Tons of drugs are released into our water supply in the US, with no oversight.
The Associated Press follows up on investigations it made a year ago. As always, government tells you there’s "no safe level" of exposure to tobacco smoke (or to smokers either), but declines any criticism of Big Pharma or its waste products: "some researchers say the lack of testing amounts to a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy about whether drugmakers are contributing to water pollution."
We’re told specifically that "3 million pounds of nicotine compounds that can be used in quit-smoking patches" are among the substances detected but of course, while smokers must be totally and inexorably damned, we’re never supposed to be afraid of nicotine that Big Pharma may have blessed.
Are pharmaceuticals dumped by Big Pharma into your water really problematic? An environmental engineer who has worked for the big firms says the companies aren’t going to rat on themselves: "Obviously nobody wants to spend the time or their dime to prove this." Big Tobacco was supposed to seek out and advertise every conjecture of risk about its products, but Big Tobacco is Satanic by definition, while Big Pharma is all-holy, and therefore exempt from mandatory masochism.
Instead of researching, or even wondering about potential harm from drug pollution, the pharmaceutical firms evade hard questioning and spout vague assurances. A pharmaceutical pollution expert responds: "I have no reason to believe them or not believe them. We don’t have peer-reviewed studies to support or not support their claims."
Will Big Pharma now pony up for such "peer-reviewed" studies? Put some pressure on them and they just might: after all, they and their minions are all the usual "peers." As a matter of fact, it would only be fair if tobacco consumers got to choose the researchers and reviewers to investigate Big Pharma’s sins, but what has fairness got to do with Health Fascism?
Perhaps we and all the critters of nature are being poisoned by the pharmaceutical makers. If so the scandal will likely be kept well under cover so as not to inconvenience the heavenly sanctified companies with the cost of monitoring the toxins they spew into the environment. After all, that money can be better spent on executive bonuses, and continuation of the smoker pogrom.
We say, proclaim far and wide: there is no safe level of pharmaceutical effluvium!
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