Two research studies document links between education, incarceration, and recidivism, as covered in articles published by ColorLines, Usable Knowledge, and Citizen Truth.

In September 2019, ColorLines reported that attending a school with a high suspension rate is associated with an increased likelihood of being arrested and a decreased likelihood of enrolling in a four-year college. The ColorLines article reported findings from a study titled “The School to Prison Pipeline: Long-Run Impacts of School Suspensions on Adult Crime” issued by the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research. As Emily Boudreau reported for Harvard University’s Usable Knowledge, the study provides “some of the first causal evidence that strict schools do indeed contribute to the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.”

The study focused primarily on North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, where approximately 23 percent of middle school students, the majority of whom are male students of color, are suspended annually. Researchers examined school administrative records, data on arrests and incarcerations, and college attendance records to assess how the district’s suspension policy and other factors affected later life outcomes. Andrew Bacher-Hicks, the study’s lead author, told Usable Knowledge that the study found “large negative impacts on later-life outcomes” for all students—not just those who were suspended—related to attending a school with a high suspension rate. As Emily Boudreau reported, the study’s authors recommended that school administrators and teachers “should be cautious of relying heavily on exclusionary practices” and that they should consider alternatives to suspensions, including positive reinforcement, and restorative processes for students returning to the classroom following any disciplinary action.

A RAND Corporation study emphasized the importance of higher education for prison inmates, as Leighanna Shirey reported for Citizen Truth in June 2019. Education serves as a form of rehabilitation, and access to higher education allows incarcerated individuals to develop new skills, leading to reduced recidivism, the RAND study documented.

As Lois Davis, a senior policy researcher at RAND and leader of the study, told Citizen Truth, the study “dispelled the myths about whether or not education helps inmates when they get out. Education is, by far, such a clear winner.” She also noted that all of society benefits when incarcerated people can receive an education: “[W]hat do you want for your community?” she asked. “If you don’t rehabilitate [prison inmates], how are they going to successfully rejoin society?”

The RAND study corroborated previous research on the value of post-secondary education programs for incarcerated people. For example, the Vera Institute of Justice has found that “education is key to improving many long-term outcomes for incarcerated people, their families, and their communities—including reducing recidivism and increasing employability and earnings after release.”

The school-to-prison pipeline has made national headlines in recent years, but establishment media have failed to cover the National Bureau of Economic Research study as important evidence that strict schools contribute to this pattern. In September 2019 the Los Angeles Times reported that schools in California have expanded their ban on “willful defiance suspensions” so that elementary and middle school students cannot be suspended for defying authority, citing the counterproductivity of such suspensions and how they are unfairly applied to Black students. An October 2019 article in Forbes discussed the school-to-prison pipeline and how students of color face harsher punishments than their white peers, noting, “The more time that Black and Brown children spend outside of the classroom, the more likely they are to be introduced to the criminal justice system.” However, neither article addressed the causal evidence documented in the study covered by ColorLines and Usable Knowledge.

Major news outlets, including the New York Times and NPR, fail to report on the positive societal effects of higher education in prisons. Instead, their orientation toward education in prisons is primarily concerned with the economics of educational programs and is centered on congressional politics. For example, in February 2018 the New York Times reported that Senate leaders might reinstate Pell grants for incarcerated students, “a move that would restore a federal lifeline to the nation’s cash-strapped prison education system.” More recently, in April 2019 NPR reported on how Congress was again considering legislation to make Pell grants available to incarcerated people. While most US prisoners are still barred from receiving Pell grants, they have been made available to a limited number of incarcerated students through the “Second Chance Pell Pilot Program”; an April 2020 Washington Post report on an expansion of the program, which Education Secretary Betsy DeVos refers to as an “experiment,” did make a passing mention of the results of the RAND study.

Shani Saxon, “Study Links High-Suspension Schools with Incarceration Later in Life,” ColorLines, September 23, 2019, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/study-links-high-suspension-schools-incarceration-later-life.

