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JUNE 28, 2015

WE THE PEOPLE RADIO

WE THE PEOPLE RADIO
 
Hour 1:

"Pharmaphobia" with Tom Stossel, MD           

Hour 2:

"Protect Our Water" with Mark Baird

 

PHARMAPHOBIA: How the Conflict of Interest Myth Undermines American Medical Innovation

Our 1st guest: Dr. Thomas Stossel, MD WE THE PEOPLE RADIO

Washington, DC (April 27, 2015) — For millennia, human survival has depended on our innate abilities to fight pathogens and repair injuries. Only in recent history has medical science improved the quality of our lives and assured longevity. While physicians and academic researchers contribute to such progress, the principal contributor is private industry, which produces the tools — drugs and medical devices — that enable doctors to prevent and cure diseases. Unfortunately, heavy regulation and biology’s complexity and unpredictability make medical innovation extremely difficult and expensive.
In PHARMAPHOBIA: How the Conflict of Interest Myth Undermines American Medical Innovation (Rowman & Littlefield, April 2015), Tom Stossel, MD, a well-known hematologist and an AEI scholar, describes how an ideological crusade stretching over the last quarter-century, using distortion and flawed logic in pursuit of theoretical professional purity, has made medical innovation even harder.

As Dr. Stossel explains in PHARMAPHOBIA, bureaucrats, reporters, politicians, and predatory lawyers have built careers attacking the medical products industry, belittling its critical contributions to medical innovation and accusing it of nonexistent malfeasance including overselling product value, flaunting safety, and corrupting physicians and academics who partner with it. The mania has imposed “conflict-of-interest” regulations limiting or banning valuable interactions between industry, physicians, and researchers while diverting scarce resources away from medical research and innovation and toward dealing with compliance issues.

At the heart of this destructive conflict-of-interest movement is the false “insinuation that the medical products industry and those who partner with it are corrupt, placing personal profit above providing medical value.” According to this movement, the performance and dissemination of research done by industry, or by industry-sponsored academic researchers, is untrustworthy. Equally suspect are efforts to make practitioners aware of such products and explain how to use them. The regulations that flow from this false narrative have undermined scientific progress and stifled American medical innovation.

As Dr. Stossel demonstrates, the real victims are patients suffering from cancer, dementia, and other serious diseases for which new treatments are delayed, reduced, or eliminated as a result of these pointless regulations. With powerful detail, Dr. Stossel — a physician-researcher who has worked extensively in the biotechnology industry — shows how attacking doctors who work with industry limits medical innovation and prevents new life-saving products from reaching patients. He then suggests what can be done to support American medical innovation and stop this dangerous conflict-of-interest movement.

PHARMAPHOBIA does the following:
•Authoritatively documents how private industry is the major engine of medical innovation, which requires a partnership between industry, physicians, and universities;
•Details the extensive damage done to medical innovation by excessive conflict-of-interest allegations and the resulting stifling regulations; and
•Proposes how Americans who care about medical innovation should resist the vested interests that have created the damaging allegations and regulations.

For interview requests or for a copy of the book, please contact Paige Tenkhoff at paige.tenkhoff@aei.org or (202) 862-5904.
 

     Hardcover Available
     Hardcover ISBN: 978-1442244627
     Hardcover Price: $38.00
     Buy the Book
     Publisher Name: Rowman & Littlefield

     Order the book 

 
Stephen Steinlight's Biography

Senior Policy Analyst

Contact - Publications - Blog - Speaking Engagements

One of the nation’s most insightful voices on immigration, Dr. Stephen Steinlight is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) in Washington, DC. He focuses on ascending trends in immigration and immigration policy, America’s changing demography and culture, the politics of immigration, the impact of immigration on the nation’s social cohesion, and the consequences of massive low-skill immigration on America’s most vulnerable groups. He is also concerned with the nexus between immigration and national security in an age of Jihadist terrorism and significant Muslim migration to Western Europe and the United States.

