Cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, wikileaks, and our right to know

From preventing an update of smoking labels, to ending an independent pharmaceutical review agency, to waging war on wikileaks, corporations and governments are cracking down on our democratic right to information.

SMOKING GUN

     As I've written in other posts, cigarettes are but one of many carcinogens, and blaming smoking for the entire cancer epidemic distracts from toxic chemicals and workplaces over which people have little control, individualizes the causes of cancer, and can turn into moralizing against "bad behaviour" instead of addressing the stressful conditions of people's lives that encourage smoking. That being said, smoking is a preventable causes of death, and labels highlighting the health impacts have been shown to decrease smoking. While Canada was the first country to impose mandatory health warnings on cigarette packages, they have not changed in ten years. There was a 6-year, $4 million plan to update labels--with bigger graphics and a 1-800 national Quitline number--to be launched on May 31, World No Tobacco Day. But at the last minute the Tory government abandoned their plans, diverting focus to contraband cigarettes.
     The CBC has revealed that this decision took place after intense tobacco industry pressure:

"Health Canada's abrupt decision in September to back down from expanding warning labels on cigarette packages came after tobacco company lobbyists waged a co-ordinated, sometimes secretive lobbying campaign…The big three tobacco companies, Imperial Tobacco Canada, JTI-Macdonald Corp. and Rothmans, Benson & Hedges Inc., lobbied a combined total of 53 times in just over two years, according to the registry. When other industry associations and smaller tobacco companies are factored in, the number of 'communications' jumps to 82."

     The CBC has also revealed that many tobacco lobbyists have ties to the Tories--including Duncan Rayner (who went from director of operations for the Conservative Party to lobbyist for Imperial Tobacco), Ezra Levant (who went from Tory insider to lobbyist for Rothmans, Benson & Hedges, and now ideological defender of the carcinogenic Tar Sands), and Perrin Beatty (who went from Conservative health minister to president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, which lobbies on behalf of the tobacco industry).

ORGANIZED (CORPORATE) CRIME 
     Instead of enhancing labels, the Harper government is parotting the tobacco industry party line that focus should instead be on reducing contraband tobacco. According to professor Dave Hammond, who consulted Health Canada on the warning labels, "they use contraband as a blunt weapon to try and beat down anything else that might be effective." As lobbyist Beatty argues, "There is a significant share of the market that it is being fuelled by organized crime. Do we want to make it easier for organized criminals by eliminating the ability of other people to offer brands in competition?" So their efforts are not to reduce smoking, but to eliminate competition with tobacco company profits.

      Like the Harper government's decision to spend billions of dollars building prisons despite a falling crime rate, the hysteria about contraband tobacco goes against current trends. According statistics from Health Canada, sales in contraband cigarette consumption have declined since 2009, along with increases in brand name tobacco. Like the government's false dichotomy between "combat" and "non-combat troops" in Afghanistan, the dichotomy between contraband and brand-name tobacco diverts attention from the fact that cigarettes, like military occupations, are deadly regardless of what form they take. Cigarettes kill 45,000 Canadians a year, 100 times the number of people murdered. Instead of being tough on corporate crime, the government is coluding with it. As Cynthia Callard of Physicians for a Smoke Free Canada describes the tobacco lobby (shown previously in the great film, The Insider):

"There's no way of knowing conversations that take place over golf games or cocktail parties or people who float between one world and another...By and large they threaten, they bully, they cajole, they seduce and they purchase support and they've done that for decades. So it's no surprise that they've been successful this time and it's sadly no surprise why they're successful."

