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FDA Goes after False Big Pharma Ads…Finally      By Robert Carter/September 22, 2025      Last week FDA spokesperson Dr. Martin Makary published a Viewpoint piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association touting the current crackdown by the FDA on misleading drug advertising by Big Pharma. After 1997, when the FDA relaxed their regulatory standards drug ads, Big Pharma increased its advertising budget by 800 percent over the next ten years.      During these last three decades the cease and desist letters sent to pharmaceutical companies for truth in advertising violations shrunk from hundreds per year to just one in 2023. Last year the FDA did not send out one cease and desist letter.      Markary announced that those decades of FDA regulatory failure have ended, and hundreds of cease and desist letters and thousands of written warnings have recently been delivered to offending Big Pharma companies. That will help curb the 31 percent increase that has occurred in consumer drug spending from direct advertising alone since 1997. Much of that consumer spending was on drugs with fewer proven benefits, but with much higher marketing budgets.      In an FDA review of Big Pharma advertising violations, only 33 percent of all drug ads named all of their contra-indications and only about 50 percent listed all the warnings or precautions they were supposed to list. With 43,000,000 Americans taking antidepressants every year, and with deaths from prescription drugs being the third leading cause of death in America – right behind heart failures and cancer – that’s a large percentage of the public who are not being informed of the risks of those psychotropic drugs.      That current shift in regulatory control by the FDA is to be lauded. Markary’s article, however, reveals there is one other marketing venue that Big Pharma exploits to peddle its dangerous wares without having to expose their risks: social media.      One 2024 study found that all social media promotions for pharmaceutical drugs mentioned their benefits, but only one third mentioned any potential for harm from them. Another analysis found that more than 1800 social media advertisements from fifteen different tele-health firms promoted prescription drugs with no warnings or risks at all listed. Worse, these social media promotions of antidepressants often masquerade as entertainment pieces, thus making it harder for innocent public to defend themselves against Big Pharma’s continuous brainwashing of them about the virtues of just taking a little pill to take the edge off the sadness or anxiety that occurs in life.      No wonder 43,000,000 Americans take antidepressants.      Big Pharma has spent a fortune brainwashing people to pop a pharmaceutical fix of instant  gratification without ever fully alerting them to the increase in risk of suicidal thought and behavior…both while they taking antidepressants and, worse, when they try to stop taking them.      The FDA, Big Pharma, and psychiatry have become known as “the medical mafia,” but given how many Americans they have addicted to antidepressants with their negligent advertising, they could just as easily be known as “the medical cartel.”

Risperdal Continues to Rack Up Hefty Lawsuits      By Robert Carter/August 21, 2025      Johnson & Johnson is again being sued for deceptive off-label marketing of its antipsychotic Risperdal. In April this year the Wisner Baum law firm filed a  lawsuit that alleges that Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary Janssen  Pharmaceuticals concealed evidence that Risperdal causes breast cancer.      In fact, not only did J&J conceal evidence from as far back as the 1990s which  linked the drug to increased cancer risks, they specifically stated in their promotional material that no “clinical trials or epidemiological studies conducted to date have shown an association between chronic  administration of this class of drugs” and cancer. An outright lie.      The new lawsuit alleges that the drug manufacturer took their narrow-use antipsychotic Risperdal, which is only to be prescribed for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and through deceptive marketing induced doctors to prescribe it to people without either of those severe diagnoses. J&J claimed that Risperdal would offer general “mood stabilization” for those with less severe diagnoses while they also concealed the increased risks for breast cancer for those taking Risperdal.      In May this year, Wisner Baum amended their lawsuit to include further allegations that J&J also withheld and manipulated clinical trial data, delayed the publication of studies deemed unfavorable to Risperdal, funded ghostwritten and misleading research aimed at downplaying its breast cancer risks, obstructed regulatory transparency, and illegally promoted Risperdal for off-label uses.      “J&J transformed a narrow-use drug into a billion-dollar blockbuster by targeting vulnerable segments of our population, all while hiding a cancer risk they’ve known about for decades,” said Wisner Baum law partner Pedram Esfandiary.      This is not the first lawsuit J&J has been hit with regarding its marketing of Risperdal. J&J pleaded guilty to criminal charges in 2013 and settled civil allegations by paying $2.2 billion for promoting Risperdal to health care providers for off-label uses. J&J also settled other Risperdal cases for an undisclosed amount in October, 2021. Those lawsuits involved another off-label use of the drug which led to breast growth in thousands of men. The company disclosed that it recorded $800 million in expenses related to the agreement.      Either J&J are very slow learners, or the huge profits they have made from  Risperdal — off- label or not — have been well worth their apparent inability to learn from their experience.

