Author: Dr Tim Coles

From New Dawn 182 (Sept-Oct 2020)

Eugenics is an attempt to produce genetically desirable children and to terminate the lives of those considered to be genetically inferior. Elements of eugenics exist everywhere. For example, when given the choice, people produce children with partners whom they find attractive. Part of them hopes that those attractive qualities will manifest in the offspring. A more extreme form is infanticide: killing children usually because of physical or mental deformity; a practice as old as humanity.¹ In Ancient Greece, Plato and Socrates (c. 470-399 BCE) suggested ways of breeding to promote the superior traits of the elite, as sickly infants were deliberately left to die of exposure.²

Today, there is a sensible and ethical side of what is often called eugenics. Examples include disabled children having operations to save their lives and individuals with learning difficulties asking for sterilisation because they can’t manage contraception and don’t want children. But institutions like the state, prisons, and medical facilities, as well as privileged elites, use eugenics as a way of trying to exterminate the elements of society whom they consider to be a burden. What started out as selective breeding and infanticide has today developed into forced sterilisation and genetic editing to produce “designer babies.” This thinking also informs certain depopulation agendas.

ORIGINS OF THE THEORY

In 1866 in Imperial Russia, the obstetrician Vasilii Florinskii authored a book advocating for scientific methods to improve human traits. Given the poverty of Russia at the time, there were no medical facilities to realise Florinskii’s ideas.³ Russia would not endure a eugenics programme until the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917. In Germany, the term “racial hygiene” (Rassenhygiene) was coined in 1895 by the biologist Dr Alfred Ploetz (1860-1940). The notion later informed Nazi thinking on eugenics. 

The British biologist Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) coined the term eugenics (meaning of good birth) and described it as “the science of improving inherited stock, not only by judicious matings, but by all the influences which give more suitable strains a better chance.”⁴ Galton was inspired by his cousin, Charles Darwin (1809-82), who was cautious about eugenics. The influential book An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) written by the economist, Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), also influenced Galton. In it, Malthus argued that unlimited population growth was unsustainable. More inspiration came from Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), the sociologist who coined the term “survival of the fittest.”⁵ In 1907, Galton established the University of London’s Eugenics Laboratory. 

In Germany, Wilhelm Schallmayer (1857-1919) authored popular books concerning selective breeding among elites to further “civilisation.”⁶ Just as US eugenicist groups were sponsored by corporate foundations, Schallmayer was promoted by Krupp, the German industrial giant. Most early feminists opposed abortion, so eugenics was, in many ways, a proxy for abortion. In the 1900s, Germany’s Bund für Mutterschutz (Organisation for Maternal Protection) saw feminists and socialists advocate for eugenics in an effort to own their bodies and gain credence in the male-dominated science milieu. The BfM was established by Elisabeth Bouness (Ruth Bré, 1862-1911), who fostered support groups for single, unwed mothers. Other, more right-wing eugenicists like Agnes Bluhm (1862-1943), dismissed the BfM’s utopianism. Men, conversely, tended to see eugenics as an opportunity to further their control over female bodies. 

Inspired by Malthus, the British Eugenics Education Society was founded in 1907 by Sybil Gotto (1885-1955) and headed by Galton. Forty-percent of its members were women. For many feminists, male dominant sexuality produced “maimed, diseased, unwanted babies.” Dora Marsden (1882-1960), editor of Freewoman, opposed the Eugenics Education Society (EES) as “a conspiracy against the poor.” The Swedish feminist Ellen Key (1849-1926) explained that society should protect all “except that which gives occasion to a weak offspring and produces bad conditions for the development of that offspring.”⁷

Eugenicists relied on biology to try to define superior and inferior characteristics. They utilised statistics to try to prove that the lowest classes of people were outbreeding the highest. EES members like the mathematician and later Ministry of Food statistician, David Heron (1881-1969), explained that: “higher net fertility is shewn… to be very markedly correlated with the most undesirable social factors (sic).” We now know that poverty can cause serious cognitive problems in developing brains. At the time, poverty-related impaired cognitive function – then called “feeble mindedness” – was falsely attributed to genetics. A 1912 report by the Committee to Consider the Eugenic Aspect of Poor Law Reform refers to the “feeble-minded” – who could not work and were of negative value to the capitalist class – as “the chief burden on the public purse,” as they required health and social care; both of which were still in their infancy. British eugenicists failed in their lobby to legalise for forced sterilisation,⁸ passing instead the Mental Deficiency Act 1913, which sought to institutionalise people with particular needs. Many British female eugenicists opposed the Act because it primarily targeted single mothers.⁹ 

