FDA warning public of risks of online pharmacies

[No Elephants]

FDA warning public of risks of online pharmacies

The Food and Drug Administration is warning U.S. consumers that the vast majority of Internet pharmacies are fraudulent and likely are selling counterfeit drugs that could harm them.

The agency on Friday launched a national campaign, called BeSafeRx, to alert the public to the danger, amid evidence that more people are shopping for their medicine online, looking for savings and convenience.

Instead, they're likely to get fake drugs that are contaminated, are past their expiration date or contain no active ingredient, the wrong amount of active ingredient or even toxic substances such as arsenic and rat poison. They could sicken or kill people, cause them to develop a resistance to their real medicine, cause new side effects or trigger harmful interactions with other medications being taken.

"Our goal is to increase awareness," FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg told The Associated Press, "not to scare people away from online pharmacies. We want them to use appropriate pharmacies."

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The same FDA that gave Monsanto the go-ahead on genetically engineered seed before an environmental impact study required by law is telling consumers not to buy cheaper drugs online? That would deprive big PHRMA of the insane profits they make off American consumers but not in other countries, right?

But, true, online, there are dangers. If only someone would file a great drug reimportation bill that would eliminate those dangers.

Doughnuts For Dorgan: Drug Reimportation Killed In Deal That Might Get Cheaper Drugs For Seniors

President Obama and the Senate leadership can't whip up the votes necessary to pass a public option or even a Medicare buy-in compromise, but they didn't have any trouble persuading 30 Democrats to vote against prescription drug reimportation Tuesday night -- thus preserving the deal cut between the Senate Finance Committee, the White House and Big Pharma.

The amendment's sponsor, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), was asked after the vote if Democratic leadership opposed his amendment in order to preserve the deal.

"Well, and they apparently did," said Dorgan. "The last seven days, we've seen a lot of votes stripped away. What did we get, 51 votes tonight for my amendment? I believe seven days ago we had sufficient votes to pass it, but I think what is happening in the intervening period is other things developed. It's a great disappointment because it seems to me very hard to do health care reform without doing something about the escalating prices for prescription drugs."

more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/15/doughnuts-for-dorgan-drug_n_393527.html

Seriously, why are we still paying to support federal agencies? They serve only the corporations and the politicians.

They're threatening us with financial cliffs and sequesters? Wish we could threatening them with a general strike--on paying taxes.


Side note: Dorgan had announced in January 2010 that he would be leaving the Senate, so defeat of this bill was not the reason he left. I don't think he publicly stated why he was leaving. (There was at that ime no obvious threat to his continued re-election.

Seems like a loss. He voted against repeal of Glass-Steagall, correctly predicting at the time that, in ten years, the error of repeal would be evident. He was only one of 8 Democratic Senators to buck Clinton and Greenspan on this.

He also spoke out in 1999 against the mortgage derivatives that brought several nations, including our own, to their economic knees.

Now, he's a lobbyist, er, I mean, "co-chair of Government Relations Practice for the Washington, DC law firm Arent Fox." He also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, which was founded in 2007 by former Senate Republican Majority Leaders Howard Baker and Bob Dole and former Senate Democratic Majority Leaders, Tom Daschle and George J. Mitchell. Dorgan is also a co-chair of BPC's Energy Project.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Dorgan

His post-public service employment seems to belie wiki's description of him as a liberal, though some of his votes did seem populist to me. Or, maybe he just learned that being a liberal rarely make you rich.

[Enthusiast]

1. It must have felt like one disappointment after another for Dorgan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veAOoQEy0PI

[No Elephants]

2. Yep. Those who thumb their noses at the most basic lessons of the Great Depression

are doomed to another Great Depression.

Isn't that a famous saying? ;-)

Greenspan admitted his error, but Bill Clinton still defends his very active role in repeal of Glass Steagall. ("I did not have sexual relations with the global economy.")

He seems have done very well financially despite repeal of Glass Steagall and NAFTA (and despite ending "welfare as we know it." Not only that, but people still point to him as someone who generated a great economy, as well as someone who "feels your pain."

So, he's still Teflon Clinton. It's probably in his horoscope or something.

Dorgan also got that mortgage derivatives were going to bring down the economy, when (supposedly) even those who were marketing them did not understand them.

I don't buy that last bit at all, though.

I know someone who went directly from law school to representing banks who were acting as indenture trustees in offerings of crap mortgage derivative securities.

Before long, he, then a kid in his early 20s with zero experience in finance and very little in law, went to his superiors in his NYC law firm and told them that something was very wrong with all the transactions on which he was working. The reply was "If we don't do it, someone else will."

He told me that story not long after I had heard on TV that someone in one of the financial firms that offered these securities to the public wrote a memo to his superiors explaining the problems and why his firm should not get involved. He was told the same things in the same words. What a coincidence!

I believe most people involved knew things were very wrong--appraisers giving wildly inflated appraisals, mortgage lenders who were paying larger finders' fees for shaky borrowers than for solid borrowers, accounting firms reviewing the books of lending banks and investment bankers alike, law firms representing lending banks and investment banks at every stage of the transactions, investment banks--all of them. Mabye the SEC, too. (The same SEC that left Madoff alone despite complaint after complaint from one of his competitors.)

Oh, yes, and the heads of the Fed and the NY Fed, too, of course. That's a real duh, isn't it/

Thank heaven the laws were changed and everyone got punished or mortgage derivatives would still be being sold.

Oh, wait. None of that happened.

Indeed, some responsible for the near total collapse of several nations were even promoted ot otherwise rewarded, like, oh, I don't know, Secretary of Treasury Geithner and everyone who got bonuses via tax dollars for all the universally destructive business their firms did.

Which brings us back to "You didn't build that. The U.S. taxpayer did."