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Today's
Stories
October
29, 2003
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October
28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane
Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert
Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason
Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris
White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27, 2003
William
A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David
Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine
Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert
Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October
25 / 26, 2003
Robert
Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James
Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher
Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane
Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin
Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn
Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey
Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets'
Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October
24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David
Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry
Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
October
23, 2003
Diane
Christian
Ruthlessness
Kurt Nimmo
Criticizing Zionism
David Lindorff
A General Theory of Theology
Alan Maass
The Future of the Anti-War Movement
William
Blum
Imperial
Indifference
Stew Albert
A Memo
October
22, 2003
Wayne
Madsen
Religious
Insanity Runs Rampant
Ray McGovern
Holding
Leaders Accountable for Lies
Christopher
Brauchli
There's
No Civilizing the Death Penalty
Elaine
Cassel
Legislators
and Women's Bodies
Bill Glahn
RIAA
Watch: the New Morality of Capitalism
Anthony Arnove
An Interview with Tariq Ali
October 21, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Beilin Agreement
Robert Jensen
The Fundamentalist General
David
Lindorff
War Dispatch from the NYT: God is on Our Side!
William S. Lind
Bremer is Deaf to History
Bridget
Gibson
Fatal Vision
Alan Haber
A Human Chain for Peace in Ann Arbor
Peter
Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Hanging of Thomas Russell
October
20, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Chile's
Failed Economy: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Chris
Floyd
Circus Maximus: Arnie, Enron and Bush Maul California
Mark Hand
Democrats Seek to Disappear Chomsky
& Nader
John &
Elaine Mellencamp
Peaceful
World
Elaine
Cassel
God's
General Unmuzzled
October
18 / 19, 2003
Robert
Pollin
Clintonomics:
the Hollow Boom
Gary Leupp
Israel, Syria and Stage Four in the Terror War
Saul Landau
Day of the Gropenfuhrer
Bruce Anderson
The California Recall
John Gershman
Bush in Asia: What a Difference a Decade Makes
Nelson P. Valdes
Bush, Electoral Politics and Cuba's "Illicit Sex Trade"
Kurt Nimmo
Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario
Tom Gorman
Al Franken and Al-Shifa
Brian
Cloughley
Public Propaganda and the Iraq War
Joanne Mariner
A New Way to Kill Tigers
Denise
Low
The Cancer of Sprawl
Mickey Z.
The Reverend of Doom
John Chuckman
US Missiles for Israeli Nukes?
George Naggiar
A Veto of Public Diplomacy
Alison
Weir
Death Threats in Berkeley
Benjamin Dangl
Bolivian Govt. Falling Apart
Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Bob Dylan
Fidel Castro
A Review of Garcia Marquez's Memoir
Adam Engel
I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert, Guthrie and Greeder
October
17, 2003
Stan Goff
Piss
On My Leg: Perception Control and the Stage Management of War
Newton
Garver
Bolivia
in Turmoil
Standard
Schaefer
Grocery Unions Under Attack
Ben Terrall
The Ordeal of the Lockheed 52
Ron Jacobs
First Syria, Then Iran
David
Lindorff
Michael
Moore Proclaims Mumia Guilty
October
16, 2003
Marjorie
Cohn
Bush
Gunning for Regime Change in Cuba
Gary Leupp
"Getting Better" in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
The US Press and Israel: Brand Loyalty and the Absence of Remorse
Rush Limbaugh
The 10 Most Overrated Athletes of All Time
Lenni
Brenner
I
Didn't Meet Huey Newton. He Met Me
Website of the Day
Time Tested Books
October
15, 2003
Sunil
Sharma / Josh Frank
The
General and the Governor: Two Measures of American Desperation
Forrest
Hylton
Dispatch
from the Bolivian War: "Like Animals They Kill Us"
Brian
Cloughley
Those
Phony Letters: How Bush Uses GIs to Spread Propaganda About Iraq
Ahmad
Faruqui
Lessons
of the October War
Uri Avnery
Three
Days as a Living Shield
Website
of the Day
Rank and File: the New Unity Partnership Document
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
October 14, 2003
Eric Ridenour
Qibya
& Sharon: Anniversary of a Massacre
Elaine
Cassel
The
Disgrace That is Guantanamo
Robert
Jensen
What the "Fighting Sioux" Tells Us About White People
David Lindorff
Talking Turkey About Iraq
Patrick
Cockburn
US Troops Bulldoze Crops
VIPS
One Person Can Make a Difference
Toni Solo
The CAFTA Thumbscrews
Peter
Linebaugh
"Remember
Orr!"
Website
of the Day
BRIDGES
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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October
29, 2003
Let Them Eat Prozac
An
Interview with David Healy
By RICK GIOMBETTI
The past fifteen years has witnessed a major comeback
for the marketing of new psychiatric drugs. There is almost no
end to the therapeutic claims that have been made regarding these
drugs, with the most popular among them, especially Prozac, obtaining
a cult like status similar to that of LSD before it. A dark side
lurks behind the multi-billion advertising campaigns and doctor
endorsements for the newer psychiatric drugs. A dark side which
includes inconvenient facts that have been known all along, such
as the fact that patients who take the newer psychiatric drugs
are more likely to kill themselves than if they hadn't taken
the drugs in the first place. Or that placebo, a.k.a. sugar pills,
have performed as well or better than the newer antidepressant
drugs in clinical trials.