Involuntary Psychiatric Hospitalization…a Communist’s Tactic? Nope. Today It’s America’s      By Robert Carter/February 15, 2025      Reuters published an article on the 10 th of this month alerting the public to the large increase since the start of the Ukraine war in compulsory psychiatric incarceration of Russians for their political views. 48 dissidents have recently been institutionalized involuntarily.      Instead, Reuters should have published an article on the one million involuntary psychiatric hospital commitments in America in 2022.      “Punitive psychiatry” had been a method of social control used in the Soviet Union since the nineteen-sixties. Today Russia is following suit by again using psychiatrists to label Ukraine war protestors with a mental disorder so that they can be put in a mental hospital.      Russian human rights activist Robert Van Voren notes that these involuntary commitments have quadrupled since 2022, the beginning of the Ukraine conflict. Still, they’re only 38.      To accomplish a “legal” incarceration, Russian psychiatrists had originally come up with two politically convenient diagnoses of mental disorder. “Sluggish schizophrenia” and “reformist delusions” were the terms coined by their psychiatrists, in the same manner that American psychiatrists vote for the inclusion of a new mental disorder into their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.       Communist China solved their problem with social “misfits” through a similar psychiatric tactic. A new mental disorder had been created by Chinese psychiatrists which allowed forceful psychiatric incarceration of Chinese citizens. They were labeled as suffering from what psychiatrists called “culture bound disorder.” Thousands of Falun Gong members, for instance, had been incarcerated in this way because their religious beliefs were considered to be a threat to an ordered Chinese society.      In America today, the rate of involuntary psychiatric detentions has increased sharply over the past two decades. In 2014 the rate of all emergency involuntary detentions was 357 per 100,000 people. Today the rate of involuntary psychiatric incarceration in the United States ranges up to a new high of 966 per 100,000 in Florida.       Laws for involuntary psychiatric incarceration — such as Florida’s Baker Act — now exist in every state. In some jurisdictions, legal mechanisms like Laura’s Law and Kendra’s Law have been passed which authorize court-ordered, forced ingestion of psychiatric drugs for those with “chronic, untreated severe mental illness.”      These laws are said to be used to protect an individual from harming himself or others. However, they can too easily be misused when in the wrong hands, as they have been in Russia and China under the complicity of their psychiatrists.      The problem in America, of course, may not then be the laws themselves. It is the use of them by psychiatrists who are able to incarcerate someone involuntarily in a mental institution through the use of one of their DSM labels of a “mental disorder” which has no scientific basis. The psychiatrist does not even always see in person the one who is being incarcerated.      A psychiatrist just writes down on a form one of the semi-bogus “mental disorders” from the DSM. Those disorders – like Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, a label for the cramps and heightened emotions for a woman during her monthly cycle – may be no more valid than the “sluggish schizophrenia” or “cultural bound disorder” coined by America’s psychiatric counterparts in Russia and China.      Yet in 2022 American psychiatrists or their proxies forcefully committed just over one million people by ordering these involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations.