The British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) is credited with influential theories concerning state-planning over national economies. Keynes believed that law and other coercive measures could be imposed on population abroad to improve their living standards by reducing their overall numbers. In 1914, for instance, he wrote: “In many, if not in most, parts of the world there actually exists at the present time a denser population than is compatible with a high level of economic wellbeing.”¹⁰ 

FROM BRITAIN TO THE USA

According to some scholars, 19th-century pedigree animal breeding inspired US eugenics, with the American Breeders Association splintering to form the eugenics movement.¹¹ By the 1910s, US states, particularly in the south, hosted “Better Babies” competitions, in which the mental and physical characteristics of infants were measured and tabulated by eugenicists.¹² Writing for American Breeders Magazine in 1910, C.B. Davenport (1866-1944), director of the Cold Spring Harbor Station for Experimental Study of Evolution, argued that “society must protect itself” from the so-called feeble-minded by “segregation” or even sterilisation. American eugenicists established the Carnegie-funded Eugenics Record Office.¹³ 

The US socialist, feminist, and birth control advocate, Margaret Sanger (1879-1966), opened America’s first birth control clinic in New York in 1916. Sanger also helped to create the organisation Planned Parenthood. But these progressive steps masked another agenda.¹⁴ Sanger was a strong advocate for eugenics, even speaking about the subject at a Ku Klux Klan meeting to white supremacists, who had an interest in wiping out the Black population.¹⁵ In 1924, the psychologist and feminist, Leta Hollingworth (1886-1939), explained that “the very intelligent are those who rise in the world of competition, and who are also able to produce children like themselves.” Sponsored by eugenics societies, “Fitter Families” competitions awarded medals, inscribed with: “Yea, I have a goodly heritage.”¹⁶

In the US, eugenicists were behind the Immigration Act 1924 which limited the entering into the US of foreign paupers whom the establishment considered genetically inferior.¹⁷ In 1927, US Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes affirmed the constitutionality of forced sterilisation when he decreed in the case of Carrie Buck (who was erroneously thought to have had learning difficulties) vs. John Hendren Bell (a eugenicist): “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” (Buck’s mother had also been misdiagnosed with mental disorders.)¹⁸ After Buck v. Bell, a dozen US states felt empowered to enact sterilisation laws against the institutionalised.¹⁹

By the mid-1930s, eugenicists recognised their failure to turn their theory and practice into a science. But there was no clear demarcation and eugenicist ideas developed as “reform eugenics.” The majority of eugenics sterilisation in the US was conducted between 1930 and 1960.²⁰ Into the 1970s, federally-funded US medical facilities continued to quietly perform forced sterilisation, usually on Black women; the most high-profile case being that of Minnie and Mary Relf, aged 12 and 14. Other cases included the sterilisation of Mexican migrant women by Californian obstetricians.²¹ In 1975, the federally-funded Indian Health Service sterilised 25,000 Indigenous women.²²

As part of its population-reducing, one-child policies, between 1971 and 2013, Chinese state and local authorities forced 200 million sterilisations and over 330 million abortions on lower-class women, offering wealthier families the chance to offset their breeding by paying “social compensation” fees. As part of India’s so-called Emergency, declared in 1975 in response to population booms, India began the forcible sterilisation of 10 million people by 1977. Later, allegedly softer measures were imposed, such as financial incentives for poor families to undergo sterilisation: 90 percent of the victims were women and included 4.6 million people in the year 2012 alone. In the poorest state, Bihar, 13,000 medical camps were established to sterilise 650,000 women.

GIVING EUGENICS A BAD NAME

In 1920, the German jurist Karl Binding (1841-1920) and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche (1865-1943) co-authored the book, Permitting the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living (Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwertes Lebens), in which they gave legal and medical justifications for murder as mercy killing (euthanasia). Their text cites eugenics and social Darwinism. Rejected by most physicians at the time, the Binding-Hoche thesis informed Nazi eugenics policy.²³ 

Between the mid-1920s and the close of the Second World War, 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilised. After the Nazis gave eugenics a bad name, US sterilisation typically occurred behind closed doors in institutions.²⁴

In 1930s Germany, conditions including epilepsy, manic-depression, and schizophrenia were attributed solely to Mendelian regressive genes.²⁵ When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they legislated to have physicians send patients with particular needs, including physical and mental, to sterilisation courts where judges, panels, witnesses, and medical professionals would decide their reproductive fate.²⁶ The Nazis promoted Lebensborn (Fount of Life) to increase the birth-rate of “Aryan” children.²⁷ At least 350,000 Germans were forcibly sterilised by the Nazis up to 1945. Because sterilisation was legal in many US states, the Nazis were not tried at Nuremberg for eugenics.²⁸ 

