Cat Got Your Wallet?

Here's a half hour long documentary that appeared on CBC about how your vet's taking you to the cleaners with 100-450% mark-ups on medications you purchase in Canada. I'm guessing that it's the same old, same old in the United States. A friend over who blogs over yonder stumbled upon it. According to the documentary, in the UK, vets are required to post what they're actually charged for common medications in their lobbies. They're also required to tell companion animal caregivers that these caregivers can obtain the very same medications at their pharmacy with a prescription from the vet (which is something you can do in Canada, as well, although good luck finding a vet who'll let you deal directly with a pharmacy and lose out on the price mark-up).

The more things "change"...

It looks like lobbyists for biotech companies like Monsanto are going to be pleased with Obama's stint in the White House. According to Grist, members of Obama's Energy and Natural Resources transition team include Michael R. Taylor, who has spent the last 30 years alternating between working of Monsanto and the FDA and USDA. Taylor was purportedly one of the people responsible for ushering in rGBH. To be precise, in 1991 the FDA created the position of Deputy Commissioner for Policy for him (the Grist article mentions it was 1994, but it was, in fact, 1991), which left him with a significant amount of control over government regulation of GMOs. After his stint with the FDA, Taylor went back to Monsanto to serve as its vice-president for public policy. See this Sourcewatch article for references and further information. DailyKos has an article on Taylor and his Monsanto/FDA dance, as well.

So, what else? David J. Hayes is listed as the ''member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project's Agency Review Working Group responsible for overseeing review of the energy and natural resources agencies". His bio has this long list of the environmentally-friendly sounding positions he's held, including an on-again / off-again stint as a partner at Latham & Watkins, a HUGE law firm that defended Monsanto in an Agent Orange case brought against the company by Vietnamese plaintiffs and that's represented Monsanto in other cases. Another Latham & Watkins partner, John Manthei "has represented the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries as counsel in nearly every major FDA legislative initiative" since 2000.

This is just the tip of how sketchy it all gets. TruthOut has a great article on all of the former lobbyists involved in Obama's new transition team, for those who are curious.

Teenage Rebellion as Mental Illness?

I read an article yesterday by Bruce Levine, a clinical psychologist and author who is critical of current trends where big pharmaceutical companies dictate how to treat what he regards as natural responses to what he calls our ''institutional society''. He advocates looking at the causes of mental illness -- going to the source, rather than medicating and numbing people to more or less hold 'em down.

In his article at AlterNet, he discusses how this generation's teenagers are being diagnosed with a multitude of new ''conditions'' and administered various drugs for quick fixes (no doubt thanks to their parents' nice insurance plans). One of the new categories of disorders he mentions is oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Wikipedia lists some of its diagnostic criteria as: deliberately annoying people, blaming others for own mistakes, easily annoyed, angry and resentful, and spiteful / vengeful. Any kid meeting just four of these qualifies as being afflicted. Not to be flippant, but these criteria describe most kids I knew in high school (and many adults I've known since).

To load the issue even further, Wikipedia states that, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatic Assocation, if this ODD is left ''untreated'', about a quarter of the kids who develop it will eventually develop the much worse ''conduct disorder'' which entails behaviours such as lying, truancy, vandalism and cruelty towards animals.

In his article, Levine describes the medicating of teenagers diagnosed with conditions falling into the ODD category as a systematic way of ''subduing defiance''. It's usually foisted upon teenagers by men (or women) in nice white coats who've spent anywhere from 8-10 years, themselves, bowing to authority while training to become professionals, all the while accepting handouts from pharma. It's an interesting piece and worth a read, if anything to gain some insight into how the pharmaceutical giants are (more or less) shaping society.