Johnson & Johnson Ordered To Pay $572 Million For Opioid Addiction Crisis
Yesterday, an Oklahoma judge Thad Balkman, of Cleveland County District Court, ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $572.1 million to the state for fueling an opioid epidemic with deceptive marketing practices.
The shares for Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) were up after the ruling because the sum is said to be substantially less than shareholders had expected. The state’s attorney general was seeking $17 billion.
The expectation was this was going to be a $1.5 billion to $2 billion fine. $572 million is a much lower number than had been feared.”
The state’s lawyers said Johnson & Johnson is an opioid “kingpin,” arguing that the marketing efforts caused doctors to over-prescribe the addictive painkillers which lead to a surge in drug addiction and overdose deaths in Oklahoma.
The payment is said to be used for the care and treatment of opioid addicts.
More than 2,000 additional opioid lawsuits are due to go to trial in Ohio in October unless the parties reach a settlement.
Of course, Johnson & Johnson vigorously denied wrongdoing and says it will appeal the decision.
In 2017 Johnson & Johnson was ordered to pay $417 million and then in 2018, they were ordered to pay $4.7 billion for asbestos in Johnson & Johnson talcum powder. Johnson & Jonhson is also one of the top five vaccine manufactures.
EPA Blocks Glyphosate Warning On Labels
Glyphosate was added to California’s Proposition 65 list of carcinogens in July 2017. Products containing Glyphosate, like Monsanto’s RoundUp, were supposed to have warning labels on the packaging that stated potential cancer risks. The glyphosate cancer warnings were scheduled to be on the packaging of glyphosate products in summer of 2018 But in 2018 Monsanto challenged the law and a federal judge temporarily banned California’s plans to add cancer warning labels on glyphosate-based products. And now the EPA has stated they will “no longer approve product labels claiming glyphosate is known to cause cancer.”
The EPA will not allow labels that indicate a link between glyphosate and cancer. Registrants selling products that contain glyphosate have 90 days from August 7th to show compliance removing the warning.
The State of California’s much criticized Proposition 65 has led to misleading labeling requirements for products, like glyphosate, because it misinforms the public about the risks they are facing.”
This means that while Costco bans glyphosate and Bayer/Monsanto is facing more than 10,000 lawsuits and losing millions of dollars in those lawsuits (maybe billions soon) for the damage glyphosate can do to one’s health, it won’t have a warning label, but coffee and supplements sold in California will have cancer warnings labels.
Your Fish Oil May Be Bad For You
Due to the way they’re processed, many fish oil supplements contain synthetic fish oil. DHA and EPA from fish oil are triglycerides, which are highly bioavailable. In most fish oil supplements, the DHA and EPA have been converted to ethyl esters — a synthetic substrate with low bioavailability that comes with health concerns.
A study, recently published in Annals of Internal Medicine on July 9 of 2019, examined the effectiveness of supplements and diets to prevent cardiovascular disease. The study looked at reviews and trials that encompasses 277 trials and 992,129 participants. They found that Omega-3 products yielded “low-certainty” evidence that they were associated with reduced risk for myocardial infarction and coronary heart disease.
One of the many problems with such medical studies is the products used. Some studies have highlighted this issue with fish oils.
A recent article from Dr. Mercola’s site explains this issue in depth.
Whittel estimates about 98% of the omega-3 products on the market are inferior (and perhaps even toxic) due to the way the fish are caught and processed — a summary of which is provided in the graphic below.
In short, in order to render the rancid fish safe for human consumption, it must be cleaned, and what’s left at the end of this process is a synthetic ethyl ester omega-3 oil. The reason why some brands are able to provide you with higher concentrations of DHA, for example, is also because of this deconstruction and reconstruction process, and this appears to be part and parcel of Amarin’s complaint.
The processing most fish oils undergo transforms the omega-3 fats from their triglyceride form into an ethyl ester form. In fish, the DHA and EPA occur in the form of triglycerides, which are the most bioavailable. In most commercial fish oil supplements, however, the DHA and EPA are delivered in the form of ethyl esters.
Mercola recommends making sure your fish oil contains DHA and EPA in their triglyceride form. The company needs to process the fish oil the right way. Cold-pressed, minimally processed fish oil with triglyceride DHA and EPA is more expensive to produce.
We recommend Carlson and Nordic Naturals. Green Lifestyle Market carries Nordic Naturals fish oil.
Mercola also recommends krill oil, which has greater bioavailability.
Chipotle Says No To Fake Meat Because It’s Too Processed
Chipotle provides a menu that contains only 51 ingredients, less than every other major restaurant chain. Chipotle offers “Plant-powered Lifestyle Bowls” and they use sofritas as their meat substitute for their vegetarian customers, which is made from tofu. Chief Executive Officer Brian Niccol says that the fake meat products are too processed for their restaurant.
We have spoken to those folks and unfortunately it wouldn’t fit in our ‘food with integrity’ principles because of the processing, as I understand it, that it takes to make a plant taste like a burger,” Niccol said in an interview. “If there’s a way for them to do this that would match our ‘food with integrity’ principles, I’m sure we would continue talking with them.”