By the mid-1930s, more than half of Germany’s physicians had joined the Nazi Party, seeing themselves as “biological soldiers” in the war against racial impurity. “Defective” German children were left to die of starvation and exposure in unheated wards. Others were poisoned with cyanide. Nazi Germany’s forced sterilisation law was also imposed on the countries it occupied, including Austria and Norway. The mass murder of “unfit” adults was usually conducted by morphine injections and the issuance of fake death certificates. By 1939, over 200,000 people had been murdered in the T4 eugenics programme.²⁹

EUGENICS & DEPOPULATION

One of the more unusual chapters in the history of the eugenics-depopulation agenda pushed by some elites concerns the Georgia Guidestones. Elberton, Georgia, is known as the granite capital of the world.³⁰ In 1979, one Robert C. Christian (pseudonym) commissioned Joe H. Fendley (c. 1935-2005), President of the Elberton Granite Finishing Company, to construct the five, capped slabs of the 19-feet-high monument to “The Age of Reason.” The Guidestones’ inscribed “ten commandments” include depopulation and eugenics: “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature. Guide reproduction wisely improving fitness and diversity.” 

We’ve seen how the elites feared being outbred by the riffraff. This theme continued into the late-1960s, with fears that third world populations were breeding out of control and threatening the resources of the privileged. Many of the theories were presented as humanitarian, that the poor hadn’t enough food and space to live worthwhile lives. This was popularised by the biologist, Paul Ehrlich (born 1932), whose book The Population Bomb (1968) presented an internationalist argument for population control through education, contraception, and financial inducements. Under cover of philanthropy, the book pushed an environmental agenda. Notably absent from the book is a critique of capitalism, which observes that children starve because poor countries export food to rich markets, that big industry poisons children as a consequence of profit-seeking, and health systems are often privatised. 

Founded in the same year as Ehrlich’s book, the Club of Rome was set up by Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King. Its book The Limits to Growth (1972, Universe Books) made much the same arguments as Ehrlich. In 1988, the Club of Rome welcomed a speech by Britain’s Prince Philip (born 1921). In the same year, the noble Prince told German media: “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation,”³¹ and in doing so exposed the antihuman thread that underlies some of the environmental movement. Infamously, another Club of Rome endeavour, The First Global Revolution (1991), argued that humans need a common enemy. Where states and religious minorities fail to act as that enemy, “the new enemy” would be “humanity itself.” Of course, the Club of Rome’s limited budget was no match for the oil industry, which swamped public opinion with climate change denial propaganda, so their agenda largely failed. 

Climate change deniers attacked sustainability initiatives such as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development’s document, Agenda 21, a nonbinding, failed roadmap towards sustainability.³² In fairness to those who see conspiracy, the UN Environment Programme’s co-founder and energy businessman, Maurice Strong (1929-2015), told the Earth Summit 1992: “We are now a species out of control. Our very success is leading us to a dangerous future… [O]verall, this [population] growth cannot continue… Population must be stabilised.”³³

The global corporate system has extracted material wealth from the third world, including food and minerals. In doing so, it has facilitated third world overpopulation (China pop. 1.4bn, India 1.3bn), because poor people tend to have more children than middle-class people due to factors including lack of sex education, the unavailability of contraception, religious indoctrination, male domination, and efforts to increase the likelihood of offspring survival by bearing large numbers of children. 

In richer countries, like those of North America, Europe, and Australasia, fertility has declined drastically. The wealth that is sucked out of the third world causes socioeconomic changes in the West, where people have affluence in the form of smartphones and packaged holidays but no real wealth in terms of affordable housing or savings. This makes it difficult to raise families. It takes two people to make a baby. That means if the fertility rate is two children per female in her lifetime, global population will not significantly fall or rise above its present rate. Globally, the average number of children per female was 4.7 in 1950, hence the rapid growth of the world’s population. But by 2017, it was 2.4. Across Western Europe, it is 1.7, meaning that Europe is in demographic decline.³⁴

Unlike the ideologies of the recent past, like those of the Club of Rome, today’s depopulation agenda has coupled with big oil. The Michael Moore production, Planet of the Humans (2020), uses outdated and often false information about renewable energy to attack the green movement (big oil agenda) while simultaneously interviewing privileged middle-aged-to-elderly white males about how people of colour in poor countries are killing the planet (Club of Rome-type agenda). The filmmakers’ solution to overconsumption is depopulation. 

