Nexus - 0221 - New Times Magazine-pages

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academics and we have the drug companies with their ridiculous _old boys in the United States are not important. You can feed 'em mandate from the FDA; and so they marry one another and we _—_ drugs, you can feed 'em pizza, send them to the Military and have have what we have today, which is this bizarre situation in which _ them go crush 8,000 Arab boys—then hang a medal on ‘em, give medicine is run by these people who really are not very good at ‘em a flag-draped coffin and you're in fine shape. And that's The science. American Way; that's how they feel about boys. Tl give you an example. This is The New England Journal of But the cannon-fodder in this war is ‘Joe Six-Packs'—the con- Medicine, okay? suming public and Joe Six-Packs. You can fry his kid, he doesn't G: I thought that that was one of the better ones, too, I mean _ give a damn, but don't get into my genitals, or my hairline or my more liberal. breasts, you know. That's the problem. ; L: Really? Eighty-three per cent of its revenue comes from G: For the first time, I'm having trouble following you. drug advertising. What do you think this costs? Eighty-three per L: Well, what I'm saying is that average American adult is cent of its revenue comes from drug advertising. more driven by his or her hairline, how hard his penis is or In addition to that, the very highly touted drug called Mevacore, whether her breasts are soft, than they are about the well-being of lovastatin, is a drug that lowers cholesterol. Now, this is my opin- their son. So, basically, I used to run around the country and say ion: The purpose of Mevacore is to allow ‘Joe Six-Packs’ to eat __ that trichlorethylene causes birth defects and learning disabilities his ‘Twinkies' and ‘Ding-Dongs' and n0t mms 200 childhood leukaemia; and everybody worry about his cholesterol. You are not said: "Well, that's irresponsible. We need going to get very much about diet control + . * . more studies and more epidemiology." in this journal because Mevacore doesn't «AN the State of California, - G: Well, what is that? want it. You know, Merck, Sharp and ag Jate as five years ago, it L: It's degreaser in the water. It's very Dohme doesn't like diet control because . . common. A obviously diet control cuts their profits. was illegal to Say bad things G: In drinking water? So, this is simply a wade journal. That's about pesticides and L: Yeah, yeah. Then, I used to run what it's all about. It's a nice one. I like h bi . d il id around the country saying the same chemi- it. But it's not a credible journal. It's not erbicides. You cou get cal causes wrinkles and impotence and soft Teally good science, but it's fun to read. i . breasts, and snap!—it's illegal! Kind of like National Enquirer. your licence taken = The bottom line—and so now we are get- G: So the people who make money off : ting to Joe Six-Packs—and, like I say, the the Military are now getting into the drug M-16 rifle doesn't work and the F-14 doesn't business? This is an area in which they can make bucks, right? fly, and they even make a goddamned movie about it and nobody gives a damn. THE TIE You know, Top Gun was all about the fact that the F-14 didn't L: So let's do the tie. We are going back again to the military- | work, and yet nobody even picked it up. I mean, the goddamned industrial complex and their involvement in medicine. What hap- machine doesn't work in combat, but that wasn't what people saw. pened, in my opinion at least, is that they are looking for another They saw this ‘honcho' kid running around. market because war is not quite that profitable any more, so But they do know that if they can't get it up that night, maybe they're going into medicine, and they have found themselves an _ it's the trichloroethylene in the water—and I'm getting to them, ally in the academic physician who really doesn't know much sci- _and that's one of the reasons that the chemical companies hate my ance wha eaally daacn't nara much shaut natiante hut wha hac cor emte THE TIE L: So let's do the tie. We are going back again to the military- industrial complex and their involvement in medicine. What hap- pened, in my opinion at least, is that they are looking for another market because war is not quite that profitable any more, so they're going into medicine, and they have found themselves an ally in the academic physician who really doesn't know much sci- ence, who really doesn't care much about patients, but who has car payments and, you know, who wants to feed his or her ego and so they want to publish in everything. G: Build a little ‘empire’? L: Yeah, right. So basically, what have we got today? We've got Lockheed who owns Dialog database. McDonnell Douglas runs 70 per cent of the hardware and software of all the hospitals in the country. Hughes Industries runs the largest research pro- grammes as we talked about, at Hopkins, Harvard and UC San Francisco. Their budget for so-called medical research is greater than the Federal Govemment's in the year 2000! FMC works with Hypertech on mononuclear antibodies. Colt Industries works on urinalysis. General Dynamics, General Motors, General Electric, Delco—they're all into medicine and into defence. Now, that's the bad news. Now let me tell you the good news. The good news is that when I went around hollering that the M- 16 rifle was bad, or that the CH-46 helicopter was bad, or the A- 21E helicopter was bad, or the F-14 was bad, nobody really cared. They laughed about it. And it's a joke that the military equipment doesn't work. Everyone joked about the so-called ‘smart bombs’ that weren't very smart, or the stealth bomber. You know the pic- tures, that everything is just sort of photographs so that you look at these war toys and everybody talks about them, but they don't really care that the kid that's running it, an eighteen-year-old boy, is going to get killed. That's not important, because eighteen-year- guts. G: I'm surprised they let you live! L: They can't do me in. a + NEXUS 43 AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 1994