Emily Boudreau, “School Discipline Linked to Later Consequences,” Usable Knowledge (Harvard Graduate School of Education), September 16, 2019, https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/19/09/school-discipline-linked-later-consequences.

Leighanna Shirey, “New Study Proves Vast Benefits of Higher Education for Inmates,” Citizen Truth, June 13, 2019, https://citizentruth.org/new-study-proves-vast-benefits-of-higher-education-for-inmates/.

Student Researchers: Jacqueline Archie, Marco Corea, Gabriella Grondalski, Rowan Hamilton, Rebecca Herbert, Kiara Killelea, Ciara Lockwood, Molly McKeogh, Liam O’Sullivan, Alexandra Shore, Eleanor Sprick, Madeline Terrio, Alexander Tran, and Kirstyn Velazquez (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Faculty Advisor: Allison Butler (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

The post #25. Studies Document Links between Education, Incarceration, and Recidivism appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin, a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aims to end support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, was scheduled to give a keynote speech to the annual International Critical Media Literacy Conference that was to be held at Georgia Southern University on February 28 and 29, 2020. Her talk was canceled because she refused to sign a contract stating she would not support a boycott of Israel. Georgia, along with 27 other states, has enacted anti-boycott laws that prohibit state offices or agencies from doing business with any companies or individuals that boycott Israel, as teleSUR English reported. Eventually the conference at which Martin was to speak was called off entirely after numerous colleagues supported Martin in her refusal to sign the contractual pledge.

BDS is a global movement driven by citizen activists. It works to peacefully pressure corporations, universities, and cultural organizations to stop doing business with the state of Israel, with the goal of pressuring Israel to obey international law and respect the human rights of Palestinians.

Georgia’s anti-boycott legislation was passed by the state’s Republican-dominated legislature in 2016 in response to the growing influence of the BDS movement on college campuses. It requires anyone who enters into a contract with the state for more than $1000 worth of work to sign an oath swearing they will not boycott Israel. 

BDS advocates argue that anti-boycott legislation, such as the laws adopted by Georgia and other states, violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution. On February 10, 2020, Martin filed a federal lawsuit against Georgia’s university system, claiming that the cancelation of her speech violated her constitutionally protected right to free speech. Martin tweeted that “[w]e must stand firmly opposed to these efforts and not cower in fear to these blatant violations of free speech.”

Martin’s legal action comes on the heels of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in December 2019 that permits the US government to define Judaism as both a religion and a nationality under federal law. The stated aim of the order was to more effectively allow the government to combat “anti-Semitism on college campuses.” In reality, by connecting Jewish religious identity with Israeli national identity, the new policy means any criticism of Israel’s government and their actions could be construed as an attack on the Jewish faith and labeled as “anti-Semitic.” The new classification means schools that receive federal funding could, by allowing any BDS activism or even discussion on campus, run afoul of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which forbids those schools from discriminating on the basis of religion or national origin. 

This story has received very little corporate coverage. Outside of reports from the Associated Press and Yahoo! Finance (which ran a story from PR Newswire on the topic), what traction the story has gotten has been limited to either independent news sources or news sources that specialize in Israeli/American affairs.

“Abby Martin Banned from Speaking at US University for Refusing to Sign Pro-Israel Pledge,” teleSUR English, January 17, 2020, https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Abby-Martin-Banned-From-Speaking-at-US-University–20200117-0007.html.

“Abby Martin Sues Georgia State Over Law Forcing Loyalty to Israel,” teleSUR English, February 10, 2020, https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Abby-Martin-Sues-Georgia-State-Over-Law-Forcing-Loyalty-to-Israel–20200210-0019.html.

Alan MacLeod, “Journalist Abby Martin Sues State of Georgia Over Law Requiring Pledge of Allegiance to Israel,” MintPress News, February 10, 2020, https://www.mintpressnews.com/abby-martin-lawsuit-state-georgia-over-bds-law/264798/.

Sheldon Richman, “Anti-BDS Laws Violate Our Freedom,” CounterPunch, February 17, 2020, https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/17/anti-bds-laws-violate-our-freedom/.

