The False Claim: Bad Products
Chapter Eleven
THE MATH:
If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.
+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.
+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.
+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.
+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.
+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.
+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.
+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.
+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to defend ourselves or others.
+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see.
+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us and keep us in Bad Wars for the past 70 years and counting.
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Part of The Pattern is that the actual truth will eventually come out. It’s just a matter of time. The Bad Companies understand this. They’ve done this enough times to know that by the time the truth arrives they will have already achieved what they set out to do and the people will be too locked in to reverse any of the bad outcomes.
From the early 1900s, we believed the false claims from the cigarette companies, for a good 50+ years. The public had no tangible good reason to assume the companies would manufacture something which could harm or kill them.
As was clearly illuminated in all the major campaigns for war in our lifetime, the lies from the campaigners battled the truth from the Watchdogs for the public’s attention and sentiment. By what we can see with our eyes, know with our reason, and feel with our hearts, we as individuals make a choice to be one of the Watchdogs seeking and disseminating the truth, or a believer and supporter of this truth. If we do not choose either of these options, by default we will be aiding and abetting the deceptive campaign. The historical outcomes of our behavior show that if we are not noticeably withholding consent we are, for all intents and purposes, giving it.
Our relationship to bad campaigns offering Bad Products is precisely the same. When it comes to Big Tobacco, Big Chemical, Big Agriculture or Big Pharma, we can either support those who bring forth the truth about their wrongdoing—with our behavior of withholding consent, of boycotting from our lives products from companies proven corrupt and dangerous—or we give our consent (actively or passively) and play a part in the dynamic that keeps the products on the market where harm is extended and compounded.
In the long-standing contest between the deceivers and the truth-tellers, the former uses Playbook tactics to silence and smear the latter. So, in the case of wars or commercial products our government subsidizes and vouches for, the average citizen can regularly remain ignorant to news of the particular deception and harm. The extent of the public’s awareness of the dangers all depends on how successful the Watchdogs are at defending against the Playbook.
BIG TOBACCO:
Unaware of the mechanics behind a public relations campaign or possible dangers in using the product, the public of 75 years ago accepted everything they saw in their magazines and on their television as real and true, which led them to believe that smoking was a good and respectable thing to do. Advertisements showing respectable people smoking—celebrities, doctors, mothers, tough cowboys and fashionable women—convinced them smoking was great because all the great people were doing it. The population in the 1950s were new to the concept of commercial propaganda so they were unaccustomed to understanding or noticing it. They naturally assumed they were thinking for themselves when they opted in to using cigarettes.
The PR reality was challenged when the first Watchdog in the form of the US Surgeon General—the intended first line of defense, the government regulatory agency—published compelling peer-reviewed scientific evidence of the harms of smoking.
The Tobacco Industry countered by issuing a press release in 19541:
“It is an obligation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee at this time to remind the public of these essential points:
There is no conclusive scientific proof of a link between smoking and cancer.
Medical research points to many possible causes of cancer…
The millions of people who derive pleasure and satisfaction from smoking can be reassured that every scientific means will be used to get all the facts as soon as possible.”
Big Tobacco would repeat these and other lies for the next 40 years until a Federal court forced them to publicly admit the truth.
In his book A Question of Intent2, former FDA commissioner, David Kessler wrote:
“Devised in the 1950s and ’60s, the tobacco industry’s strategy was embodied in a script written by the lawyers. Every tobacco company executive in the public eye was told to learn the script backwards and forwards, no deviation was allowed. The basic premise was simple—smoking had not been proved to cause cancer. Not proven, not proven, not proven—this would be stated insistently and repeatedly. Inject a thin wedge of doubt, create controversy, never deviate from the prepared line. It was a simple plan and it worked.”
It still works, for anyone who uses the Playbook Big Tobacco crafted. Most humans would not use a tool which deceives other humans so they get sick and die. But some do. And they will amass great power doing it.
The tools we use to oppose these beings are goodwill, kindness, and truth. Guided by these virtues, Watchdogs strive to clear the obstacles laid by the Playbook in order to serve humanity by informing and warning of the deception and harm.
