A white collar mafia and the licit drug trade

A book of this nature would not be complete without a critique of modern psychiatry, tellingly described as 'the drug industry's paradise'. Nowhere are the excesses of 'disaster capitalism' more in evidence than within this specialty. This chapter is priceless – distressingly priceless. In addition to graphically illustrating the book's main thesis with accounts of hidden suicides in normal people taking SSRI's (e.g. in a drug company sponsored trial) it also makes a significant contribution to the ongoing debate regarding the validity of psychiatric diagnoses and efficacy of psychiatric interventions. The accounts of suicides in children, together with other harms caused by the application of increasingly elastic psychiatric diagnoses and the concomitant use of dangerous psychotropic drugs (the real dangers of which are hidden by drug companies), is both chilling and deeply saddening.

The unnecessary loss of human lives and the debilitating effects on patients are sorely lamentable. However, this is compounded by the fact that doctors are deprived of the information they need in order to assess risks and benefits for the drugs they prescribe, and therefore must unwittingly contribute to the ongoing harms caused by drugs. Because of the suppression of crucial information by drug companies (willingly supported in most cases by the regulating agencies), no one outside of these companies knows the true efficacy and potential harms associated with the use of their drugs. This issue was also raised by Dr David Healey in his book describing the murky story of the SSRI's and the associated shenanigans of the companies that brought them to market. He notes that it is obvious that these drugs may work quite effectively in one group of patients and that they may be extremely deleterious in another (leading in some instances to self-harm and homicidal behavior), while being largely ineffective in another. Unfortunately, due to the current state of things we will never know the defining characteristics of these three groups. Dr Gøtzsche takes these observations a few steps further, showing that this is the case for most of the drugs in current use, particularly the biggest selling ones. In effect, we are seeing the undermining of Western biomedicine by those who supply its major therapeutic modality.

The evidence presented in this book is very convincing, and we may well wonder how the drug industry giants have gotten away with all of this for so long. Shouldn't the perpetrators of such crimes be brought to justice? Unfortunately we have only seen the dispensing of partial justice, with the imposition of relatively small fines in only a few cases, or out of court settlements with minimal publicity. Such a dire situation demands redress at all levels. But that is unlikely to happen any time soon - the system is too entrenched for that. In order to understand how we have got to this point and to grasp the extent and scope of this crisis, I will leave it to Dr Gøtzsche to elucidate the issues and point the way towards a satisfactory resolution.

This book should be mandatory reading for both students and practitioners of Western Medicine. Moreover, it will provide much needed clarity to practitioners of complementary healthcare who are working in a Western clinical setting, and dealing on a daily basis with patients who are prescribed drugs that may be ineffective and potentially dangerous, under the mantle of 'modern evidence based medicine'.