Potluck and Propaganda

In light of the recent Harvard medical students rebel against big pharma ties, I thought the following video is appropriate:


More Entheogens and Psychedelic Drug Information

(5/3/09) More recent developments on this topic - "The Scientist" magazine has reported that the drug manufacturer Merck has created a real sounding but phony peer reviewed journal to publish favorable data for its products:

"Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles--most of which presented data favorable to Merck products--that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship..."

(8/6/09) Just one more report and then I'll stop. The New York Times reports today on newly released court documents that show how pharmaceutical company Wyeth paid a medical communications firm to use ghost writers in drafting and publishing 26 papers between 1998 and 2005 backing the usage of hormone replacement therapy in women. The papers 'emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, heart disease and dementia'. On the other hand, a federal study done in 2002 'found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke'.

Thanks to all who came to SeraPhi this weekend. It was truly a joy to share ideas and get informed together. All the material we played is available for free on the web. Here are the movies in the order they were shown:

We started the evening with a talk titled "Open Source Democracy" by Douglas Rushkoff (55 min), author of a book by the same name.





We then accidentally played a piece by Keith Olbermann called "8 years in 8 minute" (9 min).





We continued with the clip that we originally wanted to show, "Great Moments In Presidential Speeches Compilation" (5 min).





The feature movie for the evening was "The Pharmacratic Inquisition" by Jan Irvin & Andrew Rutajit of gnosticmedia.com (111 min). Here is part 1 of 12:



YouTube playlist with all 12 parts: here.



We finished the evening with the awesome TED talk "My Stroke of Insight" by Jill Bolte Taylor (20 min).




Hope to see many of you at the next P&P!

I am excited to announce the first Potluck and Propaganda event this Saturday 11/29/08. Let's share our Thanksgiving dinner leftovers and afterwards watch the movie Renegade (Blueberry). Potluck starts 7pm and we'll probably start the movie around 10pm or so. Let me know if you want to bring additional things to watch afterwards. As far as I'm concerned we can go till morning.

Clarification: because of the long Thanksgiving weekend we are having the event on Saturday instead of the usual Tuesday. There will be no P&P on 12/2/08. The next event (after this Saturday) will be on Tuesday 01/06/09.

Hope to see you!