Over the many decades, Big Tobacco repeated their mantras “We believe the products we make are not injurious to health.”
The Watchdogs brought forth the evidence that the products were injurious. Due to the courage of whistleblowers and tenacity of litigators, millions of pages of internal tobacco documents came to light which laid out their strategy and documented its implementation. It was also revealed that the industry themselves had evidence of the dangers but kept it secret.
A British American Tobacco subsidiary wrote in 1963: “Nicotine is addictive. We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug.”3
It would be fifteen years before the National Institute of Drug Abuse officially confirmed to the public that nicotine is addictive.
So, this is the False Claim game played by the Bad Companies and the War Machine—truth battling lies. Many years and decades go by as the “debate” runs its course and before the public can be fully informed. A reminder of the Big Tobacco stakes—at least 8 million people die every year from using their products.
BIG CHEMICAL:
In the many decades since DuPont began manufacturing Teflon in 1945, the company has been considered one of the most respected in the United States. Before the lawsuits against them began to force the issue, the public had no clear (clearly visible) reason to mistrust their business practices or products. And even to this day, the truth about forever chemicals and the devastation they cause is only getting support from a small minority of the population.
The fluorochemical products invented by 3M were manufactured by a relatively small number of major chemical companies who sold these base chemicals to thousands of manufacturers who incorporated the substances into a broad range of goods which led to mass market saturation of products containing forever chemicals. They were marketed as “the solution for your problems.” The Big Chemical scientists published academic papers on their unusual properties and applications which have “become an integral part of the machinery that runs today’s economy…”4
While neither the public nor the FDA had any clue about the toxicity of these chemicals for half a century, a few individual Watchdogs would fight to get out the truth.
Over a 20 year legal battle against DuPont, lawyer Robert Bilott exposed that the Bad Company knew for decades that PFOA was escaping its plant, leaching into nearby drinking water, accumulating in the blood of its workers, and harming animals tested in its own labs.
Another tenacious Attorney General, Lori Swanson, sued 3M on behalf of the people of Minnesota. The information brought forth through discovery disclosed that as early as the 1960s, 3M had been conducting in-house studies of the fluorochemicals on rats and monkeys with alarming results (in one all the monkeys died, in another, they developed lesions on their spleen, lymph nodes, and bone marrow—organs central in maintaining the body’s immune defenses), leaving the scientists to definitively conclude “a possible human health problem” and an urgent need to study the longterm safety on humans.
But, because the chemical companies chose not to do these safety studies on humans, and chose to bury the animal studies, Dupont and 3M could still deceptively repeat the “Not harmful / has not been proven” mantra. This is a favorite trick of the deceivers—a lack of evidence proves the accusation of harm false. It only becomes true when someone smuggles the evidence out from the shadows and into the light.
These Watchdog legal teams were able to get their hands on minutes from the 1979 3M meeting to prove that eight staff members were shown the catastrophic conclusions from their in-house studies and officially decided that the toxicity “does not constitute a substantial risk and should not be reported [to the EPA] at this time.”
You can watch the 3M executives and scientists admitting to the cover-up and willful delay in this video made by the local news in Minnesota (local news often ends up the more responsible journalistic watchdog compared to captured mainstream media). The news story condenses the jaw-dropping level of deception which is only now coming out, 50 years after the fact.
It would take Kris Hansen, a 3M scientist to turn whistleblower, to bring forward her discovery that the Bad Company’s signature chemical product was in the blood of almost every American.
Another 22-year veteran of DuPont, Glen Evers, blew the whistle that DuPont failed to tell the FDA of internal studies showing that the poisonous chemical coating comes off food wrapping in greater concentrations than thought when the FDA first approved its use.
And yet, after the Watchdogs blew their whistles, litigated, won the lawsuits, and put into the public record the evidence of how environmentally hazardous these products are, Dupont still in recent years scores very high on environmental and corporate governance metrics, including being named one of the 100 Best Corporate Citizens. And its fraudulent mantra, that “protecting the people and the planet is a core pillar” of its strategy, remains the bold header on its website.