Dr. Steinlight has testified before the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives and the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate. He has also provided expert testimony before state legislatures and State Freedom of Information Commissions. He has shared podiums with members of the House and presidential candidates. He has also addressed hundreds of state legislator and civic and religious groups across the country, been a panelist at conferences and public forums, and is frequently interviewed on radio and TV. He has written extensively on many of the central issues in the immigration debate.

Prior to joining CIS, he was Executive Director of the American Anti-Slavery Group, the Boston-based abolitionist organization. For eight years he was National Affairs Director at the American Jewish Committee (AJC) where he oversaw its public policy agenda centered on First Amendment issues, civil rights, immigration, and social policy. While at AJC, Dr. Steinlight was a member of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and founded and served as Senior Advisor to the critically-acclaimed commonQuest: The Magazine of Black-Jewish Relations.

He also served as Vice President of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) for three years. He convened the first global interreligious dialogues involving dissident Muslim scholars; played a lead role in propagating community-oriented policing; worked on issues affecting Native Americans; and directed the largest survey of intergroup attitudes ever undertaken in America: Taking America’s Pulse: A Survey of Intergroup Attitudes in the United States.

Prior to joining NCCJ, he was Director of Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the body responsible for developing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Dr. Steinlight was co-creator of the Museum’s “Remember the Children Exhibition.”

A magna cum laude graduate of Columbia College, Columbia University, upon graduation he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and received the Columbia College Alumni Merit Award. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Kellett Fellow, and a Marshall Scholar at the University of Sussex, England, where he received his M.Phil and PhD. He was a professor of English and Victorian Studies for 20 years, teaching at the University of Sussex, the State University of New York; the Institút Britannique de Paris; and the School of Graduate Studies, New York University. The recipient of numerous academic honors and visiting professorship, he has been a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and is currently an Associate Fellow at Timothy Dwight College, Yale University.

Dr. Steinlight is author of two books: Fractious Nation? Unity and Division in Contemporary American Life (UC-Berkeley Press, 2003); and Children of Abraham (K’TAV 2002): An Introduction to Islam and Islamism co-authored with one of the foremost scholar/opponents of Islamism, the late Khalid Durán. Both authors received fatwas for having written the book. Dr. Steinlight was also selected by the United States Council for Peace to join a team of conflict-resolution and civil society experts sent to Macedonia in 2003 to maintain the ceasefire in that nation’s civil war and create a process for President Trajkovski and his cabinet to work with leading jurists and former rebels to amend its constitution.

Dr. Steinlight lives in New York City.
 

 


Hour 2: "Protect Our Water" 
wwwPieNPolitics.com                           WE THE PEOPLE RADIO
www.SiskiyouCountyWaterUsers.com
Our 2nd guest: Mark Baird

Today we are discussing the CA State Dept. of Fish & Game and a host of other agencies who impose regulations on landowners with regard to water. The loss of the recent Farm Bureau vs. Fish & Game case revisits the old battleground of 1602 permits for the “substantial alteration of a stream bed, bank or channel”. At this time there is no legal definition of “substantial” so the agencies have a weaponized regulation with which to threaten and punish landowners as they see fit.



This has a direct effect on water rights by reducing the legal water allotment that land owners use to irrigate their pastures and fields. If they choose not to get a permit they could face fines or jail. If they get the permit they admit that they need permission from an agency to exercise their water right. Farmers and ranchers believe this is a “water grab” by the State of California and if successful will create a major problem for the rest of the state, including municipalities that divert water for use by residents.


Those involved with Scott Valley Protect Our Water ad-hoc group are standing on their U.S. and California Constitutional rights, which protect Property Rights. Court decisions have declared Water Rights are a Property Right. If Water Rights are affected and the state can tell a landowner how much water he or she can use — this is a “taking” of a Property Right.
 


 
 
 
 

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