Big Pharma: 2+ lobbyists per lawmaker

This video is from CNN’s American Morning, broadcast Oct. 22, 2009.

60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft Reports On Drug Lobbyists’ Role in Passing Bill That Keeps Drug Prices High

If you have ever wondered why the cost of prescription drugs in the United States are the highest in the world or why it’s illegal to import cheaper drugs from Canada or Mexico, you need look no further than the pharmaceutical lobby and its influence in Washington, D.C.

According to a report by the Center for Public Integrity, congressmen are outnumbered two to one by lobbyists for an industry that spends roughly $100 million a year in campaign contributions and lobbying expenses to protect its profits.

One reason those profits have exceeded Wall Street expectations is the Medicare prescription drug bill. It was passed more than three-and-a-half years ago, but as 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft reports, its effects are still reverberating through the halls of Congress, providing a window into how the lobby works.  (read more here.)

Drugmakers’ victories in Washington could keep health costs high, trade office warns

The pharmaceutical industry spent $110 million in just the first half of 2009 in its efforts to influence health care reform, part of a booming lobbying effort that now has 2.3 drug lobbyists on Capitol Hill for every member of Congress, a new investigative report reveals.

Writing in Time magazine, Karen Tumulty and Michael Scherer report that Big Pharma’s efforts to protect their interests in health care reform amounts to an expenditure of $609,000 per day, and “they’re getting a pretty good return on their investment,” Tumulty told CNN’s John King on Thursday.

“It’s not just the lobbyists,” Tumulty said. “The money goes into a lot of other things. It finances a lot of so-called research, expert reports, consultant reports. A lot of do-good organizations are springing up with names that sound like quite beneficial organizations, but you look at them and it turns out the whole thing is being run by drug companies.”

As evidence of drugmakers’ clout on the Hill, Tumulty pointed to a major victory for the group earlier this summer, when the House and Senate voted to extend patent protection of biotechnology drugs — biologics, as they are known — by an additional 12 years.

The move to grant them extra protection from generic drug makers was opposed by the Federal Trade Commission, which argued that extending patent protection could stifle innovation and keep drug costs high.

“These bio-tech drugs — they’re miracle drugs — are probably going to be something like half of all new drugs being approved,” Tumulty said. “And the big fight right now is whether there will ever be a generic equivalent for these drugs that cost $20,000, $40,000 or even $200,000 per year to administer.”

Tumulty noted that it’s practically impossible to trace all the money being spent in Washington to influence health care reform, because “it’s going not only into the campaign coffers of elected officials and salaries of lobbyists, but also into organizations that are essentially front groups for these interests, and into scientific-sounding consultant reports.”

Tumulty warned that the American public could be the “losers” in all of this.

“On some of these key questions you’ve got to say the lobbyists are getting pretty much everything they’re asking for,” she told CNN’s John Roberts. “And considering how important it is to bring down health care costs in the long run, I think the rest of us are the losers.”

(Source: Raw Story)

See Also:  Bloomberg.com Six Lobbyists Per Lawmaker Work on Health Overhaul (Update2)

Two Paths Emerge For Full Legalization Of Marijuana In California

As supporters of a proposed ballot initiative to fully legalize pot  turned in their signatures this week, a spokesman for San Francisco’s Tom Ammiano said the assemblyman would also reintroduce his own decriminalization bill in the state legislature. “We are planning on reintroducing the bill in early- or mid-February,” Ammiano’s spokesman, Quintin Mecke, told the Weekly.

The bill would fly in the face of federal law by removing pot from a list of controlled substances and regulating it like alcohol, with with the over-21 crowd being able to buy it, grow it and have it.

Ammiano’s bill would tax pot to the tune of $50 an ounce, an amount the state Board of Equalization estimates could bring the state a much-needed $1.3 billion a year in revenues.

While the state initiative would allow local governments to decide whether or not to outlaw or control sales (like states with “wet and dry” alcohol counties), Ammiano’s bill would establish a state regulatory body to license growers, wholesalers and retailers.

“Marijuana purists are concerned that the ballot initiative may not go far enough in fully legalizing marijuana,” Drug Policy Alliance spokesman Stephen Gutwillig told the Weekly. “It was drafted to appeal to as many voters as possible. We endorse both of them. The decriminalization of marijuana for adults is the most important thing.”

Ammiano’s original bill died in a committee as time ran out on last year’s legislative session.

(Source: Dennis Romero LAWeekly)

Mexican Cartels Join DEA in Opposition of U.S. State Marijuana Laws

The DEA and other federal agencies want to incarcerate people and overly regulate this simple herb and you know who is on their team? That’s right, the Mexican drug cartels.

Source: Tim King Salem-News.com This nation is heading for a showdown with the Drug Enforcement Agency, a government arm nearing rogue status. They have been running awry of state laws in order to keep the pharmaceutical and insurance industries intact. The DEA is an enemy of the emerging data that keeps painting marijuana an even richer tone of green, and their interests a sootier shade of black.

They are the last vestiges of the Bush Administration’s whacked out interpretation of how things should be. I don’t know about you but I’m tired of the feds shoveling sh*t over the vibrant people of America.

The moral compasses of these so-called cops is soaring somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle. The centerpoints of the new campaign are both LA and San Diego Counties, where the will of the people is utterly devalued.

Marijuana never should have been criminalized and only a blind, closed minded society would seek to keep it that way. Clearly, it is not the will of the people that is at stake, but the profits of the above mentioned industries.

The feds want to lock up your sons and daughters, parents and grandparents, because of a plant that grows naturally in the ground. Pot laws are a farce and a case of extremely willful prejudice. Laws against marijuana are rooted in bigotry toward Mexicans and African-Americans.

Jack Herer, author of “The Emperor Wears No Clothes”, wrote the book of all books on this subject. He exposed the process used to vilify and then criminalize this herb which helps Americans by the millions.

The DEA and other federal agencies want to incarcerate people and overly regulate this simple herb and you know who is on their team? That’s right, the Mexican drug cartels. They are the DEA’s friends.

Only a complete simpleton misses the connection.

Keeping marijuana illegal and non-commercial only helps big pharma, insurance, DEA job security, and these cold blooded drug dealing killers south of the border. The United States is economically strapped and the DEA wants to keep it that way.

In my view that makes them a danger to our very existence. The agency should be disbanded, they had their chance and they have miserably failed. In their heyday they added to the problem of “drugs in America” through their complicity with the Ronald Reagan/Ollie North era guns for drugs programs operated by the DEA’s sister agency, the CIA.

Our writers Dr. Phil Leveque and Allan Erickson have written about this at length, along with Norm Stamper, former Seattle Police Chief, who is an active proponent and member of the forward thinking group called LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

Americans have been had and now the DEA wants to rub salt in our wounds by proving that they don’t have to follow state laws; as if they are somehow above it, as if somehow there is no United States at all.

People of the older generations might as well get it through their heads that practically everyone today either has or does use marijuana. Again, as Dr. Leveque has written hundreds of times over the years on these pages, marijuana has never caused a single death. It is an appropriate alternative to alcohol, which kills a person’s liver.

Almost every single negative thing you have ever been taught in school, or told by a police officer about marijuana, is probably not true.

Conservative Judge Says Legalize Drugs

Retired California Superior Court Judge James Gray says we can hurt gangs and cartels by legalizing and regulating all drugs after spending years locking people up in the “war on drugs.” Judge Gray is now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), which any citizen can join.