At Least 82 Suicides Occur while FDA Takes Two Decades to Rule on Dangers of Singulair and Its Generic Offspring      By Robert Carter/January 30, 2025      Big Pharma drug  manufacturer Merck has had its asthma medicine,  Singulair, and its generic  offshoots, named in more than 4800 reports of psychiatric problems, particularly in children.At least 82 suicides have also been reported for those who took the medication, a third of whom are children.      However, no lawsuits from Singulair victims have been successful due to the legal, but constitutional loophole of “preemption,” which states that federal law overrides state law in these matters. Two U.S. Supreme Court rulings in 2011 and 2013 had barred any lawsuits against generic drug makers which were based on state laws that enabled claims about design defects or about failures to warn consumers of potential dangers.      Merck’s patent on Singulair expired in 2012 – after Merck had reaped more than $50 billion in revenue from it – and thereafter a number of generic drug manufacturers started producing the medication. Although 91 percent of all U.S. prescriptions are now generic, per the FDA, the legal “preemption” defense has protected most all generic drug manufacturers from lawsuits over production defects or inadequate black box warnings.      Only the original name brand drug manufacturers can still be sued, but it is hard to prove their violations of manufacturing defects or inadequate safety warnings.      For example, during Merck’s original clinical trials for Singulair before its 1998 release, one eighteen year old participant had attempted suicide and one twelve year old participant had to be hospitalized for depression and suicidal thoughts. Although there are still pending lawsuits against Merck over Singulair, Merck still has not yet lost any of the earlier suits. In 2014 the FDA dismissed the relevance of these two suicide events.      After Singulair first hit the market in 1998, the reports of psychiatric difficulties and successful suicides after taking the medication continued to accumulate, but it took twenty years before the FDA first took action. It was not until 2008 that an FDA review of the drug’s psychiatric effects and suicide risks recommended “further studies in animals and humans.” That report also suggested the FDA should have Merck conduct its own observational study.       However, the FDA never did require such a study, reasoning in part that serious side effects including suicidal thinking “were expected to be quite rare.”      In 2014 an FDA investigator of the initial Merck trials for Singulair claimed that those two reported suicide events had been unrelated to ingesting Singulair. The FDA agreed, but it did report that those initial Merck clinical trials were short and were not designed to detect psychiatric side-effects.      Stephane Bissonnette, a Merck manager, told the 2014 FDA panel that “suicidality was quite rare” in the trials, using almost exactly the same phrase the FDA itself had used six years earlier.      The lethal side-effects of those taking the medication continued to build – including a count of eighty-two suicides – and in 2019 the FDA convened another board to decide whether the drug’s side-effects warranted a black box warning. Following that board’s report, the FDA should have required new studies of Singulair and its generic descendents, but instead the FDA merely announced in March 2020 that it would only add to the existing black box warning of the drug’s “side-effects.”      At any number of points during its twenty-two year history monitoring Singulair and its generic offshoots, the FDA could have legally – not to mention ethically — required Merck to redo and improve their trials, given the number of severe negative reactions to the drug, but it did not.      If it had, a minimum of 82 suicides might have been prevented and 4800 victims of the psychiatric side-effects of the drug would have been spared their own mental health ordeals.      (Thanks to Reuters’ 2023 Special Report for help bringing this travesty to light).

