What the hell? The Manhattan-based Center for Reproductive Rights is grilling FDA officials on their failure to approve the Plan B pill as a drug that can be distributed without a prescription. Why might they not have approved it?
Pharma Medicine
New Debit Card Vulnerability
By 4.24.06
Your debit card could be stolen and used without the thieves even having to hack your PIN code.
MERCK Gets Mercked for $9 Million in Vioxx Suit
By 4.12.06
A jury awarded $9 million in punitive damages to John Darby who blamed his heart attacks on Vioxx. The sum is a defeat for drug-maker Merck, which, for some fucking reason, was assumed to be “bulletproof” because the trial took place in New Jersey.
Television Stations Airing Seeded PR News Reports
By 4.7.06
You might remember last month’s Wal-Mart blogging scandal, in which it came to light that Wal-Mart was feeding information to bloggers. Many bloggers were posting the propaganda wholesale without attributing the (obviously) subjective source. Slimy MSM toads chortled as a chink in blogging’s armor appeared: why, mainstream media is objective. They’d never betray the precious sanctity of their journalistic integrity, as holy and binding as stone tablets handed down from YHWH. They would never simply ejaculate PR propaganda into our faces wholesale — they were better than that.
More Customers Mocked By Walgreens Pharmacy
By 3.24.06
Just over two weeks after a woman sued Walgreens for labeling her a “PSYCHO,” two more patients are suing for slanderous remarks attached to their prescription sheets.
Study: Herbal Supplements Turn Kids Into Crack Fiends
By 3.24.06
Back when I was in high school, there was only one kind of ‘herbal supplement’: the magic jay bone. Quizzing me and my horde of giggling compatriots in the back of senile Mrs. Johnson’s fourth period Remedial English class, any researcher who cared to have asked would have found that the ratio of herbal supplement takers to illegal drug users was one to one.
TGN1412 Trial Like “Russian Roulette”
By 3.17.06
Do you see the man to the right? The one who looks like the evilest German scientist to ever stumble in blood-smeared scrubs out of a Nazi laboratory? Gaze carefully upon the ominous shadowing falling upon his cadaverous features, the inhuman leer. Yes, readers, you are looking upon the horrible visage of none other than Dr. Thomas Hanke, Chief Scientific Officer of TeGenero, whose drug TGN1412 had six men in trials tearing at their skin and screaming.
Drug Trial Goes Horribly Wrong
By 3.16.06
Two men are in critical condition and four are seriously ill after partaking in a clinical drug trial.
Ambien Users Report Primitive Unconscious Night Gourgings
By 3.14.06
As if America weren’t globular enough already, now you can get fat off sleeping pills.
Walgreens Pharmacists Mock You Behind Your Back
By 3.8.06
How would you like to see this on your bottle of meds?
Panexa: The Right Choice, The Safe Choice
By 12.28.05
Gelf Magazine has an interview with Carrie McLaren of Stay Free!, a Brooklyn-based media outlet that “explores the politics and perversions of mass media and American (consumer) culture.” Which is to say, hippies gnawing on at the trunk of the freedom tree.
No Money in Curing AIDS
By 12.27.05
Hey, AIDS sufferers! Better stock up on aspirin. There’s just not enough money is curing your often fatal disease, says the federal chief of AIDS research, Dr. Edmund Tramont.
“If we look at the vaccine, HIV vaccine, we’re going to have an HIV vaccine. It’s not going to be made by a company,” Tramont said. “They’re dropping out like flies because there’s no real incentive for them to do it. We have to do it.”
Of course, the pharmaceutical researchers deny that they’re dragging their feet.
Health Care Plans to Kill You
By 12.19.05
In less than five paragraphs, Stay Free Magazine’s “How Hip Health Plan Breeds Superbugs” chillingly describes the nightmare plutopia in which we currently live—a world where not only are you chipperly reamed for twice the cost of your sinus medication, but are also softened up like veal for the slurping protuberances of a hyper-immune race of super bacteria.
No, the reason HIP covers less than a full supply is because it wants two co-payments out of me. At $30 each, that makes the drug $60. This not only makes the drug unduly expensive, but it encourages patients not to take their full course of antibiotics…. which, if you know anything about antibiotics, is dangerous from a public health perspective, because it can lead to drug-resistant bacteria.
Which, of course, is HIP’s entire insidious plot. A pallid, gel-like population of wheezing mouth breathers ridden through the streets by antibiotic junky bacteria jonesin’ for a fix. And who are these superbugs? As any reader who is familiar with the direct-to-video oeuvre of Brian Yuzna in the early 90’s will be quick to realize, these are the board of directors of HIP Healthcare itself.
EcstasyData.org: Testing Pills Before You Ingest Them
By 12.16.05
Shopping for real ecstasy is such a chore—especially since so much of the stuff isn’t really MDMA, the magical methylenedioxymethamphetamine that makes the world go snuggly. Used to be, one could just pop over to EcstasyData.org and see if they’d run a test on a pill from your batch. If your pill had more random junk druggery than MDMA, you’d then know to take two. (We kid, unless it was also filled with ketamine, which is awesome.)
Kentucky Prescription Drug Resellers: By the Gram
By 12.13.05
“They justify it because they’re having a hard time financially,” he said. “Left to ourselves, we can justify anything, but they’re really part of the problem.”
Of course the real question is: Are these Grandmothers of Slangin’ maximizing their profits by buying from discount overseas pharmacies? And if so, which ones, and can we get their domain names?
