If you could get 70 percent of Americans addicted to your drugs and rake in $280 billion a year in the process, would you do it? If you could come up with a \u201cpill for every problem\u201d and charge Americans twice as much for those pills as people in other countries pay, would you do it? If you could make more money than you ever dreamed possible by turning the American people into the most doped up people in the history of the planet, would you do it? In America today, the number of people hooked on legal drugs absolutely dwarfs the number of people hooked on illegal drugs. And sadly, the number of people killed by legal drugs absolutely dwarfs the number of people killed by illegal drugs. But most Americans assume that if a drug is \u201clegal\u201d that it must be safe.\u00a0 After all, the big pharmaceutical companies and the federal government would never allow us to take anything that would hurt us, right? Sadly, the truth is that they don\u2019t really care about us. They don\u2019t really care that prescription painkillers are some of the most addictive drugs on the entire planet and that they kill more Americans each year than heroin and cocaine combined. They don\u2019t care that antidepressants are turning tens of millions of Americans into zombies and can significantly increase the chance of suicide (just look at the warning label). All the big pharmaceutical companies really care about is making as much money as they possibly can. The following are 20 signs that the pharmaceutical companies are running a $280 billion money making scam\u2026 #1\u00a0\u00a0 According to a study conducted by the Mayo Clinic, 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug. An astounding 20 percent of all Americans are on at least five prescription drugs. #2\u00a0\u00a0 According to the CDC, approximately 9 out of every 10 Americans that are at least 60 years of age say that they have taken at least one prescription drug within the last month. #3\u00a0\u00a0 The 11 largest pharmaceutical companies combined to rake in approximately $85,000,000,000 in profits in 2012. #4\u00a0\u00a0 During 2013, Americans will spend more than 280 billion dollars on prescription drugs. #5\u00a0\u00a0 According to Alternet, last year \u201c11 of the 12 new-to-market drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration were priced above $100,000 per-patient per-year\u201d. #6\u00a0\u00a0 The CDC says that spending on prescription drugs more than doubledbetween 1999 and 2008. #7\u00a0\u00a0 Many prescription drugs cost about twice as much in the United States as they do in other countries. #8\u00a0\u00a0 One study found that more than 20 percent of all American adults are taking at least one drug for \u201cpsychiatric\u201d or \u201cbehavioral\u201d disorders. #9\u00a0\u00a0 The percentage of women taking antidepressants in America is higher than in any other country in the world. #10\u00a0\u00a0 Children in the United States are three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants than children in Europe are. #11\u00a0\u00a0 A shocking Government Accountability Office report discovered that approximately one-third of all foster children in the United States are on at least one<\/p>\n
psychiatric drug. In fact, the report found that many states seem to be doping up foster children as a matter of course. Just check out these stunning statistics\u2026 In Texas, foster children were 53 times more likely to be prescribed five or more psychiatric medications at the same time than non-foster children. In Massachusetts, they were 19 times more likely. In Michigan, the number was 15 times. It was 13 times in Oregon. And in Florida, foster children were nearly four times as likely to be given five or more psychotropic medications at the same time compared to non-foster children. #12\u00a0\u00a0 In 2010, the average teen in the U.S. was taking 1.2 central nervous system drugs. Those are the kinds of drugs which treat conditions such as ADHD and depression. #13\u00a0\u00a0 The total number of Americans taking antidepressants doubled between 1996 and 2005. #14\u00a0\u00a0 All of those antidepressants don\u2019t seem to be working too well. The suicide rate for Americans between the ages of 35 and 64 rose by close to 30 percent between 1999 and 2010. The number of Americans that are killed by suicide now exceeds the number of Americans that die as a result of car accidents. #15\u00a0\u00a0 According to the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, 36 millionAmericans have abused prescription drugs at some point in their lives. #16\u00a0\u00a0 A survey conducted for the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that more than 15 percent of all U.S. high school seniors abuse prescription drugs. #17\u00a0\u00a0 According to the CDC, approximately three quarters of a million people a year are rushed to emergency rooms in the United States because of adverse reactions to pharmaceutical drugs. #18\u00a0\u00a0 According to the Los Angeles Times, drug deaths (mostly caused by prescription drugs) are climbing at an astounding rate\u2026. Drug fatalities more than doubled among teens and young adults between 2000 and 2008, years for which more detailed data are available. Deaths more than tripled among people aged 50 to 69, the Times analysis found. In terms of sheer numbers, the death toll is highest among people in their 40s. #19\u00a0\u00a0 In the United States today, prescription painkillers kill more Americans than heroin and cocaine combined. #20\u00a0\u00a0 Each year, tens of billions of dollars is spent on pharmaceutical marketing in the United States alone.\u00a0 The American people deserve better than that. Every year, the United States spends more on health care than Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Australia combined. In fact, if the U.S. health care system was a separate nation it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet. For all the money that we spend, we should be the healthiest people in the world by a wide margin. Instead, life expectancy is higher in dozens of other countries and we have very high rates of cancer, heart disease and diabetes. For much more on the colossal failure of our health care system, please see my previous article entitled \u201c50 Signs That The U.S. Health Care System Is A Gigantic Money Making Scam\u201c. So what do you think about the pharmaceutical companies that are making billions of dollars by getting the American people addicted to their super-expensive legal drugs?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (Gigantic money-making scam!)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Michael Snyder\u00a0 –\u00a0 American Dream<\/p>\n
Source:\u00a0 e-mail sent from Drug Watch International\u00a0 June 22 2013<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you could get 70 percent of Americans addicted to your drugs and rake in $280 billion a year in the process, would you do it? If you could come up with a \u201cpill for every problem\u201d and charge Americans twice as much for those pills as people in other countries pay, would you do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economic","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8934\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}