ALL THIS SCARY DRUG INDUSTRY NEWS AND NOWHERE TO SMOKE IT ALL AWAY

In his latest blast of election fear-mongering, U.S. Vice-President
Dick Cheney warned that Al Qaeda is seeking nukes and that'll be the
end of us if Americans don't elect him. Quite a choice: nuclear
annihilation or the kind, grandfatherly hand of Dick Cheney thrusting
a gun in your back.

No wonder I've drifted to the edge of depression. Nothing seems to be
going right out there. If you believe the polls and the "experts",
Bush will be re-elected and the environment will degenerate into a
continuous catastrophe of extreme weather events. It almost makes me
wonder whether Dick is earning something on the side promoting
antidepressants, in addition to his tireless work boosting the sales
of weapons and oil services.

Not to joke about a serious matter. Depression can be a
life-threatening illness. So when good diet, exercise, plenty of
regular sleep and shooting the TV don't do the trick, perhaps it's not
a bad thing to let some legitimate medical authority introduce you to
one of the popular and lucrative members of the SSRI (Selective
Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) family.

Of course, I'd like feel confident about ingesting that nice clean,
extensively researched and tested pill but I'm a little worried about
the recent spate of bad publicity about the side effects. Last week an
advisory panel to the US Food and Drug Administration warned that
children taking antidepressant drugs which include Prozac, Paxil,
Zoloft, Fluoxetine, Effexor and Celexa may be at an increased risk for
suicidal behaviour and voted 15-to-8 to advise the government to
require a prominent "black box" warning label on the
medications.

Many of the panelists noted with alarm that except for Prozac, none of
the antidepressants have been approved for treating depression in
children. Once the FDA puts its rubber stamp on a drug, doctors are
free to prescribe it "off label" for conditions not specifically
endorsed by the agency.

Consumer and patient advocates have complained that the FDA, many
physicians and the drug manufacturers themselves have known about
these dangers for years and that the standards used to approve these
drugs are appallingly low.

Speaking of which, a heavily censored report was grudgingly released
by UBC concerning serious ethical breaches before 2001 when the
university's clinical research ethics board was basing its reviews of
proposed new drug research trials on brief summaries instead of
detailed project protocols. Canadian and U.S. federal regulations
require detailed review of these lengthy protocols to ensure
volunteers (or 'human guinea pigs', if you prefer) are fully informed
of the risks in participating in drug and experimental treatment trials.

University officials claim they have corrected these problems but are
refusing to release the censored part of the report because the
information, "would constitute harm to the financial interests of UBC
and other public bodies if disclosed." - those other public bodies, I
suppose, being the drug companies pouring millions of research dollars
into cash-starved universities to conduct their careful medical research.

I confess, my confidence in the pharmaceutical industry and our
regulatory agencies was slightly shaken, if not stirred. So I stuck my
head into the heavily-busted Da Kine shop on the Drive to see if they
were still retailing any of that relatively harmless cannabis. There
was a line of five hopeful customers at the till, down from the usual
queue of 35 out the door. But our hopeful expressions crumpled like
pop cans when the clerk declared emphatically, "We have no marijuana
products of any kind for sale for the foreseeable future."

"But I have Dick Cheney-related depression!" I complained, brandishing my
self-diagnosed medical form. He shrugged helplessly so I trudged home and
made a triple truffle chocolate malted, pet the cat and fired a whole clip
into the television. Prognosis: better.