Birds of a Feather … Big Pharma Cohorts Now under Federal Scrutiny      By Robert Carter/December 23, 2024      Profit continues to be revealed as a driving force in the Big Pharma conglomerate.       Last week a Big Pharma consulting firm, McKinsey and Company, agreed to pay $650 million as a  settlement with the U.S. Justice Department so as to avoid their criminal prosecution for helping boost Purdue Pharma’s sales of its addictive opioid, OxyContin.      This week the U. S. Justice Department released its civil complaint against CVS alleging their complicity in filling unlawful prescriptions of opioids and “trinity” prescriptions (a dangerous combination of an opioid, a benzodiazepine and a muscle relaxant).      These two cases illustrate new legal forays by the Justice Department into those ancillary industries that have helped Big Pharma roll out death and addiction to so many unsuspecting users of their dangerous pharmaceutical concoctions.      Opioids have been linked to 80,000 deaths per year, and in the early years of their distribution to the public most of these fatalities were from legal prescriptions. Since then drug makers and distributors have paid nearly $50 billion in settlements with governments to atone for their unethical and illegal practices in pushing these drugs.      The net of justice is now expanding further as pharmaceutical consulting firms like McKinsey and Company and  pharmaceutical distribution centers such as CVS’s nine thousand pharmacies are coming into the sights of these Justice Department big guns.      McKinsey has acknowledged its guilt in contributing to the opioid crisis and has agreed for the next five years not to work for the sale, marketing, or promotion of controlled substances. The firm’s senior partner, Martin Elling, has also pleaded guilty to obstructing justice after it was discovered he had deleted relevant files from his computer about his business relations with Purdue Pharma.      “We should have appreciated the harm opioids were causing in our society and we should not have undertaken sales and marketing work for Purdue Pharma,” a company spokesperson said.      CVS, on the other hand, is still protesting the current Justice Department accusations.      “We will defend ourselves vigorously against this misguided federal lawsuit,” Amy Thibault, external communications director for CVS, wrote in a statement.      According to the Justice Department complaint, CVS ignored substantial  evidence from its own pharmacists as well as from other internal and external data and sources that its pharmacies were dispensing controlled substance  prescriptions without any medical purpose from known “pill mill” prescribers.      The Justice Department complaint also alleges that CVS sought reimbursement from federal health care programs for these  prescriptions, which is a violation of the U.S. False Claims Act.      “Each of the  prescriptions in question was for an FDA-approved opioid medication,” CVS’s Amy Thibault went on to say, and it was “prescribed by a practitioner who the government itself licensed, authorized, and empowered to write controlled-substance prescriptions.”      Yes, that’s right, Amy, and these guys are even more birds of a Big Pharma feather.

Gold Rush Mentality Surrounds Big Pharma Push for FDA Approval of Psychedelic-based Antidepressants      By Robert Carter/December 8, 2024      Even some psychiatrists have acknowledged that the last fifty years of their medicating those diagnosed with schizophrenia – the umbrella term for most mental illnesses – has not beenparticularly successful. Big Pharma is on board with that assessment and is now investing millions in research into “breakthrough therapy” psychedelic-based medication to treat any number of mental disorders.      LSD, psilocybin and MDMA are all being tested in preparation for the first FDA approved clinical trials for these hallucinogens to be used to treat depression and anxiety as well as other mental “disorders.”Never mind that all three drugs have been classified as illegal Schedule 1 drugs that have a “high potential for abuse” and are without any “currently accepted medical use in treatment”.      Even the United States Drug Enforcement Administration has reported that the use of LSD in psychotherapy largely has been debunked, and “drug studies have confirmed that the powerful hallucinogenic effects of this drug can produce profound adverse reactions, such as acute panic reactions, psychotic crises, and “flashbacks”, especially in users ill-equipped to deal with such trauma.”      In the 1950s psychiatrists used LSD research to try to replicate the effects of mental illness, and their infamous MKUltra experiments used LSD covertly on often unsuspecting subjects to develop workable mind control techniques.      So why are so many dollars now pouring into what should be questionable psychedelic research?      Because the psychedelic therapeutics market has been valued at $2 billion in 2023 and it is expected to grow to $7 billion by 2031.      