Even as they pay out the settlements for causing the catastrophic damage, 3M and DuPont still will not admit liability and maintain that their products were safely made and used.
But, the truth according to environmental chemistry studies from Harvard University and elsewhere, is that the forever chemicals are “reducing public health on an incredibly large scale”. This immense flood of toxicity causing widespread disease has still only amounted to limited public knowledge on the subject, due to the effectiveness of the Playbook tactics currently in play.
BIG AGRICULTURE:
Since 1974, consumers believed the false claims from Monsanto that the herbicide RoundUp was “safer than table salt” and “practically non-toxic” and “environmentally friendly”. The product has been widely used in our yards and saturated commercial farming ever since. The company had to eventually drop these slogans after being taken to court in 1996 for false and misleading advertising.
Even though Monsanto’s internal studies submitted to the EPA in 1981 provided ample evidence that glyphosate caused cancer and other health problems, the key documents were classified as ‘trade secrets’ and never published.5
35 years later, The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) officially concluded that there is “sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity” based on laboratory studies.
The story of the retaliation against the IARC from the Bad Company was told by award-winning journalism in The French newspaper Le Monde, who published an investigative series known as the “Monsanto Papers,” reporting on the all-out “effort to destroy the United Nations’ cancer agency by any means possible” in order to protect its blockbuster product. This assault which far surpassed in intensity and maliciousness any Big Tobacco strong-arming must be read to be believed.
The public, unless they read the French article or the book of the same name The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice, would have no way of knowing about the lawsuit and the dangers of RoundUp.
At the time of this commercial in 2022, a collaboration between three environmental Watchdogs were publishing the actual truth in a report called Merchants of Poison.
(* Since publishing this chapter, the internet has taken down all recent RoundUp commercials from youtube so the above link now reroutes to the shopping page for all the RoundUp products. Not sure why…:)
However, our EPA still sides with Monsanto (now Bayer AG) that there are no risks of concern to human health with glyphosate and it is unlikely to be a human carcinogen. So, the “debate” continues…
Despite the EPA still parroting the company’s false claims, hundreds of thousands of judges have forced Bayer to pay settlements to the victims whose Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma was proven in court to be caused by their use of RoundUp. At the heart of their defense, Bayer’s legal teams repeatedly point to the regulatory agencies’ conclusions that glyphosate is not a cancer risk. But the lawyers for the plaintiffs presented Monsanto’s internal emails which show that those same regulators were being manipulated or fooled by the company’s pressure.
Globally, the number of new cases of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (NHL) rose significantly from 255,667 in 1990 to 604,554 in 2021, an enormous spike.
During the successful RoundUp campaign and subsequent market domination, the Bad Companies of Big Agriculture created a commercial farming revolution built on the use of glyphosate and with the introduction of their RoundUp Ready (GMO) crops.
The false claims here are that global adoption of their pesticides is vital to fighting world hunger and of course that they are completely safe.
In 2015, a peer-reviewed statement in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe, signed by 300 scientists, physicians and scholars, asserts there is no scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs. They say the claim of scientific consensus on GMOs frequently repeated in the media is “an artificial construct that has been falsely perpetuated.”
This method to prove GMOs are safe, utilizes the common and extremely unscrupulous umbrella mantra of “the science is settled”, that a consensus about the safety has already been reached and there is no need to discuss or study the subject any further. This, ironically, is the opposite of how science works.
In 2017, the UN published a report stating that the claim that pesticides are essential to feed the global population is a myth, and officially accused the agro-industry giants of “systematic denial of harms” and “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics”.
The report also confirmed the magnitude of the damage inflicted by these chemicals: “Chronic exposure to pesticides has been linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, hormone disruption, developmental disorders and sterility.”
To create their manufactured revolution in how humans grow food, Monsanto went beyond just marketing to creating a nefarious system where they had oppressive control over private farming business and practices, forcing farmers to use only their patented seeds and pay the company royalties for them.6
In May 2003, the Watchdog Center for Food Safety released a report called Monsanto vs U.S. Farmers which found that farmers had become subject to harassment, investigation, and prosecution by Monsanto over supposed infringement of its seed patents and technology. The result has been a total assault on the foundations of farming traditions that have endured for centuries in this country and millennia around the world, including one of the oldest, the right to save and replant crop seed.
