"Rumors" on the evening news about the cash cow penis drugs.  Turns out maybe they cause necrosis in the optic nerve through lack of blood.  'Can I keep doing it until I need glasses?'  Yes, apparently you can keep going, but no, nothing short of a cerebral implant chip on the back surface of your brain will help if you don't have an optic nerve.  And last I checked those chips were at the very beginnings of proof of concept.

I read once many years ago that the results of a trust survey placed the pharmacist at #2.  More trusted than everyone except minister/preacher/father/rabi.  I don't suppose he can count on that ranking even though these drug problems aren't his fault.

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I suppose this will (as far as coverage and dissemination) wind up going away rather quickly.  Unless people begin to realize that this is just one example in an institutional system that brought us the 'side-saddle gas tank explosions'.  If you can't remember that far back look it up.  The summary is that the executives knew that these gas tanks explode in flames under the door of the vehicle in side accidents, but they felt that it would be cheaper to cover up the problem and buy off the families of dead people rather than fix the problem.  And I mean look it up even after reading my summary if you don't remember it.  Don't just let it slip.  Don't take my word.  Take some personal responsibility and learn something for yourself instead of letting someone else tell you what to think.

Now we have this insane system where the governmental regulatory body tasked with keeping the people safe with respect to medical procedures and drugs is funded by the big drug companies from which they are supposed to be protecting us.  It is also routine for the members of that regulatory body to recieve stageringly large gifts from those same companies, and to be given 'consulting' positions with huge salaries after a favorable report on a drug trial.

And time after time we've found drugs to be unsafe that the FDA approved years earlier.  On closer examination it turns out that the safety trials were rushed, eliminated, or the results modified.  Could that have anything to do with the unethical practices given above, legal though they may be?  Hmm.

I know it's an impossibly difficult concept for many people, but ethical, moral, and legal are not the same at all.  They aren't even particularly related.  They just happen to show a strong correlation in many societies.  I'll give a few examples to help get you thinking.  In my moral famework it is absolutely immoral to cut off a person's hand unless you are protecting someone from immediate threat of life.  Ethics has nothing to say on the topic.  It would be a requirement of law to do so for a petty crime in some places.  Law, ethics and morality allow pinning a corporate officer with responsibility for a problem even to the point of ending his career in Japan, even though the entire board was involved.  My ethics don't allow this at all.  But to them there is nothing unethical or immoral about deception when it comes to business.  They treat it very like war where deception is a key element of the endevour.

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