The FDA has been in the line of fire for serious violations of its mission. The charge: Standing up for pharmaceutical profits rather than the health of those people who are using medicines.

Under the FDA's rule, pharmaceutical companies have become the most profitable industry on planet earth, but our health is not getting any better - rather the reverse. Every year, national budgets are straining to meet increasing costs of healthcare, much of which goes to expensive but evidently quite useless pharmaceuticals.

The companies that produce patentable medicines have the FDA in their pockets. They control the agency that is supposed to oversee their operations. The tool: user fees, which pay much of the FDA's budget, but which come with strings attached. The money may be used to expedite the approval of new pharmaceutical drugs but not to monitor their safety once they are on the market.

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The FDA - Cartoon by Emma Holister.

Advertising of pharmaceutical drugs to the public is a peculiar U.S. phenomenon, which allows great expansion of pharmaceutical business by driving demand, but it also leads to waste and to the widespread use of dangerous drugs.

New illnesses are invented, promoted and drugs to treat them are provided - all for the profit of an industry that seems to have thrown decency and morals out the window and set its course on dominating every aspect of our lives. Disease mongering is the term and the practice has been challenged, but is continuing.

According to some researchers, the health system in the U.S. has become the leading cause of injury and death.

In a somewhat ironic turn of events, China, which is being accused of a lack of safety on foods and pharmaceuticals, has condemned its former chief of drug control to death, while entirely similar if not worse violations in the U.S. remain without so much as a reprimand. Stephen Fox, who has campaigned in New Mexico to remove aspartame, a dangerous artificial sweetener, from the market, discusses the situation at the FDA ...

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Former head of China’s FDA condemned to death over Big Pharma bribes
Does this mean anything to USA FDA Commissioner Von Eschenbach?

By Stephen Fox

Despite China’s draconian lack of civil liberties and its unequaled penchant putting its citizens to death, especially rowdy and “seditious” Tibetans, once in a great while, China justly takes an appropriate judicial action, especially when its government officials are embarrassed by two major recent scandals within one month, the pet food fiasco and the substitution of diethylene glycol for glycerine, leading to at least hundreds of deaths in Central America and India, from poisonous toothpaste. Zheng Xiaoyu, the ex-head of China's FDA, was sentenced to death for accepting $832,000 in drug company bribes.