Nonprofits like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) — now valued at $97 million in assets, all through donations — are cashing in on this psychedelics research gold rush. They have even donated over $20 million themselves to other organizations studying the use of psychedelics for therapeutic applications.      Just who are these new gold rush carpetbaggers?      MAPS therapists were videoed in 2022 spooning and pinning down a Phase 2 clinical trial participant in one study for the use of MDMA for PTSD therapy, as reported by New York Magazine. After that session one of the therapists sexually coerced the patient and the patient moved in with the therapists for the next two years.      MAPS lists Vicky Dulai as one of its three member Board of Directors. She “advises philanthropists and foundations about emerging opportunities in psychedelic research, treatment, and therapist training.” Vicky is their (very successful) fundraiser.      In May, 2021 Vicky was alleged in a civil lawsuit of exploiting multi-millionaire venture capitalist George Sarlo, then in his eighties, to extract more than $4 million from him while acting as his “psychedelic therapist” and feeding him ayahuasca, MDMA, and Ketamine.      The two of them had started a romantic relationship before he had had his first psychedelic  experience.      Sarlo gifted her $1.4 million for a house that she, her husband and children, had moved into. He “loaned” $190,000 to her husband for a business investment and he gave her a $65,000 Porsche.      Vicky used $30,000 of Sarlo’s philanthropic funds for private schooling for her children, received a $5150 monthly salary as director of his charitable foundation, and in just the first quarter of 2021 withdreaw more than $300,000 from Sarlo’s personal checking account to fly with her family and Sarlo to Hawaii on a private jet that itself cost $75,000.      The civil case against Vicky was settled out of court and no criminal charges were ever filed. She and Sarlo often participated together in psychedelic fundraising and networking events, and after Sarlo made a $1 million donation to MAPS, Vicky was given her seat on the board of directors.      That’s who these carpetbaggers are.       Back in 1998, a United Nations report estimated that the illegal synthetic drug market at that time, which included psychedelics, was $60 million.      Today’s unscrupulous opportunists like Vicky Dalai are doing their best to ensure this new, legal psychedelic drug market is not far behind.

Psychiatrist and Chairman of Arkansas State Medical Board Hit with Medical Fraud Criminal Charges and over 100 Lawsuits      By Robert Carter/November 3, 2024      The trial of psychiatrist Brian Wyatt has recently been postponed to next spring because of his attorneys’ full schedule. Wyatt was arrested last year for two criminal charges of “large scale medical fraud” for billing Medicaid for appointments he never had with patients.      In early 2023 a confidential informant had reported Hyatt to the Arkansas medical authorities as director of Northwest Medical’s Behavioral Health in Springdale for “significant growth in the unit and likewise in the claims and billings submitted to Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurance” under his time at the helm. Hyatt was arrested eight months later for two counts of large scale Medicaid fraud.      Since then more than 100 of Hyatt’s ex-patients have filed lawsuits against him for “unlawfully coercing, abusing and holding patients against their will” within the Springdale, Arkansas, Behavioral Unit in order to receive greater reimbursement from Medicare between 2018 and 2022.      One patient was charged over $14,000 for a five day stay at the unit, for example, but he never once saw Dr. Hyatt himself. In fact, Hyatt is reported to have issued orders to his staff to mark out his name on his patients’ wristbands so they would not know his name.      William VanWhy, one of the patients filing a lawsuit against Hyatt through the Odom Law Firm, reported that “I stayed there for about five days under Dr. Hyatt’s care. I have never seen him in my life. I’ve never met him, even though I was under his care. I asked to leave every day for the last three days and they wouldn’t let me leave.”      VanWhy’s insurance was then billed for two in-person visits during his stay, per reports, with his total charges in the tens of thousands of dollars.      Matt Lindsay of the Odom Law Firm also reported that many of his clients were chemically restrained, but never got any help in the unit. “Beyond not getting help, they got much worse, and they are still every day living with the effects of what they went through at that facility,” Lindsay said.      The initial informant about Hyatt had also reported that the psychiatrist was only on the floor for a few minutes each day and that he had no contact with patients.       Hyatt has pleaded not guilty to the two Medicaid criminal fraud charges.      One can’t help but wonder how much the spectacular – if utterly fraudulent – growth of the Springdale Behavioral Health Unit under his tenure was a factor in Hyatt achieving the position of Chairman of the Arkansas State Medical Board.      Certainly the psychiatrist did not arrive in that position because of his extraordinary and selfless care for his patients.