David Healy's new book Let Them Eat
Prozac attempts to put into the public domain these and many
other inconvenient facts about the marketing of the Selective
Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) class of antidepressant drugs,
namely, Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, et al. Drawing from his career
as both an academic and practicing psychiatrist, and as an expert
witness in lawsuits against the pharmaceutical industry, Let
Them Eat Prozac traces Healy's development from a pharmaceutical
industry consultant to independent critic of the industry, culminating
in the withdrawal of
a job offer from the University of Toronto and subsequent
breech of contract lawsuit after delivering a public lecture.
Let Them Eat Prozac should be of interest to anybody wanting
to learn more about a history most people in the United States
and beyond know little or nothing about. It should also be of
special to interest to anybody planning to attend the upcoming
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) hearing on prescribing the
newer antidepressant drugs to children.
Let Them Eat Prozac is currently only
available through the Canadian publishing concern Lorimer.
However, it can ordered by residents of the United States (I
did so the day before I wrote this article and was charged $27.66
U.S. dollars for the book, plus shipping and handling. If you
don't want to wait for the American edition of the book to come
out this Spring, then you can order it from Lorimer by calling
toll free 1-800-565-1975, Monday--Friday, 8am--4pm Eastern time).
In the interest of informing an American audience of the book
before the convening of the upcoming FDA hearing, I conducted
a brief interview with the author via e-mail. --RG
Rick Giombetti: The title of this book quickly caught my attention.
You're writing career, much of it focusing on recording the history
of psychopharmacology, has revolved around the ivory tower of
academia and peer-reviewed academic publications. The title of
your new book is likely to conjure up images of an angry populace
upset with what they've been getting fed by psychiatry and the
pharmaceutical industry for the past fifteen years. An angry
populace demanding accountability for the marketing of the newer
generation of psychiatric drugs, like at the upcoming February
2 FDA hearing on prescribing antidrepressant drugs to children.
How did you come up with the title for this book?
Davidy Healy: When talking to a colleague one afternoon about
the outline of the book, my then 14 year old son was on his way
through the room and he said "you know what you should call
that--let them eat prozac". Publishers and editors uniformly
hate the title but they haven't been able come up with a better
one.
RG:
The publication of the book appears to be a quite Canadian event,
but it clearly contains information that is of interest to anybody
living in a society touched by the aggressive marketing of the
newer antidepressant drugs. It appears the seminal event that
led to the publication of this book was your firing from a professorship
at the University of Toronto and the subsequent breech of contract
lawsuit. What were the primary purposes for publishing this book
and why did Lorimer become the publisher?
DH:
The book was essentially written before I got fired. So my firing
was added onto rather than the center of or reason for the book.
I approached a number of university publishers
who said it would be a better trade book and a number of trade
publishers who said it would be a better university press book
and they all said, "By the way, no one is interested in
a book on the pharmaceutical industry."
The book ended up with Lorimer who publishes
for the Canadian Association for
University Teachers--so this is a CAUT book. Why? Well first
of all it is a privilege to be linked to CAUT who did so much
for me. But also I think the Canadians more than either the Americans,
the British or other Europeans have got a grip on the corporatization
of healthcare and especially the issue of how this impacts on
academic freedom or the traditional role of the universities
and if you want to make a difference on these issues this is
the coalition to link in to it seems to me.
But the book is also now due out in Spring
in the US from New York University
Press who have done a great job on editing it into better
shape and making it generally more user friendly.
One of the things to note is that the
book comes with a website and the hope was to make the whole
episode into a resource for social scientists, bioethicists and
anyone interested in healthcare and corporate governance issues.
To this end CAUT, who host the website healyprozac.com,
are open to having other accounts of academic freedom cases posted
on this site but also contrary views on how this data stacks
up provided the view is not simply polemical. The site makes
available a huge amount of material which does offer the opportunity
for people to make up their own mind and any relevant material
could be posted. The criterion for access is a posting that contains
new material that can contribute to genuine debate in these areas.
RG:
The subject of ghost writing is dealt with in your book. This
is a subject that has touched us in the Seattle area where I
live, as Dr. David Dunner of the University of Washington admitted
to the Guardian
last year that he "ghost wrote" (i.e. he had nothing
to do with an article he "authored") an article for
the March 1995 issue of European Neuropsychopharmacology.
From reading the descriptions of the publication process in the
medical academic journals in the outline for the book on the
Internet site, it sounds more like a public relations operation
on behalf of pharmaceuticals and their products than a scientific
undertaking. Is this a fair characterization of the current state
of medical academic publishing?
DH:
Ghostwriting is at the heart of the process. I am due to lecture
today (October 28) at Grand
Rounds in the Neuropsychiatric Institute in UCLA. This will
be webcast. At the heart of this talk will be just this issue
with some of the examples outlined in the book.