Monsanto built a department of 75 employees and set aside an annual budget of $10 million for the sole purpose of investigating and prosecuting farmers for patent infringement to keep them enslaved to the glyphosate pesticides and GMO crops. The Bad Company still persists with the justification that their products are the only way to feed the world.
Yet in 2015, The Rodale Institute’s 30-year Farming Systems Trial (FST) demonstrated that organic farming systems are more profitable, require less energy, and build more soil health compared to conventional systems. Key findings include organic systems outperforming conventional ones in drought years, producing comparable average yields over time, and producing 40% fewer greenhouse gases.
BIG PHARMA:
The false claim trajectory from Big Pharma companies can follow a slightly different path than other products as they first must deceive the medical community who will then be used as a proxy to sell the product to the population. It is a still-present and distressing enigma for Americans to ponder how opioids became so fatally overprescribed when they were previously understood to be addictive, that development of tolerance results in dose escalation, and that dependence would make quitting difficult. The mystery is only answered with the harsh fact that the prescribing physicians believed a Bad Company’s false claim, for over a decade.
Purdue Pharma used their great wealth, power and influence on its marketing campaigns that claimed that their new painkiller Oxycontin was safe. They spent up to $200 million a year on this. Stating in audiotapes, brochures, videotapes, literature and its website, they claimed that “the risk of addiction was less than one percent.” More than 5000 physicians, pharmacists, and nurses attended all-expenses-paid symposiums, where they were recruited and trained for Purdue’s national speaker bureau, to influence doctors’ prescribing.
If a Bad Company can get enough people to parrot their false claim, a lie can become a “consensus”.
This campaign’s lies minimized the risks and exaggerated the benefits of their drug, and opioid prescribing surged. This doubled the rate of opioid-related deaths in the U.S. from 1999 to 2010.7.
I honestly can’t say where the Watchdogs were in those first years of Oxycontin. Communities everywhere were seeing the devastation with their own eyes. The doctors prescribing the pills and the pharmacists handing them out to longer and longer lines of worse and worse-looking citizens must have seen it with their own eyes. Hepatitis C cases were skyrocketing. Methadone clinics were being overrun with people trying to get off the drugs.
But eventually, in 2007, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Purdue who pled guilty to misleading the public about OxyContin’s risk of addiction and agreed to pay $600 million. Three top executives were charged with a felony and sentenced to community service.
A year after this trial, Carol Panara, who would become a whistleblower, joined Purdue Pharma as a sales representative. As doctors were now finally showing concern about addiction, she was trained to address this by suggesting patients could be experiencing “pseudoaddiction.” It’s a fun/not-fun read to see how they introduced another new fraudulent claim to wriggle past the now-exposed one, that suggested patients might only appear to be addicted, when in fact they’re just in pain.
Pleading guilty to felonies did not stop Purdue from selling Oxycontin but it did cut into their profits some. So they hired one of the biggest global consulting firms McKinsey and Company to help revive their sales. McKinsey advised Purdue on how to “turbocharge” the sales pipeline for OxyContin by intensifying marketing to High Value Prescribers, included prescribers who were writing opioid prescriptions for uses that were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary. For both Purdue and McKinsey, this was a financial success.
And so the Bad Company continued to fuel the opioid crisis for another 12 years between their first court case and the last one in 2019 which led Purdue to file for bankruptcy, after being forced to pay as much as $12 billion over time. A report from 2017 estimated that 130 people were dying every day in the U.S. from opioid-related overdoses, and that number has only increased ever since.
This is just the most famous case of how the Big Pharma False Claim game works. Bad Company releases a bad drug, illegally markets it as safe and effective, buries the evidence of harm, the patients suffer the bad outcomes, usually death. If there is a Watchdog to draw attention to the harm there may be a settlement where the company pays a small percentage of their annual profits and then they continue on selling other products for more profit.
This DOJ press conference was about the 2013 settlement with Johnson & Johnson for illegally marketing the antipsychotic drug Risperdal for unapproved uses in children and the elderly.
