Prime Minister John Howard has ruled out making a personal plea to the Singaporean Government to save the life of an Australian drug trafficker on death row.Nguyen has said he was acting as a drug mule in a bid to pay off debts incurred by his twin brother.
Melbourne salesman Van Tuong Nguyen, 25, was caught smuggling 396g[14oz] of heroin strapped to his body and in his hand luggage at Changi airport in 2002.
Daily Telegraph AU 04.Nov.05
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link origin barista
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Shanmugam Murugesu, 38, was hanged at 6am [14.May.05] in Changi prison despite weeks of campaigning by local and international civil rights groups and his family.Vioxx, Celebrex, and Bextra are COX-2 inhibitors. Therapeutically, they relieve pain and reduce inflammation, but don't cause gastrointestinal problems the way aspirin, naproxen, and ibuprofen do.
Shanmugam, an ethnic Tamil whose only previous conviction was a traffic offence, was arrested at the Malaysian border in August 2003 with 1.03kg[3lbs.] of cannabis. Capital punishment in the city-state has long been shrouded in silence, but the case sparked rare debate on the death penalty after Shanmugam's twin 14-year-old sons, Gopalan and Krishnan, gathered nearly 1,000 signatures in a petition seeking clemency from Singapore President S R Nathan.
Transform Drug Policy Foundation
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Vioxx was the most heavily advertised prescription drug in 2000, and Celebrex the seventh.
Merck & Co. makes Vioxx; Pfizer Inc. makes Celebrex and Bextra.
The establishment press is attempting to spin a Merck victory in a New Jersey court today as a vindication for the drug company, but it's not. The medical and legal, not to say moral and ethical, truth is that the companies knew there were potentially fatal side-effects, but downplayed them against the prospects of enormous profit.
Pfizer made $4.6 billion from Celebrex and Bextra in 2004.
Vioxx generated $2.5 billion in worldwide sales for Merck in 2003.
NBC's web site has a Vioxx Fact Sheet that says, among other things: "Merck pulled Vioxx off the market last September after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart attacks and strokes in patients taking the drug for more than 18 months."
The more accurate version would be that Merck halted a study in 2001 when it "showed an increased relative risk of adverse thrombotic cardiovascular events (including heart attack and stroke), beginning after 18 months of rofecoxib therapy...". In other words as soon as it became obvious there were serious negative findings, they quit looking.
Three years later, under pressure, and after the release of Dr. David Graham's internal FDA memorandum detailing findings of risk for acute harm and death from Vioxx, they withdrew the drug. When it became obvious they would have no legally defensible position whatsoever. Not "they found out it was bad, and stopped making and selling it". But "they found out it was bad and kept making and selling it until they couldn't get away with it anymore".
Merck publicly announced its voluntary withdrawal of Vioxx from the market worldwide on September 30, 2004.
On April 7, 2005 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asked Pfizer to withdraw its COX-2 painkiller Bextra from the market and to include the strongest possible warning on Celebrex. Pfizer agreed to suspend sales and marketing of Bextra in the US.
The FDA stated that Celebrex should remain on the market, but with stronger label warnings about the increased risk of heart attack and stroke.
It's important to remember that these are pain relieving chemicals, and the relief of intense and/or chronic pain may outweigh the risk of side-effects for some people. The market for pain relievers is so lucrative because there are so many people with chronic pain. An argument that could be advanced would be that out of the millions taking the drugs a few tens of thousands would experience negative effects, and a few thousand might die.
We take the same and worse odds when we drive, and most of us drive every day.
Being able to make a conscious and informed choice is what most of us would consider the ideal. But that would require some kind of protection against the predatory designs of individuals and corporations who aren't primarily interested in whether or not their products harm or help anyone, just so long as they make money. But then that's the role of the FDA.
In the case of individuals like Dr. Graham though, it isn't so much protection we're getting as a valiant and heroically beleaguered defense.
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So you tell me, 3 pounds of marijuana, 14 ounces of heroin = the death penalty.
Scolnick acknowledged no letter was sent to physicians and that data about deaths among Alzheimer's patients was not added to the information card Merck salespeople used to answer doctors' questions.
"You'd agree mortality data is important and something physicians should know?" Buchanan said.
"It's data the physician should know," said Scolnick.
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"Rofecoxib is a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) that was used in the treatment of osteoarthritis, acute pain conditions, and dysmenorrhoea. Formerly marketed by Merck & Co. under the trade names Vioxx, Ceoxx and Ceeoxx, it was voluntarily withdrawn from the market in 2004 because of concerns about increased risk of heart attack and stroke.