Student Researchers: Kathleen Doyle (University of Vermont) and Troy Patton (Diablo Valley College)

Faculty Evaluators: Rob Williams (University of Vermont) and Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)

The post #24. Silenced in Savannah: Journalist Abby Martin Challenges Georgia’s BDS “Gag Law” appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The United States’s global gag rule continues to put at risk the sexual health of women in developing countries that rely on US aid. This federal rule—formally known as the “Mexico City Policy”—blocks access to the $9 billion of US federal funding for NGOs that provide abortion counseling, referrals, or any kind of abortion services throughout the world. In the first days of the new presidential term in January 2017, the Trump-Pence administration reinstated and drastically expanded the global gag rule. Three years after the implementation of the new guidelines, women continue to be harmed, Rewire.News and other independent news outlets reported.

The global gag rule was first implemented by the Reagan administration in 1984, and has continuously been changed, repealed, and reinstated through partisan presidencies. The Trump administration has advanced the strictest policies yet, expanding its scope to include other forms of assistance from the State Department, USAID, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Defense. The federal rule forces organizations to choose between receiving global health assistance from the United States and providing comprehensive reproductive care. The current enforcement of the policy, according to the Rewire.News report, denies funding for “HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, nutrition, maternal health, family planning, and malaria.” 

According to the Sierra Club, British-based NGO Marie Stopes International, which works in 37 countries to provide contraception and safe abortions, suffered a huge funding gap for continuing to provide abortion services. Karen J. Coates reported that this cut in finances will lead to an estimated “1.8 million unintended pregnancies, 600,000 unsafe abortions, and 4,600 avoidable maternal deaths.” In addition, the current terms of the gag rule are so broad that, along with defunding organizations that provide contraceptive and abortion services, many international health organizations that do not specialize in abortion or family planning are being targeted. As Coates reported, in March 2019 “Secretary of State Mike Pompeo further interpreted the rule to include subcontractors and partner organizations working with any group receiving US health aid.”

Despite the stated intentions of the Republican politicians who have supported the policy, the net effect of the global gag rule in its many incarnations from 1984 to now has, ironically, been to increase abortions and suffering. As Coates noted, “One study, published in the Lancet, followed three-quarters of a million women in 26 countries over 20 years and found that during previous impositions of the rule, abortions rose by 40 percent in the most affected regions.”

In early 2019 US lawmakers introduced the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights Act. If this bill is passed, it would “permanently repeal the global gag rule and prevent future administrations from easily reimposing it via executive order.” To date, the act has yet to make it to a congressional vote.

The global gag rule has received very limited corporate media coverage. The New York Times has published a pair of articles and a Q. and A., along with a plethora of opinion pieces from 2001 to 2019 on the policy. The articles, however, cover the politics of the situation without helping readers to understand the policy’s impacts on global health organizations, and by extension, women throughout the world. The Washington Post covered the story in 2017 but lacked substantial detail concerning the impact the policy would have on groups like Marie Stopes International. The only substantial coverage of this issue apart from the Rewire.News and Sierra reports has come from other independent sources, such as KPFA and The Independent.

Monica Kerrigan and Nelly Munyasia, “Three Years Later, Trump’s ‘Global Gag Rule’ Continues to Devastate Global Health,” Rewire.News, January 23, 2020, https://rewire.news/article/2020/01/23/three-years-later-trumps-global-gag-rule-continues-to-devastate-global-health/.

Karen J. Coates, “The Global Gag Rule Puts a Choke Hold on Contraception,” Sierra, November–December 2019, https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2019-6-november-december/protect/global-gag-rule-puts-choke-hold-contraception [first published online October 30, 2019].