In 2022, J&J settled a lawsuit for $5 billion for its contribution to the opioid epidemic. Like the rest, the company was accused of downplaying the risk of addiction when manufacturing, marketing, and supplying various opioid drugs.
J&J is still currently litigating and settling tens of thousands of lawsuits over its baby powder, found to contain cancer-causing asbestos, which the company was aware of since 1971.
Before Purdue, pharma company Merck held the (dis)honor for the highest settlement paid, $6.85 billion, over its arthritis drug Vioxx causing heart attacks and strokes . The scandal also revealed that the drug’s manufacturer manipulated clinical trials and downplayed the drug’s risks to doctors and the public. Merck was also found to have attempted to discredit and silence doctors who were critical of Vioxx with a nefarious “hitlist”.
In 2000, American Home Products Corp. agreed to pay $3.75 billion after evidence showing its weight loss drug combo “fen-phen” caused heart valve damage and a fatal lung condition. The company was accused of withholding information that would have warned Fen Phen users of the risks involved so they could continue to sell their popular diet drug.
In 2012, GlaxoSmithKline settled a $3 billion deal, pleading guilty to off-label marketing (pushing the anti-depressent Wellbutrin for uses not approved by the FDA and promoting another Paxil for use in children despite no evidence of efficacy); and for failing to report safety data to the FDA for its diabetes drug Avandia; and for paying kickbacks to doctors to encourage them to prescribe its drugs.
GSK just last year had to pay another $2.2 billion to settle lawsuits for its heartburn drug Zantac causing cancer. Despite this settlement charge, GSK’s profit grew by 5% that quarter, driven by robust sales in its oncology products (cancer treatments).
Drugmaker Eli Lilly paid a $1.42 billion settlement in 2009, for pushing Zyprexa for off-label uses in children and elderly dementia patients and sought to coerce physicians to use the drug as primary care despite its label.
AstraZeneca has been involved in several settlements, most notably a $520 million settlement in 2010 to resolve allegations of illegally marketing the antipsychotic drug Seroquel for unapproved uses. More recently, the company reached a $425 million settlement in 2023 to resolve more product liability claims related to its Nexium and Prilosec medications.
In 2009, Pfizer paid out $894 million to those who suffered heart attacks and strokes, due to fraud in the promotion of its drugs Bextra and Celebrex which concealed the risks.
You can search on “all Pfizer settlement history” to see the long list of the many other crimes and pay offs from this company, as it would take up too much room to list them all here. In fact, you can search on any pharmaceutical company for a list of lawsuits to see where they have run the False Claim game to the detriment of society.
All these legal issues and fees (and all those heart problems, strokes, overdoses and cancers) were just momentary set backs to the companies’ success and profits. In all cases, except for the bankrupted Purdue, the corporate stocks have shown stability and continued to rise post-settlements. And many of the Big Pharma giants, like Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and AstraZeneca, have recently made very sweet deals with our U.S. government for guaranteed extended profits.
So, the products were created and they were sold to us. Unsuspecting us. The process started off just fine. We were smoking our cigarettes, using our plastic products, drinking our water supply. We were spraying our weeds, eating our genetically modified food, eating the food wrapped in chemical packaging. We were going to the doctor when we needed relief from pain and taking the prescribed pills for all our other ailments.
But—the products contained a hidden harm. And the Bad Companies did not disclose this to us, instead they covered it up. There is no law or oath that can stop them from doing it all again.
This is the Pattern, and this is our system. It is truth vs deception—which will we believe? It is truth-tellers vs deceivers—who will we believe?
And, how much damage will be done while we wrestle with these questions.
I truly appreciate anyone taking the time to face this piece of our reality. Our new strategies absolutely depend upon the examination. We can only produce different outcomes if we look closely at the methods used on us, from a century ago to the very present, which have produced terrible outcomes. We need to fully understand each part of the methodology and remember it. We may never figure out how to stop them from deceiving, but let’s really try hard to figure out what exactly it is that still allows us to be tricked by their deceit.
+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us to buy and use Bad Products that cause disease and death. =
We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….