EUGENICS TODAY

Today, genetic screening and gene editing have the potential to realise the dreams of eugenicists. Part of their agenda is to own life, while the agenda of the corporations to which some of them ally is purely to make money. This can be done, in part, via patenting genes: the building blocks of life.

The patenting of life began in 1971. Dr Ananda Chakrabarty (1938-2020) of the giant corporation, General Electric, applied to the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to register a genetically-modified organism (GMO), which he’d engineered to eat oil spills. The PTO rejected the application on the grounds that living things are not patentable. Chakrabarty appealed to the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, whose judges voted in his favour. The decision allowed anything but a “complete” human being to be patented. Since then, the race to patent every gene and combination means that corporations and entrepreneurs own 20 percent of the human genome via 40,000 patents.³⁵ In 1984, after one John Moore (1945-2001) attended the University of California-Los Angeles for cancer treatment, the University together with the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Corp. obtained and patented his spleen cells (making $3 billion in the process), without Moore’s knowledge or consent. In 1990, the Supreme Court of California ruled that Moore had no rights over his cells. By 2003, 127,000 patent applications were filed for human genes and sequences.³⁶

In 1998, the geneticist Dr David J. Galton, a relative of Sir Francis, wrote not of the immorality of eugenics but of the need for better regulation: “To prevent such abuses in the future statutory bodies, such as a genetics commission, should be established to provide guidance and rules of conduct.”³⁷ In 2003, the geneticist Charles Epstein wrote: “modern human genetics and medical genetics… are eugenic – if not a literal return to the eugenics of the past, at least a reincarnation of that eugenics in a new guise.”³⁸ Between 2005 and 2016, dozens of female prisoners were sterilised in California without their informed consent.³⁹ Historian Daniel J. Kevles says that humanity “now possesses tools to reshape its own hereditary capacities, perhaps even to realise the dream of eugenicists that human beings might take charge of their own evolution.”⁴⁰

Today, dozens of gene-editing companies offer services in agbiotech, biobanking, cell therapy, DNA sequencing, stems, synthetic biology, and vaccines.⁴¹ These profit-seeking companies have the potential to work in the interests of eugenicists; for example, by editing genes to enhance certain traits desired by parents. Under the section “New Humans,” the UK Ministry of Defence notes that out to the year 2036: “The application of advanced genetics could challenge current assumptions about human nature and existence.” It goes on to note that, “[i]nitially employed for medical purposes, breakthroughs in these areas could be put to ethically questionable uses.” Examples include “the super-enhancement of human attributes, including physical strength and sensory perception.” It concludes that “[e]xtreme variation in attributes could arise between individuals, [or] between societies, creating additional reasons for conflict.” Another section of the report notes that “biotechnology and genetic engineering may be combined to create ‘designer’ bio-weapons to target crops, livestock, or particular ethnic groups” (emphasis in original). The document ends with reference to the final step in eugenics: ethnic cleansing. In referencing neutron weapons, which kill life and leave property undamaged, the MoD states: “The ability to inflict organic destruction, while leaving infrastructure intact, might make it a weapon of choice for extreme ethnic cleansing in an increasingly populated world.”⁴²

CONCLUSION

This article has traced the thread of eugenics from our ancient past to the trans- and post-humanist visions of gene-editing tech-heads. The article has documented how eugenics can infringe upon human rights and even lead to genocide. 

A final thought concerns elder care and social security in economically neoliberal states. In the UK, the policies of the ruling Tory party (2010-present) have, in the last decade, killed a quarter of a million economically useless Britons via fiscal austerity: old people who needed later-life care, disabled people claiming social security, and the most impoverished who depended on the state for their survival.⁴³ 

In the minds of policymakers, eugenics is alive and well. 

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Footnotes

1. Marianne Hem Eriksen (2013) World Archaeology, 49(3): 338-356

2. Timothy M. Reynolds (2009) Clinical Biochemical Reviews, 30: 187-96. 

3. Nikolai Krementsov (2011) Annals of Science, 68(1): 61-92.

4. David J. Galton and Clare J. Galton (1998) Journal of Medical Ethics, 24(2): 99-105.

5. Philip R. Reilly (2015) Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, 16: 351-68.

6. Reilly, op. cit.

7. Ann Taylor Allen (2000) German Studies Review, 23(3): 477-505.

8. Pauline M. H. Mazumdar (2002) Trends in Eugenics, 18(1): 48-52.

9. Allen, op. cit.

10. Quoted in Edward W. Fuller, Mises Institute, 14 November 2019, https://mises.org/wire/keynes-eugenics-race-and-population-control#footnote5_z3fncpw

