daily.
Once it gets into groundwater, NDMA is wicked hard to get out, as citizens
of numerous California cities found out in the late 1990s. Its "miscibility"
(rapid solubility) with water is extreme, meaning that a few drops of it
rapidly spreads through miles of underground aquifers or other water
supplies in a matter of hours or days at most. Because of this, it's nearly
impossible to isolate the contamination once it happens, the only solution
then being radical and expensive water treatment everywhere in the aquafer,
principally using ultraviolet light.
Ever since 1987 when Congress and the Reagan administration cut a corrupt
deal with Big Pharma to ban the retail import of pharmaceuticals into the
U.S., Democrats have pushed to allow Americans to get their prescription
drugs from other countries when they're too expensive here (which is nearly
always the case; we pay about twice as much for drugs as any other country
in the world).
In 2000, Congress passed a law to allow imported retail drugs, but the
Clinton administration, heavily funded by the health care industry, killed
it administratively.
Nonetheless, progressive Democrats have pushed for years for the elimination
of the ban. I first met Bernie Sanders when I lived in Montpelier, Vermont,
around the turn of the century and he was organizing busloads of Vermont
seniors to travel the two hours to Montreal to fill their prescriptions.
And now, in another popular policy position "borrowed" from progressive
Democrats (who have also opposed neoliberal trade deals for decades), the
Trump administration is talking about letting American consumers buy drugs
from Canada or overseas.
The downside of this is that generic drugs sold in Canada are just as likely
to be made in India and China, and thus just as contaminated, as drugs sold
here. The upside is that because Canadian drugs will be cheaper, some of us
can afford to buy the name-brand versions made in Germany, Switzerland or
Ireland and sold in Canada, and not worry about getting cancer from NDMA in
our generic drugs. (Yes, I mean this sarcastically.)
There was a time when virtually all drugs sold in the U.S. were manufactured
here, including generics, or in Switzerland and Germany. Congress passed a
special tax break for American drug manufacturers who'd move their factories
to Puerto Rico, and for decades that was the hub of U.S. drug manufacturing.
But in past decades neoliberalism has won out, and only a fraction of the
pharma facilities in and around San Juan remain in operation.
Trump ran on the traditionally Democratic and progressive position of
bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., a project that progressive senators
including Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders have worked on their entire
modern political careers.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent
Media Institute.