Student Researcher: Madison Miller (North Central College)

Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)

The post #23. “Global Gag Rule” Continues to Compromise Women’s Health around World appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

From March 18 to May 14, 2020, more than 36 million US workers lost their jobs, while the wealth of US billionaires increased by more than $368 billion, an increase of 12.5 percent. The net worth of eight of these billionaires has increased by more than a billion dollars each. [Note: These eight billionaires, identified by Inequality.org as “pandemic profiteers,” are Jeff Bezos (Amazon), MacKenzie Bezos (Amazon), Eric Yuan (Zoom), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), John Albert Sobrato (Silicon Valley real estate), Elon Musk (Tesla and SpaceX), Joshua Harris (Apollo Global Management), and Rocco Commisso (Mediacom). See Chuck Collins, Omar Ocampo, and Sophia Paslaski, “Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes, and Pandemic Profiteers,” Institute for Policy Studies, April 23, 2020, https://ips-dc.org/billionaire-bonanza-2020/.]

An Institute for Policy Studies report, “Billionaire Bonanza 2020,” recommended the establishment of a pandemic profiteering oversight committee, passage of a corporate transparency act to discourage wealth hiding, an emergency 10 percent millionaire income tax, and a wealth tax. Acknowledging that enacting a new tax regime on assets would be “challenging in the short term,” the report proposed an emergency 10 percent surtax on taxpayers with incomes of more than $2 million—that is, the richest 0.2 percent of Americans—which would apply not only to income from wages and salaries but also from investment returns. The proposed surtax would raise $635 billion over ten years, the Institute for Policy Studies estimated.

The UK government could raise “up to £174bn [roughly $213 billion] a year to help cope with the Covid-19 crisis if it taxed wealth at the same rate as income,” the Guardian reported in April 2020. Richard Murphy, a professor of political economy at City, University of London, determined that between 2011 and 2018, the United Kingdom taxed income at an average of just 29.4 percent, while wealth—accrued through increased housing prices and personal pensions—had been taxed at just 3.4 percent, making UK taxes highly regressive: When income and wealth are combined, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 10 percent of the population, the Guardian reported, was 18 percent, much less than the 42 percent effective tax rate for the poorest 10 percent. 

Murphy told the Guardian he was not campaigning for a wealth tax as such, but that the UK government could begin to cover some of the coronavirus crisis bill by picking “low-hanging fruit,” such as equalizing the tax rates on income and capital gains, reducing the annual capital gains tax allowance, and abolishing higher-rate tax reliefs for pension contributions. 

In the United States, John R. Talbott reported for Truthout that at least one prominent Wall Street figure, Peter Fahey, a retired Goldman Sachs partner, supports a wealth tax to address the pandemic’s toll on the economy. Fahey called on “a core group of thoughtful, patriotic billionaires to step forward” to subject themselves to “the equivalent of a substantial wealth tax to address the Federal budget crisis that will emerge from the COVID-19 crisis.” Talbott himself advocated a “one-time 3 percent wealth tax on the top 10 percent of the wealthiest people in the world” to provide nine trillion dollars in global emergency relief funds.

Wealth tax proposals have received mixed news coverage in the corporate media. Before the pandemic, establishment news outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post, reported on proposals made by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the context of the 2020 Democratic primary elections. As the COVID-19 crisis has developed, additional outlets, including HuffPost, Bloomberg, ABC News, and the New York Times have also covered wealth tax proposals made in response to the pandemic. The pandemic is “the perfect opportunity for billionaires to justify their existence,” HuffPost reported, but two months into the coronavirus outbreak “America is still waiting for billionaire philanthropists to deliver.” Bloomberg published an opinion piece by a former member of the Financial Times’s editorial board, opposing a wealth tax. ABC News broadcast a report on the topic, featuring French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. After Piketty responded to questions about how much tax he had paid on royalties from his surprise bestseller, he told ABC that the coronavirus crisis “illustrates a virulent inequality” that could lead to the kind of wealth taxes he has advocated. In search of journalistic balance, ABC News also quoted from a Fox Business Network interview in which Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s top economic advisor, asked, “Why do we have to raise taxes? . . . Let’s let people keep their own money.” In April 2020 the New York Times published an editorial by Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, advocating a 5 percent tax on the richest 5 percent of households as a means to raise up to $2 trillion in pandemic relief funds.