11. Mazumdar, op. cit. 

12. Steven Selden (2005) Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 149(2): 199-225.

13. Mazumdar, op. cit.

14. Reilly, op. cit. 

15. Margaret Sanger (1938) Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., pp. 366-67. 

16. Selden, op. cit. 

17. Mazumdar, op. cit.

18. Victoria Nourse (2016) Nature, 530: 418.

19. Reilly, op. cit.

20. Mazumdar, op. cit.

21. Reilly, op. cit.

22. Angela Gonzales et al. (2007) The Public Historian, 29(3): 53-67

23. Michael A. Grodin et al. (2018) AJPH, 108(1): 53-57

24. Reilly, op. cit.

25. Mazumdar, op. cit.

26. Grodin et al., op. cit.

27. Reilly, op. cit.

28. Mazumdar, op. cit.

29. Grodin et al., op. cit.

30. City of Elberton, “Welcome…,” no date, www.cityofelberton.net/

31. Quoted in Charlie Proctor, Royal Central, 14 March 2020, https://royalcentral.co.uk/uk/philip/prince-philips-deadly-virus-gaffe-139041/

32. United Nations Conference on Environment & Development, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 3rd to 14th June 1992, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/Agenda21.pdf

33. Maurice Strong, Earth Summit Opening Plenary Part 2, 3 June 1992, www.c-span.org/video/?26478-1/earth-summit-opening-plenary-part-2

34. James Gallagher, BBC, 9 November 2018, www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-46118103

35. Chester S. Chuang and Denys T. Lau (2010) Clinical Therapy, 32(12): 2054-56.

36. See my Privatized Planet (2019, New Internationalist).

37. Galton and Galton, op. cit. 

38. Diane B. Paul (2014) Science and Education, 23: 259-71. 

39. Grodin et al., op cit. 

40. Daniel J. Kevles (2016) Science and Technology, 32(3): 45-50.

41. Biotech-careers, no date, https://biotech-careers.org/company-core-activity/gene-editing

42. Ministry of Defence, The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme: 2007-2036, January 2007, pp. 79, 71, 85, https://ia800702.us.archive.org/28/items/strat_trends_23jan07/strat_trends_23jan07.pdf

43. See my article in The London Economic, 1 July 2020, www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/tory-policies-have-killed-a-quarter-of-a-million-people-in-the-last-decade/01/07/

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 14 No 2 (Apr 2020)

The pharmaceutical industry is worth $1 trillion, half of which comes from US-based sales. The alternative health industry, by comparison, is worth just $59bn. Big Pharma bribes doctors, dominates advertising, and drives the anti-natural health narrative. 

The biggest, multibillion-dollar companies are Pfizer (US), Novartis (Switzerland), Roche (Switzerland), Johnson & Johnson (J&J US), Merck & Co. (US), Sanofi (France), GlaxoSmithKline (GSK UK), AbbVie (US), Takeda (Japan), and AstraZeneca (UK-Sweden). The bulk of their profits come from prescription drugs. Big Pharma kills people in two ways: 1) pricing life-saving drugs out of the market and 2) aggressively marketing potentially dangerous products. 

It often is cheaper for Big Pharma to break the law and pay fines than follow regulations that hinder profits. Every year at least one major drug company is fined for one or more of the following: bribery, drug safety, false claims, fraud, foreign corruption, off-label and unproven promotion, price-fixing, and violating consumer protection. Since 2000 in the US alone Pfizer has been fined by federal authorities 47 times totalling $4.4bn; Merck 42 times for $3bn; J&J 28 times for $3.4bn; Abbott 25 times for $2.3bn; Novartis 22 times for $1.2bn; and GSK 13 times for $3.9bn.

Profits are boosted by what Elaine Hollingsworth calls “the sickness industry.” Despite living longer, obesity, depression, dementia, increased cancer and other morbidities mean that Westerners are now less healthy than just a few generations ago. Big Pharma pathologises minor ailments and makes people dependent on drugs instead of encouraging the use of natural alternatives. The crisis of the industry’s influence over the medical profession, from reporting trial results to influencing doctors, prompted the British Medical Journal (BMJ) to launch a “Commercial Influence in Health Initiative” to expose Big Pharma’s deadly influence. 

“Fictionosis”: From Fake Disease To Fake Journals

Marketing fake medicine dates back at least to 19^th century America when ‘patent medicine shows’ – which promoted products that were neither patented nor medicines – promised cures for fatigue, baldness, and scrofula. Million-dollar enterprises included Ayer’s Hair Vigor and Scovill’s Sarsaparilla. Dr Larry Dossey writes that in the 1900s, medical companies sought “to inflate a common, everyday condition to the level of pathology.” This was the beginning of what the science writer Julie Deardoff calls “fictionosis.” 