BIG PHARMA, BIG SECRETS

     Another recent sad victory for corporations is the killing of the Therapeutics Initiative, a publicly-funded group based at the University of British Columbia, that provides independent evidence-based reviews of pharmaceutical risks and benefits. Therapeutics Initiative helped expose the health risks of blockbuster drug Vioxx. Vioxx, an anti-arthritis medicine, was heavily marketed and made billions for Merck. But it increased the risk of heart attacks and killed killed more Americans than were killed in the Vietnam War. Thanks to the early warnings by Therapeutics Initative, it was kept it off the shelf in BC, saving 500 lives.
     Therapeutics Iniative has also called into question the costly and widespread use of levaquin to treat pneumonia, statins for primary prevention of heart attacks, gabapentin for chronic pain, and recently blew the whistle on a new blood-thinner. Dabigatran is set to replace coumadin as a blood thinner to prevent stroke, and has been approved by Health Canada based on a study funded by its maker, pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim. Therapeutics Iniative recently alerted the fact that it appears to increase the risk of heart attacks and stomach bleeds, but the company refuses to release all its safety data. In additition to exposing health risks of Big Pharma, Therapeutics Iniative's input to which medications will be covered by the provincial drug plan has saved the government $50 million a year and given BC the lowest average per-capita drug spending.
     But despite this life-saving, cost-saving and efficiency, the BC government (under industry pressure) cut the small $1 million required to sustain Therapeutics Iniative,  refused to hire the scientists to its advisory board, and instead will base its decisions on profit-driven pharmaceutical companies. This is the latest scandal in the corrupt world of Big Pharma (for a more detailed look into the industry, see this video).

WIKILEAKS: SUPPORT  FREEDOM OF INFORMATION

     If pressuring a government to cut funds to a review agency that saves lifes and resources isn't damning enough, how about trying to sabotage a government's lawsuit against a company for its role in the death of children with meningitis. That's what wikileaks has recently revealed about the world's largest pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, which tried to pressure the Nigerian attorney general to drop charges against Pfizer for its antibiotic's role in the death of children during a meningitis epidemic in 1996.
     Wikileaks has come under sustained attack by governments and corporations--from kicking it off internet servers to calls to assassinating its editor in chief--for the "crime" of releassing information that the public should know: about corporate corruption, military war crimes, government lies. The leak about Pfizer is just the tip of the iceberg, as wikileaks has announced it will blow the whistle on corporations after finishing the current release of diplomatic cables.
     Please sign the petition by Avaaz to defend their freedom of expression and freedom of the press. And you can donate to wikileaks through their website. There is no freedom or democracy without information, and from cigarettes to pharmaceuticals to corporate/government behaviour we have a right to know.

5 lies and 3 truths revealed by wikileaks

We all know the Iraq War was based on lies: Iraq did not pose a threat, there were no WMDs, there was no link to 9/11. The recently leaked Pentagon files reveal five more lies that are key to understanding the nature of the war, and three truths that guide future actions.

LIE #1: “WE DON'T DO BODY COUNTS” (US General Tommy Franks)

     The most obvious lie revealed by the leaked files is that the US does indeed to body counts. Through files detailed enough to provide a map of casualties across the country, the military’s own estimate show the Iraq War has killed over 100,000 people, two-thirds of them civilians.
     But the General was right in some respects. The documented death toll do not include any casualties of the initial “shock and awe” invasion, nor do they count a single casualty when the military leveled the city of Fallujah. So 100,000 is a gross underestimation of the impact of the Iraq War.

LIE #2: SUPPORTING THE TROOPS MEANS SUPPORTING THE WAR

     The second most obvious aspect of the files, and another reason why the military is in a panic, is that these files were leaked from within the military. Clearly troops are not happy with the war, and it was opposition from within the military—combined with local resistance and a  mass peace movement—that forced the US military into its humiliating defeat in Vietnam, scarring its confidence for a generation. The next lies reveal why the troops are so unhappy.

LIE #3: ABUSES REPRESENT "A FEW BAD APPLES" (Donald Rumsfeld)

     Periodic stories of civilian deaths over the years have been dismissed as isolated incidents. But according to the analysis of the files by Iraq Body Count:

“The new deaths are concentrated in small incidents, killing one or two people at a time, scattered all over Iraq, and occurring almost every day for the whole period. These are the small but relentless tragedies of this war that these logs reveal in unprecedented detail.”

    This tragedy is no accident. The government and military blamed defeat in Vietnam on Americans back home seeing photos of dead soldiers, so their solution was to use embedded media who would refuse to report the truth, and enhanced military doctrine that would reduce casualties. As the Guardian explains:

“Known since 2001 as force protection, it puts a high premium on minimising all conceivable risk by permitting troops to bypass traditional methods of detecting friend from foe in favour of extreme pre-emptive action.”