Ghostwriting though is not the biggest
problem. Often these writers (at the firms hired by pharmaceutical
companies to write peer-reviewed articles for academic journals)
will write better than most academics and they get results out
quicker and will often be more honest. The key problem is lack
of access to the data from these trials and against the background
of this lack of data, the questions of ghostwriting, conflict
of interest, and consultancies assume the importance they have.
I think though journals who are worried about how to make sure
authors are real authors are missing the key point. In the article
you refer to the key point is not whether David Dunner was an
author in the usual sense of the word but the fact that the data
in that article are just plain wrong. They give the impression
there is no difference between placebo suicidal act rates and
Paxil suicidal act rates, when in fact the raw data shows a possible
up to 8-fold higher rate of suicidal acts on Paxil.
RG:
Last year another Seattle area researcher Dr. Arif Kahn of the
Northwest
Center for Clinical Research colated the clinical trail data
in the public domain for all the psychiatric drugs approved by
the FDA for marketing from 1985--2000. Kahn found disturbingly
high suicide rates among the 71,604 subjects who took the drugs
in the clinical trials. Among the aggressively marketed newer
antidepressants and neuroleptics the suicide rates almost matched
the overall annual U.S. death rate. Dr. Kahn appears to be doing
something you've been doing for years as an expert witness in
lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies for the marketing of
their newer antidepressants. How was this important, and apparently
difficult to find, clinical trial data unearthed by way of discovery
in court?
DH:
What Dr Khan and I have been doing is quite different. He accesses
FDA reviews and not the raw data. He does not appear to have
seen the raw data lying behind the tables prepared by the companies
for the FDA. Had he had access to the raw data the figures he
presented would have been far more alarming.
RG:
I noticed at the Internet site for the book that not even British
government officials can observe the clinical trial data pharmaceutical
companies used to make scientific claims about their aggressively
marketed psychiatric drugs. Here in the U.S. we have a Freedom
Of Information Act and discovery in lawsuits, but these instruments
are too little too late for the people who have taken the newer
antidepressants since they've been introduced to the market.
It seems like the more clinical trial data pertaining to the
newer psychiatric drugs gets put into the public domain, the
worse the pharmaceutical companies and their drugs look. Do the
events of the recent past with the newer generation of antidepressant
drugs demand democratic transparency in the regulatory approval
process for new drugs? By democratic transparency I mean putting
all the clinical trial data into the public domain for comment
before a drug can be approved for marketing.
DH:
FOIA will only get you FDA reviews in the main. From this you
can get the names of individual trial protocols and you might
be able to get summaries of these but you can't get the raw data.
In Britain we have even less access, and any developments there
have been in the UK are down to the efforts of the media and
two women in particularly,
Shelley Jofre and
Boseley, who while looking at the scientific publications
have said "wait a minute, this doesn't add up".
In the absence of access to data generated
by people like the readers of this website taking risks with
their lives and health with new drugs, only to have the companies
bury the inconvenient findings, there is one other way forward.
Groups like the American Psychiatric Association or the Royal
College of Psychiatrists, who increasingly feature presentations
of "data" from these trials at their annual meetings,
could make it clear that they do not regard selected datasets
without rights of access to the entire set as scientific data.
I think there has been a shameful professional failing here.
RG:
Are there any antidepressants you are currently not prescribing?
If there are any you are no longer prescribing could you explain
why?
DH:
I have never prescribed venlafaxine (a.k.a Effexor). The data
always smelt fishy to me and the marketing of this drug was even
less satisfactory than that of the others--this is not to say
there aren't some perfectly decent people in Wyeth, our local
representative is one of the most decent we have.
The emergence of data in recent years
especially on dependence and withdrawal from Paxil has meant
that I no longer use this, where once I used it or recommended
it a lot. I have many people who are suffering very severely
with this withdrawal syndrome, which in some cases looks like
it will mean that people cannot ever stop treatment. I do not
want the SSRIs removed from the market, I have only ever wanted
them to come with appropriate warnings, but if you had to make
an exception to that it might be Paxil on the basis that we have
5 other SSRIs to choose from, losing one would not be a disaster.
I think its worth adding here that I
can't see how anyone can prescribe Zyprexa. The basis for doing
so on an informed basis just isn't there, given that Zyprexa
manufacturer Eli Lilly refuses to put into the public domain
the data on suicidal acts in their clinical trials and it seems
that neither the FDA nor Arif Khan have access to this. Against
a background of what seems to be the highest suicide rate in
psychotropic clinical trial history, the fact that this drug
had gone on to become the best-selling psychotropic agent at
the moment I think stands as a good symbol of all the problems
in the field.
David Healy is Reader in Psychological
Medicine at the University of Wales College of Medicine and Visiting
Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto. He received
his medical degree from University College Dublin and was a Clinical
Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. Former Secretary
of the British Association for Psychopharmacology, Healy is author
of more than 120 peer reviewed articles and more than a dozen
books, including The Antidepressant Era (Harvard) and
The Creation of Psychopharmacology (Harvard).
Rick Giombetti
lives in Seattle. This interview was originally published on
his blog site.
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Robert
Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James
Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher
Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane
Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin
Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn
Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey
Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets'
Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
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