As a medicinal chemist, I ignored my suspicion that an insidious and deliberate push to get each and every American hooked on drugs, while at the same time bankrupting them, existed between Big Pharma and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
When you're an adult, it's easy to lie to yourself. Do it once, and it becomes habitual...just look around at all the lies about weight, money and relationships...
This was one of my earliest lessons to my 18 yo son, Blair. I started teaching him through wrestling and jiujitsu and later with the great novels by Manly P Hall, Alan Watts and Terence Mckenna.
You can think about yourself any way you want, but real life will knock you silly if you're paying attention...
I enjoyed my work. Drug design paid well and kept me comfortably isolated in a high-tech lab, fully equipped to help me bend and twist matter at will.
The last thing I wanted to think of was a plot designed to sabotage health and wealth—while causing untold ecological damage—using my chemistry skills. But over time, experience confirmed my suspicion as fact and revealed something even scarier.
As you grow up, you'll come to the crossroads - the hard way or the easy way. If you want a good life, you'll have to choose the hard route. In grappling, that means training twice a day, cutting weight and sacrificing birthday parties, camping trips and weekend trips with the family.
Graduating high school, he's now completed his 10 year run of grappling and academics. Hopefully he learned what it means to master something and live with purpose, courtesy of joyful suffering. Because that's what he's going to need to master his chosen field of aviation.
He's a 5th generation pilot. Will he excel at it? Yes, but only if he remembers how to take the hard road, even when everyone else to taking the easy one...the consequences in the sky are severe.
So too are they in medicine!
Deadly Profiteering
My passion for drug design arose from the miracle of emergency medicine, one of humankind’s greatest scientific achievements. Sadly though, medicine is no longer exclusive to emergency use.
Today, outside of emergency medicine, it’s being used in a deadly game of profiteering, as heavily documented in my book, Over-The-Counter Natural Cures. To follow the herd meant making a lot of money and putting my education to use to support my growing family, 23 years ago. But I had to watch it all vanish...
My doubts about modern medicine began as a young medicinal chemist who specialized in natural product chemistry - the study of plant based medicine. I was employed by Eli Lilly to design a new generation of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) meds, a class which includes tamoxifen and raloxifene. Initially, they were thought to block estrogen receptors and thereby halt breast cancer.
...but, the truth was revealed.
As time progressed, it was learned that the HRT meds were also capable of activating estrogen receptors and boosting cancer growth. The Journal of the American Medical Association recognized this trend and published, “Our data add to the growing body of evidence that recent long-term use of HRT is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer and that such use may be related particularly to lobular tumors.”
My task was made clear: Design HRT ‘knock-offs’ that are effective without causing cancer. My attempt to design safer alternatives began with small alterations to the two-dimensional structure of tamoxifen.
It was unsuccessful.
All chemical cousins acted as cancer fertilizer and after one year, the project was ended. Access to tamoxifen and other HRT meds however, was not. Despite its ability to inflame cancer, tamoxifen continued to be used as the Gold-Standard in breast cancer treatment. This put millions of women at risk for dying from cancer...who thought they were putting an end to it!
As a young naïve chemist, I was determined to learn how such a dangerous drug could get through the prestigious FDA approval process. How could everyone be so ignorant and complacent?
In every profession, you'r going to come to hit these crossroads. Are you going to ask questions or sell out and go with the majority masses?
Checkbook Science
Tamoxifen was developed by British company Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), whose pharmaceutical division was later spun off as Astra Zeneca. Knowing that “demand drives drug approval,” ICI established—in partnership with the American Cancer Society–National Breast Cancer Awareness Month!
Fueled by fear, women worldwide began pushing for more choices in cancer drugs, and in Big Pharma language, that means more drug approvals. Tamoxifen demand was successfully created and expanded every subsequent year thanks to ICI’s self-serving pink ribbon campaign.
But, how did tamoxifen sail past the protective blood-brain barrier of the FDA? A quick lesson in statistical contortionism shows how.
Just like chemists manipulate the properties of matter, Big Pharma manipulates studies using “checkbook science.” This allows them to pay for the design and interpretation of clinical trials.
Tamoxifen studies were conveniently stopped at five years, the minimum amount of time required for cancer to develop. This successfully hid its cancer causing problem. But just like their pink campaigns, there’s more stink.
In 1992, tamoxifen evangelist Dr. Bernard Fisher, working for the National Cancer Institute (NCI), received $68 million in federal money to assess whether the drug could prevent breast cancer. In an effort to make tamoxifen appear safe and effective, Fisher failed to report falsified data and enrollment fraud to the NCI, casting further stench over the study and resulting in his termination as director.
The smoke and mirrors showed that tamoxifen reduced breast cancer by 50%. In reality, it was an insignificant 1.3% absolute difference.
Checkbook science isn’t illegal by FDA standards. It’s been going on for over 20 years and was the chief impetus behind the COVID VACCINE APPROVAL.
Known as the Bayh-Dole Act, US law was amended in 1980 to permit flagrant conflicts of interest, ones that allow the industry to design drug trials and hire experts to conjure up favorable results at will.
Once demand was created, and checkbook science in place, the FDA only needed one study to approve tamoxifen in record time–30 days. They did this by hiring advisors with Big Pharma financial ties to sit on its review committee. Failing to do their homework, only ten percent of the case reports from women enrolled in the tamoxifen trials were reviewed by the committee. But, most alarming to me as a chemist, it was still given a green light as a preventive cancer treatment for healthy women!
...among industry scientists, this is called DISEASE INFLATION.
Aiming for wealth, not health, Big Pharma hit the financial bull’s eye. As the Gold-Standard for breast cancer treatment today, generic tamoxifen rakes in billions every year with few noticing its “little cancer problem,” as it became known in our lab.
Today, profiteering and checkbook science are ruling the FDA, the government and our schools. It's one nation under meds.
The way out is by taking charge with lifestyle and botanical medicine! I took the hard road and swore off modern medicine all together. I quit my career. I abandoned health insurance. And my wife and I decided to have all four children at home...and two of them all grown up now.
Blair wasn't even born when I put the first plant-based medicine into a capsule and sold it! Even before that, I was 15 years old when I formulated my all-natural testosterone primer, Raw-T! Today, it's used by tens-of-thousands to get their natural testosterone back so they can live young!
Sunday, I've posted 5 LOW STOCK ALERTS! This has been a theme for the last two decades - demand is bigger than supply. This is all proof that taking the hard road leads to the good life. Walking away from a toxic culture disguised as medicine was the best thing I ever did. Anything else is a lie and a waste of time and effort.
Good luck Blair! The crossroads await!
Dare to live young,
The People's Chemist