In other words, shoot first, ask questions later. This is exactly the experience of troops in Iraq, in countless home invasions and checkpoint killings. According to Joshua Key, who served a tour in Iraq before becoming coming to Canada as a war resister:

"“The running procedure was ‘Shoot first, ask questions later.’ We had no regard for the lives of the civilians around us. That was pretty evident in day-to-day actions, as well as the way we raided their homes and did everything else. There were no repercussions, no questions.”"

     Ironically, this so-called “force protection” contributed to at least 7 American soldiers getting killed and 34 injured in “friendly fire” attacks. Of course the impact on Iraqis has been much worse. In one instructive log, soldiers in an Apache helicopter hunted and killed two Iraqis who tried to surrender, after advice and orders from higher up the chain of command including a military lawyer. As the Guardian concluded, the “crew were not trigger-happy, but sought immediate advice from their superiors at all stages of the attack.” This is course will do nothing to dampen the emergence of a local resistance, a global peace movement, or anti-war opposition from within the military.

LIE #4: “WE DO NOT TORTURE” (George W. Bush)

     The most gruesome part of the leaked files is the accounts of torture of Iraqis handed over by the US military, who then refused to investigate. The scale of these events has led the UN to demand Obama investigate, charge, and compensate. According Manfred Nowak, the UN's chief investigator on torture:

“whenever they expel, extradite or hand over any detainees to the authorities of another state to assess whether or not these individuals are under specific risk of torture. If this assessment is not done, or authorities hand over detainees knowing there is a serious risk of them being subjected to torture, they violate article 3 of the UN convention that precludes torture.” 

Nowak said it would be up to the Obama administration to launch an "independent and objective" investigation with a view not only to "bring the perpetrators to justice but also to provide the victims with adequate remedy and reparation"

LIE #5: "THE AMERICAN COMBAT MISSION IN IRAQ HAS ENDED" (Barack Obama)

    After launching character assassination against Wikileak’s founder Julian Assange, and then pleading with media to not release the files, the US military responded to the leaks by shooting itself in the foot. It claimed that:

“The biggest potential damage here, we think, could be to our forces, because there are now potentially 400,000 documents in the public domain for our enemies to mine, look for vulnerabilities, patterns of behaviour, things they could exploit to wage attacks against us in the future.” 

How could this damage your forces if you ended the combat mission? The concern by the Pentagon exposes the fact that 50,000 troops remain and the war is not over.

TRUTH #1: THE IRAQ WAR IS A WAR CRIME.

    From the lies that justified the war, to the doctrine that orders soldiers to shoot civilians, to the practice of ignoring torture, wikileaks makes clear the Iraq War is a war crime. Next month former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is coming to Canada, and needs to be greeted with mass protests.

TRUTH #2: CANADIANS WERE RIGHT, HARPER/KENNEY WERE WRONG

    Canadians in their hundreds of thousands mobilized before the war and stopped our government from participating. Two prominent supporters of the war were Stephen Harper (current Prime Minister) and Jason Kenney (current Immigration Minister), who have continued to support the war by deporting US Iraq War resisters to US prisons, and declaring them criminally inadmissible to Canada. Persecuting soldiers who refuse to participate in war crimes makes Harper and Kenney complicit in war crimes.

TRUTH #3: IRAQ WAR RESISTERS WERE RIGHT.

     For 6 years US Iraq War resisters have been coming to Canada to seek refuge, and the Pentagon vindicate their reasons: they don’t want to take part in the daily widespread practice of killing civilians and ignoring torture. That they volunteered and signed a contract is completely irrelevant. The Nuremberg principles demand soldiers refuse participation in war crimes, and wikileaks proves that this is the daily experience in Iraq. Furthermore, the majority of Canadians and their MPs support war resisters.

The only rational conclusion from wikileaks is for the US to finally end its occupation of Iraq, and for Canada to welcome war resisters.