The term “drug wars” often refers to violent cartels which bully, bribe and slaughter in the name of  illegal drug profits. But another drug war is assailing America, and no machine guns are used. Rather, it’s a war inflicted by huge pharmaceutical companies — often foreign-based — which knowingly sell deadly, defective drugs for years while reaping monstrous profits.

Take GlaxoSmithKline, a British pharmaceutical giant whose negligence with deadly drugs seems to know no limits. GSK’s latest revealed outrage concerns diabetes medication Avandia, which carries a high risk of causing heart attacks. According to a recent New York Times investigation, GSK knew of this risk for 11 years yet covered it up, continuing to peddle its defective drug even though people were dying as a result.

In short, GSK knew it was killing people and did so anyway, all in the name of money.

And that’s just the tip of a cold-hearted iceberg. GSK also suppressed information that antidepressant Paxil spurred suicidal thoughts and behavior in teens and younger kids. And Paxil also has been shown to cause serious birth defects in the newborn infants of women who took it during pregnancy. When little ones are born with heart, lung and brain defects, while parents pray, GSK shrugs and counts its money.

GSK is far from alone. Roche Pharmaceuticals, based in Switzerland, has heaped misery on Americans for years via acne treatment Accutane. It sparks many serious side effects, including an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) such as Crohn’s Disease or Ulcerative Colitis. They often require surgeries which even may involve removal of the colon. These are debilitating, lifelong injuries.

But Roche is more interested in money than human life, too. After all, it was making more than a billion dollars per year selling its defective drug.

The pattern is clear: Huge pharmaceutical corporations unleash defective drugs on an innocent populace. These drugs do their advertised job but also have hidden dangers.

Those dangers have killed many Americans and will kill still more, but the pharmaceutical giants are content to keep reaping  enormous profits in the billions for as long as they can. Then when push comes to shove, they discontinue the product after making a killing — in more ways than one — paying defective drug lawsuit verdicts and settlements in the millions, rather than the billions they’ve already made.

For them, it’s all about profits. For Americans, it should be all about product safety and corporate liability for gross negligence — negligence which mandates not only compensatory but also punitive damages in defective drug lawsuits.

If you or a family member has been harmed by Avandia, Paxil, Accutane or any other defective drug, alert a defective drug lawyer or attorney with Jim S. Adler & Associates and fight back. You have a legal right to claim financial compensation for your losses from negligent manufacturers, which are waging a deadly drug war against us as surely as any gun-toting cartel.

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