DrugRant: Someone Wants Hanging...

Oh - while I'm here...

Anyone who watched Four Corners last night, should now be on the same page as me regarding both "capture theory" (whereby bureaucracies wind up being the bee-yatch of whoever has the most clout in the industry they supposedly regulate), and the corruption between major pharma companies and the second rate arseholes who call themselves "the government".

The fact that the FDA dropped the ball is no surprise - it has been Pharma's bitch since Donald Rumsfeld (then-CEO of GD Searle) used his Beltway connections to get Aspartame approved (despite the FDA panel rejecting it as unsafe). He simply got the head of the FDA replaced.

Next time some smarmy shit-head mentions the 11th of September, remind them that Cox-2 inhibitors have killed (at a rough estimate) fifty times as many folks as died the day US foreign policy returned home.

Fifty 9-11's in less than five years. bin Laden should just buy up shares in the major pharmaceutical companies - with the corrupt nexus between them and their supposed "safety and efficacy" regulators at the FDA (and the TGA here), al-Qaeda's body-count is pathetic by comparison.

The TGA will stop folks from using ephedrine which is one of the best things around for low-cost weight-loss, relatively free from side effects (some minor increase in pulse for a couple of days). Yet they will permit - and in fact help promote - the distribution of Celebrex and Vioxx (in fact, even permitting them to be subsidised via the PBS), despite heir efficacy being hypothetical!!!

Now, ephedrine is banned because once in a blue moon, a truckie would take too much in order to stay awake. The dose would wear off prematurely, and there would be a highway "incident".

But if you totalled up every death caused by ephedrine in its entire history, you don't get close to the number of deaths caused by Celebrex since 2001.

More people have been killed by the FDA/Pharma corrupt nexus than heroin, cocaine, MDMA, ecstasy, amyl nitrite and ephedrine combined (and that includes the deaths that resulted from the criminal subculture, not just from consumption of the drugs). The same is true here in Australia.

Excuse my Anglo-Saxon, but that is a fucking disgrace.

And so long as we have vermin in politics, this sort of shit will continue; the only solution is to impose a system where there can be no corruption of the government and regulators by big business... namely, by simply picking people at random from the population and putting them in charge of government departments.

Think about that: could things possibly be run worse than they are now? What difference would it make if the Minister for Health was a mechanic from Dubbo rather than a shill for the AMA? (The Minister at the time of the rapid approval of Celebrex, was Wooldridge - I hope his mother was on Celebrex).

We have got to get away from a system where some second-rate shithead lawyer can become Prime Minister - and does so as a result of decades of commitment to THE PARTY, and a continued commitment to lying his shiny little simian head off whenever he sees fit.

If each Prime Minister of Australia (and all the other hangers-on that suck at the taxpayers teat) since Federation had been randomly selected for a 2-year terms with no chance of re-selection, there is no way we would have been involved in a single 20th Century war. We would not have yet another silly experiment at prohibition (when they outlawed booze, consumption rose... which was the whole idea, since it enriched a bunch of people with political connections - like the Kennedies). We would in all likelihood not have stupid "one size fits all" speed limits, and the law would mostly be about preventing violence against property and persons.

It's the only genuinely bullet-proof system - which is why it worked so well in ancient Athens. The corrupt had to find a way to obtain and then entrench power, so they perverted the Athenian system. It's past time we went back... like I have said for a decade - how much worse would things be if we did?

I call it Randomocracy. It has no utopian vision - it relies on "designed gridlock" by disenfranchising everyone, not just those without money to bribe politicians. it also relies on the idea that a group of 200 people who have no political party affiliation will generate superior outcomes than those who need to keep an eye on their preselection.

There is no need for a gun-totin' revolution to get this into place, either... of which more later. (Basically if you get enough money together you can bribe a politician to do anything, including signing the death warrant on his entire "class"... not physical death - the death of party politics, but not of government).