Larry Elliott, “Wealth Tax Rise Could Raise £174bn to Tackle COVID-19, Expert Says,” The Guardian, April 22, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/apr/22/wealth-tax-rise-could-raise-174bn-tackle-covid-19-expert-says.

John R. Talbott, “To Confront Coronavirus, We Need an Emergency Wealth Tax,” Truthout, March 25, 2020, https://truthout.org/articles/to-confront-coronavirus-we-need-an-emergency-wealth-tax.

Student Researcher: Weston Pollock (San Francisco State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)

The post #22. An Emergency Wealth Tax to Confront Coronavirus Pandemic appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Owing to the war launched in 2015 by a US-backed coalition of Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen now suffers from “a complete absence” of law and order, which has given rise to what Ahmed Abdulkareem described for MintPress News as “a black Suq (market) of human trafficking on a scale never before seen in Yemen.” Abdulkareem’s report is partly based on the accounts of seventeen Yemeni victims of human trafficking who agreed to speak to MintPress News about their ordeals.

Due to lack of educational opportunities and economic collapse, Yemeni people are literally sacrificing their bodies to provide for their families. Between 2015 and 2017, more than ten thousand cases of organ sales have been documented by the Yemen Organization for Combating Human Trafficking, a Sana’a-based NGO. Actual figures are almost certainly higher, because many cases go unreported owing to the practice being illegal, religious concerns, and the stigma of the practice in a conservative society.

In one interview, a 35-year-old man named Tawfiq described selling one of his kidneys to sustain his family. He was relatively fortunate, because many Yemenis die in the process due to illegal, unprofessional procedures. Another Yemeni, named Aisha, who was forced to sell one of her kidneys, told MintPress News that she was paid $5000, though her kidney was sold for $30,000 on the black market.

A Yemeni named Maha told MintPress News that Yemeni brokers help secure passports by contacting staff members from the Yemeni Consulate in Saudi Arabia, who work together with a dealer from the organ black market. They produce a formal medical report to make it appear that the organ is from a legal donor. This clears the way for the sale of kidneys and other organs to neighboring countries.

A Yemeni family, who asked to remain anonymous, told MintPress News how their son was kidnapped. After the body was found, an autopsy showed that the boy’s heart had been removed, presumably to be sold on the black market.

Trafficking involves not only human organs but also sexual exploitation. As Abdulkareem reported, trafficked Yemeni women are subjected to rape, violence, extreme cruelty, and other forms of coercion. Female trafficking victims who spoke to MintPress News reported being forced into prostitution networks in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. From a rehabilitation center in Sana’a, one trafficking victim said that she was now afraid to return home for fear of being killed for violating her family’s honor.

As Abdulkareem reported, the blockade levied against Yemen by the Saudi Coalition since 2015 has helped human trafficking flourish. Under blockade, Yemenis are no longer able to flee violence there or able to travel to neighboring wealthy Gulf countries for work. Furthermore, although Yemen’s laws prohibit trafficking and those who are found guilty are sentenced to ten years in prison, these laws go unenforced, in part because government officials themselves appear to be directly involved in the trafficking and illegal organ sales.

Although US corporate news media have reported on forced labor, sexual exploitation, and the organ trade elsewhere in the Middle East, they appear to have devoted no specific coverage to the unprecedented scale of human trafficking taking place in Yemen.

Ahmed Abdulkareem, “Human Trafficking is Booming in Yemen as the War Enters Its Fifth Year,” MintPress News, September 13, 2019, https://www.mintpressnews.com/human-trafficking-booming-yemen-war/261818/.

Student Researcher: Carlos Alfonso Gutierrez (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Amal Munayer (Sonoma State University)

The post #21. The Scourge of Human Trafficking in Yemen appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Calling for policy solutions to dismantle the US system of criminal punishment and the inequalities and white supremacy that this system promotes and perpetuates, Alec Karakatsanis, the executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and 116 other human and civil rights groups released a comprehensive fourteen-point plan to “transform the existing system into one of respect and justice,” Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams in September 2019.

