In 1964 the FDA filed a lawsuit against Andrew Ivy, Vice President and Professor of physiology at the University of Illinois. Ivy was the elite of mainstream medicine in the US at the time with impeccable credentials.� The moment he advocated an alternative treatment, Krebiozen, he was branded a quack overnight.� Over 20,000 cancer patients had allegedly benefited from Krebiozen. �After 289 days at trial, and admitted purjured testimony from one doctor, Ivy and three co-defendants were acquitted of all 240 counts. Krebiozen was never properly investigated.
FDA commissioner (in the 1960's) James Goddard persecuted a potentially excllent drug, DMSO, a simple molecule which often brought pain relief. Positive studies by scientists numbered in the 1000's but he did not care. A drug company executive supposedly told the leading DMSO researcher, from "The Healing of Cancer",
"I don't care if it is the major drug of our century-and we all know it is-it isn't worth it to us."
Apparently it would have threatened too many other profitable drug lines. A few years after leaving the FDA Goddard became Chairman of the board of Ormont Drug and Chemical company.
In 1969 the US Congress study found that 37 of 49 top FDA officials moved to high corporate positions in companies they were previously supposedly regulating.
In 1970, former FDA commissioner Dr. Herbert Ley said, "The thing that bugs me is that the people think the FDA is protecting them. It isn't. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it is doing are as different as night and day."
A 1975 GAO study found 150 FDA officials owned stock in the companies they were supposed to regulate. In 1975, an independent government evaluation found massive conflicts of interest among the FDA's top personnel.
According to a Tuft's University study released in 1990, it now takes 12 years and costs 231 million dollars to research, test and obtain approval for a new drug. Along with the requisite mountain of paperwork. As is typical with all government bureaucrats, they demand copious amounts of paperwork to protect themselves if their decision is proven wrong. Meanwhile important drugs are held up for years or are never investigated due to the enormous cost and time involved.
The FDA's generic drug scandal hit the news in 1989. Some companies were obtaining fast approvals for their drugs from the FDA while others were delayed for years. The CEO of one company hired a private detective to investigate why some companies received approvals and his was not.
They found that several FDA reviewers were accepting bribes from some drug companies to speed their drugs through the process and derail those submitted by competing companies. Eventually 42 persons and ten companies were found guilty of criminal acts.
A battle being fought now epitomizes how far the FDA will go in order to protect the drug companies profits. For over eleven months Jim and Donna Navarro have fought the FDA for the right to give their five year old son, Thomas, an alternative treatment. Thomas suffers with Medulloblastoma, a type of malignant brain cancer. After surgery, chemotherapy was recommended. Jim and Donna asked what the side-effects were;
...Fluid on the middle ear, hearing loss, memory loss, hyperthyroidism, spinal growth deficit..." the list went on. Worse, permanent retardation. Jim and Donna researched their sons cancer for thousands of hours. They found Dr. Burzynski?s treatment (antineoplastons) in Houston, that has had some very good success with this type of brain cancer, with minimal short term side effects.
The FDA refuses to allow Burzysnki to treat Thomas until he has undergone chemotherapy and radiation treatment first. Jim and Donna pleaded with the FDA commissioner Jane Henney, her superior Donna Shalala and several politicians, all to no avail. The FDA would rather see Thomas Navarro dead than taking the medicine of his parents choice.
The FDA's motives are explicitly clear. Prominent FDA officials protect the pharmaceutical companies profit margins and are later rewarded with lucrative positions within those same companies. As Burzysnki says;
"The past commissioner of the FDA-now he is an official of one of the large pharmaceutical companies, with a salary of 2 million a year."