To prove how easy it is to invent new illnesses, doctors Ray Moynihan and David Henry claimed to have discovered a new, potentially fatal, laziness disease: “motivational deficiency disorder.” Data was supposedly supplied by one Dr Leth Argos; a pun on lethargy. Their fake research was published in the BMJ. 

The term “disease mongering” was coined by Lynn Payer who identified ten methods used by Big Pharma to convince us that we are sick: abnormalising normal conditions; portraying potential consumers as sufferers; identifying common conditions to maximise target audiences; defining conditions as diseases; working with medical professionals to gain credibility; selecting issues; using selective statistics; using endpoint references; implying that technology is risk-free; and devaluing real ailments for which no cures exist.

In the 1960s, Dr Keith Connors was paid by the drug company CIBA to trial Ritalin. Connors set a precedent for trialling Big Pharma-sponsored drug studies on children via university-affiliated clinics. Connors watched this model get out of control to the point where he called misdiagnoses of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) “a national disaster.” Journalist Alan Schwarz revealed that although only 5 per cent of US children actually have ADHD, 15 per cent are diagnosed with it. This is largely due to Big Pharma pushing its products on doctors and families. Thirty per cent of all boys in the American South (i.e., the poor states) are misdiagnosed. Schwarz claims that Big Pharma paid “all the top researchers” to publish studies claiming that ADHD drugs are safe. Big Pharma then took the false data from their subsidised studies and constructed advertisements targeted at worried parents. The advert for Adderall XR, for instance, claimed that the drug boosts the child’s grades to match their intelligence. Schwarz says that “[e]very ADHD drug – Adderall XR, Concerta, Vyvanse, Metadate, you name it – has received a formal reprimand from the [US Food and Drug Administration] for false and misleading advertising.” Yet, many remain on the market. 

Medical ghostwriters do not disclose their paymasters and are paid by companies to influence both policymakers and doctors. Elsie Langdon-Neuner estimates that over 10 per cent of journal publications are ghostwritten. Ghostwriting becomes apparent thanks only to whistleblowers and court orders. Researchers Healy and Cattell discovered 85 academic papers written by drug companies with the author’s name still to be determined. Fifty-five were written by Pfizer, and 30 were either funded by Pfizer or based on Pfizer’s data. Just two articles declared a conflict of interest, and every single one reported positive results. In 1999, Merck introduced the painkiller Vioxx. By 2004 it was withdrawn after being linked to cardiovascular disorders. Merck had previously hired ghostwriters despite having internal knowledge that the drug may increase the risk of thrombus formations.

Big Pharma has even paid for the publication of fake peer-reviewed journals that report positive results of drug trials without disclosing funding. Elsevier’s Australia office published six such journals between 2000-05: Australasian Journal of General Practice, Australasian Journal of Neurology, Australasian Journal of Cardiology, Australasian Journal of Clinical Pharmacy, Australasian Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine, and Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine.

Lobbying: “They Sell Lies”

The number of deaths caused by alternative medicines and therapies is so small that no generalised statistics have been compiled with the exception of cancer; namely, that complementary cancer therapy patients are reportedly five times more likely to die than allopathic cancer patients. Compare this to the UK alone, where prescription errors kill 20,000 patients a year. In the US, prescription errors kill a quarter of a million. The World Health Organization says that by 2012, 80 per cent of the world’s population was using alternative health therapies, including people in so-called developed countries. Around that time, 400 high-profile Australian doctors and scientists formed Friends of Science in Medicine, a lobby to remove alternative health degree courses from universities. 

Today, Big Pharma spends $50 billion a year – almost the value of the entire alternative health industry – on advertising and PR. Ex-salesman and former leader of the Nordic Cochrane Centre, Dr Peter C. Gøtzsche, writes: “Drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs.” He quotes The Lancet as saying that medical journals “devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” By 2010, 85 per cent of drug company-funded trials of new medicines yielded positive results for the top five products (e.g., antidepressants), compared to just half for government-funded studies. In Australia in 2017, Lisa Bero of Sydney University’s Charles Perkins Centre found that drug industry-sponsored trials of medicines and equipment were 30 per cent more likely to report favourable results. “Currently, we have no validated way to detect or evaluate these subtle but systematic biases.” Lobbying means that drug prices in Australia are double those of the UK and three times the cost of medicines in New Zealand. By 2017, Australians were paying $500m above the average for seven common drugs. 

