Since 2006, Mexican cartels have killed 28,000 men, women and children in drug-related violence. As troubling as these numbers are, those deaths and injuries represent a fraction of those who are negligently killed or injured by US doctors and drug companies every year. Based upon admissions information, 3,607,000 patients suffered adverse drug reactions in 1994 alone.
Unlike the Mexican police forces that stage captured suspects and their profits before the international media, the pharmaceutical industry routinely pays off regulators, prosecutors and victims for their silence. Since 2004, companies like GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Pfizer have paid $8 billion to settle thousands of criminal and civil complaints after killing or injuring millions. But when a drug like Seroquel generates $4 billion/year, a $520 million fine becomes nothing more than a business expense.
To facilitate America's progressive eugenics, drug companies pay basketball players and actors to push deadly drugs - especially in black and gay communities. But when licensed investigators and scientists question those efforts, PharmaSluts like and Jeanne Bergman rent their unused diplomas to give legitimacy to the criminal enterprise while attacking real scientists and reporters with harassing letters, gay porn and meritless complaints.
Unfortunately for Bergman and her peers, another real doctor has broken ranks with what Shannon Brownlee identifies as drug whores.
Unlike Bergman, Nancy Turner Banks, MD has actually practiced medicine and treated patients for 25 years. The Harvard Medical School graduate trained in surgery, obstetrics, gynecology and gynecological oncology and has practiced general obstetrics and gynecology for twenty-five years. She also earned an MBA in finance.
In her recently published book AIDS, Opium, Diamonds and Empire, Dr. Banks exposes the AIDS religion for the pseudoscience that it is:
"It is a great mistake to think that wars only concern armies, regulars or guerillas, involved in active engagement--blowing people and things to smithereens. In today's world, nothing could be farther from the truth. The real forces of evil wage another kind of warfare. This warfare is principally financial. The dark princes of debt finance have gained practically unopposed leverage over every important social, economic and political institution, including and especially the health care delivery system. As a result, death by iatrogenic medicine kills more people in a year than either cancer or heart disease. The demons of capital and "free market" ideology have gained control of the pharmaceutical industry, the teaching of physicians, the major media, including medical journals and the flow of research dollars. They control a clandestine intelligence agency, the Epidemic Intelligence Service that has silently infiltrated every major health department, hospital, newspaper and medical journal across the nation enabling the control of information and the mounting of a consolidated response on a moments notice. These dollars determine if there is going to be a "war on cancer" or a "war on AIDS." These wars are planned and mounted with the same organizational strategic planning as the Pentagon. What this ultimately leads to is the development of bad science and toxic drugs that are created ostensibly to fight cancer and AIDS, but in effect cause more cancer and more AIDS--and that is the point of the war. People die in war and the profiteers substantially increase their wealth and power."
Dr. Banks draws the connections between free market strategies, the destruction of national sovereignty by the process of globalization, and AIDS as one of the health consequences of a neo-Darwinian philosophy. Through meticulous research, Banks found a medical-pharmaceutical- industrial complex that was taken over one hundred years ago by the titans of financial capitalism. Their aim was to create profit - not to conquer disease. This book of social history points to a cauldron of historical events that contributed to the HIV/AIDS crisis.
AIDS, Opium, Diamonds, and Empire tells the dramatic story of a financial ideology that is damaging to everything that it means to be human. It is the story of profits over people. In the end, it is the story of hope and how we can regain our sanity and our health in a world gone mad.