Beyond Meat’s CEO responded with an invitation, suggesting that Beyond Meat’s factory is much better than what they’d find visiting a factory-farm.
You can come to our facility anytime. Don’t call me, just knock on the door. I invite you to do the same with all of Chipotle’s meat-processing facilities. They won’t let you, and if they did, you wouldn’t want to see it.”
Many consumers are looking towards more sustainable foods and becoming more aware of the environmental costs and animal cruelty involved with factory farming. But consumers are also becoming more concerned with health problems with processed foods and GMOs.
Both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods develop their faux meat with highly processed plant-based ingredients. Beyond Meat’s uses pea protein as their main ingredient. Impossible Foods GMO soy and heme which is made from genetically modified yeast.
Medical Mistakes Harm More Than 10% Of Patients and Is #3 Leading Cause Of Death
According to a new report published The BMJ medical journal, more than 1 in 10 patients are harmed in the course of their medical care. Half of those injuries are said to be preventable. Of the preventable errors, 12 percent led to patients being permanently disabled or killed.
The study looked at 70 earlier reports and covered more than 300,000 patients.
Our study finds that most harm relates to medication, and this is one core area that preventative strategies could focus on.”
This was an international study. Two decades ago a report from the Institute of Medicine showed that medical errors resulted in the death of 98,000 Americans each year. A recent Johns Hopkins study concludes 250,000 people in the U.S. die from medical errors yearly but other reports show numbers as high as 440,000 a year.
How Many Acres of Hemp Would Stop Global Warming? – Thought Experiment
I got curious about carbon sequestration and did some math.
According to my sources, we have about 770,000,000,000 (770 billion) tons of excess carbon dioxide that we need to remove from our atmosphere.
One ton of carbon equals 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide (carbon dioxide has two oxygen molecules for every carbon).
So we need to remove 210,000,000,000 tons of carbon from the air.
One tree removes 13 pounds of carbon per year. Let’s give it a ten-year lifespan for this purpose. One tree sequesters 130 pounds of carbon in a ten year time period.
A forest contains about 100 trees per acre.
So an acre of trees over a ten year period can sequester 13,000 pounds or 6.5 tons of carbon.
So we need about 32,300,000,000 (32.3 billion) acres of trees planted to capture the excess carbon within a decade.
And this assumes we don’t add any more C02 to the atmosphere. Plus we are losing 200,000 acres of rainforest every day (73,000,000 acres a year), so that too would have to stop.
What about hemp?
Glad you asked! An acre of hemp can absorb 4.2 tons of carbon per year per acre. That’s 42 tons in a decade. But we can’t just chop down the hemp, let it decompose, and plant more. We need to do something with the hemp, or else much of that carbon goes back into the air. That’s where hempcrete (we need this bad, look it up!) and a variety of textiles and other uses come in! We can make much better concrete out of hemp and concrete is a massive source of C02 output (Cement is the source of about 8% of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions).
So if we only planted hemp instead of the trees we need (obviously we should do both) we would need 5,000,000,000 (5 billion) acres of hemp. Let’s add another billion acres for fertilizer production and transportation and other production-C02 costs.
Google Removed Natural Health Websites From Search Results – List of Alternative Search Engines
The internet has increased our level of awareness to unprecedented heights. For better and for worse, we have had a freedom of information that we have never enjoyed before. One major drawback has been fake news (though the phrase has been co-opted to mean news one disagrees with). Today social media sites are using fake news and other disinformation as an excuse to censor alternative news and information.
A few years ago we saw the writing on the wall and we put our energy towards ensuring we ranked well on the search engines – primarily Google because they account for more than 95% of search engine web traffic.
But on June 3rd, Google had a major algorithm change, which nearly eliminated the organic search results for natural health websites including Green Med Info, Mercola,DrAxe.com, Naturalnews.com, and ours.
We agree that disinformation is a problem but questioning the prevailing wisdom, raising concerns, and alternative news is imperative for a fair democracy. Censorship is not what we need.
The problem of fake news isn’t solved by hoping for a referee, but rather because we as citizens, we as users of these services, help each other. We talk and we share and we point out what is fake. We point out what is true. The answer to bad speech is not censorship, the answer to bad speech is more speech. We have to exercise and spread the idea that critical thinking matters, now more than ever, given the fact that lies seem to be getting more popular.”
Google today is not only a weapon for promoting the pharmaceutical agenda but now also a drug company itself. During the past six years, Google’s parent company Alphabet has launched two pharmaceutical companies. In 2013, it founded Calico, run by Genentech’s former CEO Arthur Levinson. Calico operates an R&D facility in the San Francisco Bay Area for the discovery of treatments associated with age-related diseases. Two years later, Alphabet founded Verily Life Sciences (previously Google Life Sciences). Both pharma companies are partnering with other drug corporations. Recently, Verily has partnered with the European pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline to form a new drug company, Galvani Bioelectronics for the development of “bioelectronic medicines.” The collaboration is costing the companies $715 million, and the new firm is being chaired by Glaxo’s former chairman of its global vaccines business.