In the US, Big Pharma is the single largest lobbyist, spending over $200m in 2018 compared to electronics and manufacturing companies, and insurance, which spent over $100m each. In 2015, US Congressman Tom Price bought stock in Innate Immunotherapeutics. A year later, he purchased stock in Amgen, Biogen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, McKesson, and Pfizer. Price then went to Australia as part of a Congressional visit where he lobbied the government to drop its protectionist measures in the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership deal. Innate Immunotherapeutics, which has a Sydney office, offered Price a discount on additional stock, making him a $150,000 profit. Price went on to become Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary. 

Part of the Big Pharma PR strategy includes funding patient advocacy groups: AstraZeneca’s launch of Breast Cancer Awareness month to boost sales of its Tamoxifen; Pfizer’s association with the Alzheimer’s Association; and Hoechst-Russel’s promotion of the arterial drug Trental via its support for the National Council of Ageing. Additional blurring occurs in the promotion of drugs, including Viagra and Prozac, as lifestyle drugs in which the judgmental competence of the consumer is weighed against that of the qualified physician. As part of their marketing strategy, Australian drug companies engage in so-called asset exchanges with community organisers, patients, and GPs. They anonymously pay speakers to promote the wonders of drugs at conferences, take GPs out to dinner, infiltrate online patient chatrooms, and so on.

Death and Addiction: “Just Like Doritos”

By the year 2001, 100 million women worldwide used hormone replacement therapy drugs (HRT), generating $3.8bn for several companies, particularly the US-based Wyeth which dominated the market. In the absence of scientific evidence, the producers of HRT drugs spent billions of dollars on PR groups like HRT Aware and RED Consultancy, promoting HRT as a “cure” for dementia, heart disease, menopause and its symptoms, mood, osteoporosis, sexual function, and vitality. HRT Aware featured women claiming to have improved their careers, overall health, sex lives, and general wellbeing – all thanks to HRT. HRT Aware turned out to be an industry group comprised of oestrogen producers, including Janssen-Cilag, Novo Nordisk, Organon, Solvay, and Wyeth. After the truth emerged in 2002 – that HRT drugs increase the risk of heart disease and double the risk of breast cancer – the drug-maker Novo Nordisk hired the German PR firm Haas & Health Partner to write letters to GPs downplaying the deadly results.

Consider also America’s opioid (painkiller) crisis. Around 170,000 Americans die annually in accidents: at home, car crashes, workplace injuries, etc. Included in that statistic is 70,000 deaths by drug overdose, meaning that drug overdose is the leading cause of death-by-accident in the US. Nearly seven in ten overdose victims did not die of heroin, crack-cocaine, or ecstasy but from opioids taken illicitly or on prescription. Each year, 18 million Americans misuse prescription drugs, including opioids, antidepressants, and stimulants. Every day, over 5,400 Americans misuse painkillers for the first time. 

Opioids include carfentanil (an elephant tranquiliser), fentanyl (50 times stronger than morphine), oxycodone (50 per cent stronger than morphine), Tylenol (for head and body aches), and Vicodin (combining hydrocodone and paracetamol). Producers including Purdue Pharma – which “aggressively” marketed OxyContin (spending $200m in 2001 alone) – deliberately targeted doctors serving ethnic minority patients known to be at risk of addiction in de-industrialised areas like Kentucky and Ohio where disaffected communities succumb to “deaths of despair.” One of the big opioid dealers, Mallinckrodt (tax-haven in Ireland), went bust after paying $1.6bn in settlements over its opioid scandal. Between 2006 and 2012, Mallinckdroft flooded the US with 76 billion hydrocodone and oxycodone pills. Ohio-based distributor Steve Cochrane joked: “It’s like people are addicted to these things or something. Oh, wait, people are…” Accounts manager Victor Borelli responded: “Just like Doritos keep eating. We’ll make more.”

Each year, one in four adults in England alone (12 million people) are prescribed addictive drugs including antidepressants and opioids. At least one million people in England are potentially hooked on painkillers as are 1.4 million Australians. Each year, around 1,000 Australians die of opioid overdose: seven out of ten from pharmaceutical opioids. In 2018, 4.3 million Australians took 39 million prescribed drugs for mental health issues. Indicative of the ease with which physicians diagnose and prescribe, 86.3 per cent of prescriptions came from GPs compared to just over 12 per cent from mental health specialists. The overwhelming majority of prescriptions were antidepressants (over 70 per cent), compared to just 10 per cent for antipsychotics and 5.6 per cent for sedatives and hypnotics.

