I, like many people, enjoy the blessing of good health. The freedom of being able live each day without worrying what the next day brings. Good health is one of the greatest assets a person can have. All the money in world cannot buy it and so it is important that we treat our health with the utmost reverence and exercise concern over the future of our health.
Of course there are those who do not want us to be healthy, there are those who would rather us be ill. Every time we are hurt or injured, physically or psychologically they make money. Every time someone is diagnosed with cancer they profit. It is the very group in which we may least suspect. That is pharmaceutical companies.

You may be asking yourself why or how this is even possible. It is possible because pharmaceutical companies are a business, and nothing more. They are by no means a non-profit group or even a government-funded department. And they have no mission statement to help serve the public in anyway (that I’m aware of). If their goal were to solve the health problems of our population then, in essence, doing their job would be putting themselves out of business. Instead, they are a business just like Coke or Wal-Mart. And although Wal-Mart may try to tell you that they are a company with the goal of making customers happy, in reality their goal is to generate profit. After all if that were true they would simply forego the checkouts and make their customers very happy. Like Wal-Mart, the goal of pharmaceutical companies is to merely generate profit and nothing more.

So why does this hurt us? So what if they are a business? Well, acting as a business it is their job to generate and increase revenue through drugs and or patents. This goal is colossally different than that of solving public health problems. In fact, the two are mutually exclusive. Just think about it intuitively, a population in which there is no disease or injury virtually eliminates the need for pharmaceutical companies/drugs. And inversely, for Big Pharma to keep its billion dollar status then disease and sickness must run ramped. “BigPharma makes their fortune selling outrageously overpriced symptom-relievers that mask the cause of the problem and often exacerbate it. The more symptoms, the more to relieve” (Source 1).

And in order to maintain their billion-dollar figures Big Pharma is naturally inclined to support some things and ignore others when it comes to new medicines. On average, millions of dollars are invested on any given drug in hopes that it makes it into your prescription. If a drug shows no sign of generating big profit then it will not be pursued. “Since […] drug companies predominantly fund medical research, scientists have almost no choice but to mainly focus their time and effort on the most profitable, but not necessarily the most effective, treatments. Though an herb, which by its very nature cannot be patented, may treat and possibly even cure a disease, drug companies may nevertheless not fund research or marketing for it, leaving the general public largely ignorant of the herb's benefits” (Source 2).

Over the decades countless herbs, research chemicals, and vitamins have shown potential for medical use but because, by law, they cannot be patented they remain useless in the eyes of many pharmaceutical companies. And without funding they will remain untapped. In 1974 a government funded experiment at the Medical College of Virginia found that marijuana's primary
psychoactive component, THC, "slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast 
cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their 
lives by as much as 36 percent" (Source 3). In addition to this a more recent Harvard Study has shown the very same thing. “A Harvard study released on April 17, 2007 shows that the active ingredient in marijuana, THC, cuts tumor growth in common lung cancer in half and significantly reduces the ability of the cancer to spread” (Source 4). But because it is a plant and has no patent, to this day no studies have been done on humans. Recently a research chemical called dichloroacetic acid has proven to be effective killing cancer cells in lab mice. “Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumors in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks” (Source 5). DCA is a cheap drug that has no patent and thus has not received any funding by drug companies for clinical trials in humans. Evangelos and his team will await money from charities before continuing their research.



Sources

Source 1

http://www.owndoc.com/stevia/stevia-...da-conspiracy/

Source 2

http://www.naturalnews.com/020345_dr...companies.html

Source 3

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle_...pped_research_

Source 4

http://www.nowpublic.com/thc_marijua..._harvard_study

Source 5

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...t-cancers.html

Other relevant Sites:

http://www.billc6.com/www/stopc6/bill51.html

http://www.naturalnews.com/023121.html

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...xt=va&aid=8850

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/ar...-medicine.aspx

http://www.natural-health-informatio...mentarius.html