Robert Kennedy, Jr. (RFK), the new Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Marty Makary, the new Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner have pledged to remove industry conflicts of interest (COIs) from government agencies. But little has been released so far about their plans for the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) reportedly rife with industry influences.
Topping the list in the military are drugmaker consultants camped out in the fertile prescription territories of DOD and VA. History shows examples.Mark Hamner, MD directed PTSD clinical care at Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center in Charleston, South Carolina, while publishing research funded by AstraZeneca about PTSD clinical care. No conflict of interest there. He listed grant support from AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Forest Laboratories and Janssen and speaker arrangements when leading a Continuing Medical Education (CME).
Lori L. Davis, MD served as chief of research and development of the Tuscaloosa VA Medical Center’s Human Research Protection Program while financially linked to sixteen drugmakers according to a medical journal article.
And then there was Matthew Friedman, MD, who was both executive director of the VA’s entire National Center for PTSD and an unabashed AstraZeneca consultant even serving as a “Pfizer visiting professor” according to the Pfizer Fellowships website.
And we can’t forget Elspeth Ritchie, who served as medical director of the army’s Strategic Communications Office in 2008 while concurrently appearing in an AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly webcast. The companies’ drugs are “sophisticated” psychiatric medicines used “on the battlefield,” she claimed.
Grace Jackson, MD who worked for both the Navy and the VA respectfully disagreed about the psychiatric drugs widely prescribed in the military. "The second-generation antipsychotics were termed 'atypical' based on misconceptions of enhanced safety and efficacy," she said, “but 20 to 30 percent of demented veterans died within the first 12 months of beginning treatment with an antipsychotic.”
Drug-Linked Suicides in the Military
During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, suicides among active-duty troops were frequently reported. Since then, news reports have subsided but suicides have not. In 2022, a report from the Defense Suicide Prevention Office revealed that there were more suicides in 2021 than any other year since the September 11 attacks. According to Army Times, suicide deaths among active-duty troops in 2021 “climbed to its highest level since the Great Depression — 36.18 per 100,000 soldiers.” The mushrooming statistics were barely reported.
In 2022, there were suicides in the Army’s new primary Arctic headquarters, at the Norfolk, Virginia-based Mid-Atlantic Regional Maintenance Center and on the USS George Washington, docked, at the time, in Virginia.
Different reasons for the suicides were floated including the scarcity of mental health professionals in remote areas, cold weather, extended darkness and the difficulty of seeing loved ones at far outposts. Less reported were the dangers of the drugs themselves.
Still Marine Times had reported that an internal investigation about earlier military suicides "found the biggest risk factor may be putting a soldier on numerous drugs simultaneously, a practice known as polypharmacy.”
Antidepressants like the SSRIs Prozac and Paxil, antipsychotics like Seroquel and Zyprexa and anti-seizure drugs like Lyrica and Neurontin, widely used in the military, are all linked to suicide in their prescribing information and in published reports. Almost 5,000 newspaper reports linked antidepressants to suicide, homicide and bizarre behavior on a website, SSRI Stories, which is no longer active.
Asthma drugs like Singulair, antismoking drugs like Chantix, acne drugs like Accutane and the still-in-use malaria drug Lariam, are also linked to suicide.
Experts Express Caution
Military figures have spoken out. Dr. David Williamson with the National Naval Medical Center told the American Forces Press Service that some injured troops seen at the center, "may already have been on six medications before behavioral health becomes involved. Then the behavioral health specialist comes along and says, 'You're not sleeping at night, so let's give you a sedative. You look depressed, so we'll give you an antidepressant.' In the end, people might end up on 10 different medications.”
Dr. Michael O'Connell, St. Joseph Country coroner, told the South Bend Tribune a few years ago that he was worried about "the possible link between certain antidepressants and suicidal behavior in young adults" and that blaming the economy for suicides was not accurate.
Retired Col. Bart Billings, a former Army psychologist said, "I feel flat out that psychiatrists are directly responsible for deaths in our military, for some of these suicides," in a Marine Times article. "I think it's criminal, what they are doing." He also testified before Congress on the topic.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST CAUSE OVERMEDICATION
Pharma-funded administrators in the military clearly overmedicate troops and veterans and overprescribe psychiatric drugs. But even if new administrative officials can route out such Pharma foxes guarding the military hen house another danger remains: the revolving door of former government officials defecting to industry and returning to lean on their former cronies on behalf of their new employers.
Excerpt https://www.amazon.com/Big-Food-Pharma-Lies-Pharmaceutical/dp/1633889351