Fighting Back

There’s plenty of action against Big Pharma. Countries from South Africa to Thailand are saying ‘no’ to international treaties that allow giants to monopolise patents and charge unaffordable prices. Big Pharma recognises the public appetite for natural products, hence its effort to corner the market. Accountability journalists like those at ProPublica expose GPs’ conflicts of interest via the “Dollars for Docs” project, such as the 2,500 physicians who received over $500,000 each between 2014 and 2018 from drug and medical device companies (700 of whom received $1m). The money came in the form of consultancy and lecture fees. The Alliance for Natural Health International documents efforts by the so-called Good Thinking Society, Quackwatch, and others, to delete the Wikipedia profiles of natural and alternative health advocates and/or insert potentially libellous material into their bios. Victims include doctors Malcolm Kendrick, Aseem Malhotra, Joseph Mercola, and Nina Teicholz.

Growing numbers of people are eating more healthily and looking for non-allopathic treatments. The Hartman Group notes that “[p]rogressive consumers are a window in to the future of health and wellness.” The year 2019 saw the biggest growth in herbal dietary supplements in the US in over two decades, totalling $8.8bn. Adaptogens, Ayurvedic, cannabinoid oils, goji berries, and natural cough drops and lozenges are among the bestsellers. 

Although most GPs are good people who do great work, it is important to also see them as potential proxies for a huge, unethical industry, and learn to distinguish the necessary drugs from the unnecessary ones. 

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Footnotes

1. Eric Whiteside, Investopedia, 4 January 2020

2. Grand View Research, March 2018

3. Matej Mikulic, Statista, 31 January 2020 

4. Good Jobs First, “Violation Tracker Industry Summary Page: Pharmaceuticals,” https://web.archive.org/web/20190907170912/https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/industry/pharmaceuticals

5. (2013) Take Control of Your Health and Escape the Sickness Industry, published by the author

6. G. Hulsegge et al. (2013) European Journal of Preventative Cardiology, doi: 10.1177/2047487313485512

7. www.bmj.com/commercial-influence

8. See my (2018) Real Fake News, Red Pill Press

9. Larry Dossey (2006) Explorations, 2(5): 379-85

10. Chicago Tribune, 9 April 2006

11. Ibid. See also Ray Moynihan (2006) BMJ 332: 745

12. Ray Moynihan et al. (2002) BMJ 324(7342): 886-91

13. Alan Schwarz (2016) Royal Statistical Society 13(6): doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00979.x

14. Gareth Cook, Scientific American, 11 October 2016

15. Elise Langdon-Neuner (2008) Mens Sana Monographs 6(1): 251-73

16. Bob Grant, The Scientist, 7 May 2009 & Alan Burdick, New Yorker, 22 March 2017

17. Alex Matthews-King, Independent, 23 February 2018.

18. Ray Sipherd, CNBC, 22 February 2018

19. Sarah Schwager, ABC (Australia), 20 February 2012

20. Peter C. Gøtzsche (2013) Deadly Medicines, London: Radcliffe

21. F.T. Bourgeois et al. (2010) Annals of Internal Medicine 153(3): 158-66

22. Quoted in Lucy Cormack, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 February 2017

23. Stephen Duckett, “Cutting a better deal,” Grattan Institute, 5 March 2017

24. Karl Evers-Hillstrom, Center for Responsive Politics, 25 October 2019

25. Robert Faturechi, Business Insider, 1 June 2017

26. Andrew Edgar (2013) Medical Health Care and Philosophy, 16: 295-304

27. Lisa Parker et al. (2019) BMJ, 367(l6694): doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l6694

28. Jocalyn Clark (2003) BMJ, 327: 400

29. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US), “Leading Causes of Death,” no date, National Center for Health Statistics, cdc.gov

30. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US), “Opioid Overdose,” no date, cdc.gov

31. National Institute on Drug Abuse (US), “Misuse of prescription drugs,” no date, drugabuse.gov

32. Art Van Zee (2009) American Journal of Public Health, 99(2): 221-27

33. Sarah DeWeerdt (2019) Nature, s10-s12: doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-02686-2

34. Scott Higham et al., Washington Post, 19 July 2019

35. National Health Service (UK), “1 in 4 people take ‘addictive’ medicines, finds review,” 10 September 2019 

36. Nick Triggle, BBC, 10 September 2019 

37. Addiction Center, “The Tragedy of Addiction in Australia,” no date, www.addictioncenter.com

38. National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, October 2018

39. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, “Mental health services in Australia,” 30 Jan 2020

40. Charles Ornstein et al., ProPublica, 17 October 2019

41. www.anhinternational.org/2018/12/12/wikipedia-censorship-of-natural-non-drug-therapies/

42. Forbes, 19 November 2015

43. Nutraceuticals World, 23 September 2019

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