Rofecoxib was one of the most widely used drugs ever to be withdrawn from the market. Worldwide, over two million people were prescribed Vioxx at the time. In the year before withdrawal, Merck had a sales revenue of US$2.5 billion from Vioxx.
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In 2001, Merck commenced the APPROVe (Adenomatous Polyp PRevention On Vioxx) study, a three year trial with the primary aim of evaluating the efficacy of rofecoxib for the prophylaxis of colorectal polyps. Celecoxib had already been approved for this indication, and it was hoped to add this to the indications for rofecoxib as well. An additional aim of the study was to further evaluate the cardiovascular safety of rofecoxib.
The APPROVe study was terminated early when the preliminary data from the study showed an increased relative risk of adverse thrombotic cardiovascular events (including heart attack and stroke), beginning after 18 months of rofecoxib therapy.
Wikipedia
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Although Merck & Co. won a victory in the second VIOXX trial today, in New Jersey, the decision does not have any negative implications for other plaintiffs.
According to Christopher Placitella of Cohen, Placitella & Roth, P.C., one of the attorneys involved in the Texas trial case, where there was a $250 million verdict, the loss is not a setback for the 6,400 other lawsuits that have been filed against Merck."
[...]
Citing the early lawsuits for asbestos health issues, Placitella pointed
out that first six asbestos cases were lost before the asbestos companies'
conduct was fully explained and revealed. "That is not the case here. One jury
has already found the drug maker's conduct so reprehensible that they awarded
$250 million," he emphasized. "The liability evidence introduced was
compelling."
Placitella, who has been conducting national liability discovery against
Merck, which he says has yet to be used in a trial against the drug maker,
stated:
"Discovery of new evidence in the VIOXX cases continues and new
evidence will surface in every case we try over the next year."
Cohen, Placitella & Roth, P.C. 03.Nov.05
PRNewswire
Versus intentionally allowing thousands of people who were not intentionally choosing to do so to endanger their lives by witholding information from them, some of whom later died from those choices.
There's nothing even resembling justice, as it's being taught these days, in that contrast.
Almost everyone who uses marijuana chooses to, and almost everyone who chooses to use it has been made aware, not only of the real dangers of use and overuse, but of scare stories and the widely distributed scornful depictions of bumbling incompetent potheads by whoever's behind the mass media campaigns against it.
Virtually everyone who uses heroin, certainly everyone who buys it, is aware of the dangers of its use and misuse as generally known.
These are informed conscious choices. Self-destructive at times, or even most of the time. But chosen consciously. An argument can be made that drug use has been glamorized by celebrities, at least in the past, before the rise to power of the New Puritans, and that would be exactly the point.
The television commercials promising relief from chronic pain that bombarded American homes, the magazine commercials that made those promises too, the radio as well, and the unspoken and uncontractual but very real promise made by the medical community to themselves and to their patients - to first, do no harm.
Most of us, in spite of knowing otherwise, link the pharmaceutical industry with the medical profession - they manufacture medicines, after all.
And because doctors still, even as they sink beneath the waves of commercialized "healthcare", symbolize an integrity that's only rivalled by ministers, that linkage means at least subconsciously we don't expect to be tricked and fooled by the drug companies.
The men and women who took Vioxx and Bextra made what they thought were informed conscious choices, but they had been lied to when they made those choices, in that particularly cunning way of not technically lying but allowing the victim to come to a wrong conclusion on his own - so that the blame begins there, in the victim, and with enough lawyers and money, stays there.
Though outright lying is not unheard of, if it seems necessary.
The numbers of potentially affected victims, if they were going to be victims, directly harmed, if they were going to be harmed, by the release of 3 pounds of marijuana into the world aren't enormous. Maybe five hundred people could have used it for a week or so; with conservation and a little temperance we could double that.
The numbers directly affected by 14 ounces of heroin are small. Maybe a thousand.
6,400 are suing Merck at this point, and that's only about Vioxx; some of them are probably venal and spurious, but not all, and more will join the suit with time.
Actual harm is harder to measure, but between the two - illegal drugs and legal drugs - the potential for harm to the public good by men pretending to provide healing medicines, not recreational substances, when they are actually knowingly and purposefully endangering innocent lives seems to me much greater.
It goes to the heart of what we're doing as communities, as people, and wrecks the trust that holds those communities together; and again, just as with the automobile, decent but gullible adults have been conned into choosing greater harm over lesser.
