Project Censored Updates

"Drug Rush" explores the lopsidedness in the FDA's regulation of new drugs. Over the last decade, AIDS activists seeking quicker access to breakthrough treatments and pharmaceutical companies eager to get their products on the shelves have successfully pressured Congress to ramp up the process for approving new drugs. But once drugs are on the market, the FDA has scant resources for monitoring their safety. The agency is short on medically trained epidemiologists to track the bad effects of new drugs. The nation's safety monitoring system relies on voluntary (and unreliable) reporting by private physicians. And at the same time, the pharmaceutical industry encourages the rapid uptake of new products through consumer advertising (including, thanks to newly relaxed regulations, television advertising) and physician-focussed promotions ranging from free pens to complementary basketball tickets.

In the months since the article appeared, the FDA has been increasingly active in trying to bolster its safety monitoring programs. An internal report, released in November 2000, concluded that the FDA should do more to monitor drugs once they're approved. Officials within the FDA's Office of Post-Marketing Drug Risk Assessment have said that they'd like to see organizations like the Agency for Healthcare Research Quality receive more money to monitor prescription drugs once they are on the market. They have also called for funds collected under the Prescription Drug User Fee Act to be earmarked for safety monitoring. As FDA Commissioner Jane Henney wrote in a letter to the Washington Monthly: "Although [monitoring for drugs on the market] has been updated, the monitoring system requires a significant infusion of resources to make it stronger."

Readers interested in exploring the FDA's regulation of new drugs should begin with Public Citizen's website, David Willman's excellent coverage of the Rezulin crisis in the L.A. Times, and the Washington Post's recent six part series on the conduct of U.S. drug testing in foreign countries.

Update by David Oaks

The guinea pigs are fighting back. You haven't heard much about this rebellion in the mainstream press, but there's a 30-year-old social change movement led by people who have experienced human rights violations in the "mental health system." These are the activists who educated me about the issues described in my piece.

For centuries, the psychiatric industry has churned out new methods and models to profitably control people diagnosed with mental disabilities. The difference this time is that an increasingly sophisticated and united "mad movement" is resisting the latest corporate trend.

The involuntary psychiatric drugging of people living in their own homes, in their own neighborhoods, is an especially alarming phenomenon. Since my article was published, the use of coerced outpatient psychiatric drugging is accelerating. In the USA, psychiatric drug industry front groups have won increased federal support for this authoritarian approach. In Canada, UK, and Australia, similar front groups are making headway. We are witnessing the globalization of a new "chemical prison" industry.

The guinea pigs did win a major battle since my article was published. In July 2000, hundreds of mental health consumers and psychiatric survivors in California stopped a proposal in the State Assembly that would have legalized involuntary outpatient psychiatric drugging.

The mainstream press perspective on forced psychiatric drugging has almost always been from the wrong end of the needle. Corporate media typically ignore the marginalized individuals who feel violated by forced psychiatric procedures.

For example, the popular press is not reporting a related news story that has emerged in mainstream medical industry publications: Recent studies indicate that long-term use of the drugs most commonly administered during involuntary procedures has been linked to such extreme changes in the size and shape of the brain that these drug-induced brain alterations are visible under MRI and CT scans.

The dominant media tend to either glorify the drug industry's most recent "magic pill," or vilify the supposedly "dangerously mentally ill." While it is important to respect the many clients who willingly choose to take prescribed psychiatric drugs, the public deserves to hear more about holistic alternatives to the corporate "biopsychiatric medical model."