The groups’ “Vision for Justice” plan advocates an expanded view of public safety, prioritizing investments in education, housing, employment, healthcare, and other public programs, guided by three core themes: ensuring equity and accountability in the criminal-legal system, building a restorative system of justice, and rebuilding communities. The plan’s fourteen specific recommendations—such as creating a new framework for pretrial justice, and decriminalizing poverty—are rooted in human rights and the practice of restorative justice, Corbett reported.

A study by the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), released in August 2019, underscored the need for comprehensive criminal justice reform. The study, titled “Arrest, Release, Repeat: How Police and Jails are Misused to Respond to Social Problems,” showed that people imprisoned as repeat offenders are likely to be poor, unemployed, or homeless, Victoria Law reported for Truthout. Although police and jails ought to promote public safety, law enforcement is more and more frequently “called upon to respond punitively to medical and economic problems unrelated to public safety issues,” according to the PPI study. Consequently, people in need of medical care and social services “cycle in and out of jail without ever receiving the help they need.” The study’s authors found that repeated arrests are “related to race and poverty, as well as high rates of mental illness and substance use disorders.”

According to the study, in 2017 at least 4.9 million individuals were arrested and booked, with the vast majority charged with nonviolent crimes. To better address the conditions that lead marginalized individuals to have contact with the police in the first place, the study’s authors recommended “public investments in employment assistance, education and vocational training, and financial assistance.”

As of May 2020, neither the “Vision for Justice” policy platform of the coalition of 117 rights groups nor the Prison Policy Initiative’s report on how police and jails are misused to respond to social problems appear to have received any coverage by the establishment press.

Jessica Corbett, “‘Vision for Justice’: 117 Rights Groups Offer Roadmap to Transform US Criminal-Legal System,” Common Dreams, September 5, 2019, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/09/05/vision-justice-117-rights-groups-offer-roadmap-transform-us-criminal-legal-system.

Victoria Law, “Arrest, Release, Repeat: New Report Exposes Vicious Cycle of Imprisonment,” Truthout, August 27, 2019, https://truthout.org/articles/arrest-release-repeat-new-report-exposes-vicious-cycle-of-imprisonment/.

Student Researchers: Xavier Rosenberg (San Francisco State University) and Carina Ramirez (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluators: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University) and Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)

The post #20. A Comprehensive Framework for Transforming the Criminal-Legal System appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Pharmaceutical giants Abbott and Sun Pharma are providing dangerous amounts of antibiotics to unlicensed doctors in India and incentivizing them to overprescribe. In August 2019 the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) reported that these unethical business practices are leading to a rise in superbugs, or bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotic treatment. Bacteria naturally evolve a resistance to antibiotics over time, but the widespread and inappropriate use of antibiotics accelerates this process. Superbugs are killing at least 58,000 babies each year and rendering a growing number of patients untreatable with all available drugs.

India’s unlicensed medical practitioners, known as “quack” doctors, are being courted by Abbott and Sun Pharma, billion-dollar companies that do business in more than one hundred countries, including the United States. The incentives these companies provide to quack doctors to sell antibiotics have included free medical equipment, gift cards, televisions, travel, and cash, earning some doctors nearly a quarter of their salary. “Sales representatives would also offer extra pills or money as an incentive to buy more antibiotics, encouraging potentially dangerous overprescription,” a Sun Pharma sales representative revealed to an undercover BIJ reporter.

India offers free healthcare to its poor citizens, but its healthcare system has an estimated shortage of 600,000 doctors and millions of trained nurses. India’s 2.5 million quack doctors vastly outnumber its one million certified doctors. As a result, patients without access to better care often turn to quack doctors for treatment, and many are unaware that their local medical “professionals” have no formal training and are being bribed to sell unnecessary antibiotics. 

In September 2019, the BIJ reported on similar problems with broken healthcare systems, medical corruption, and dangerous superbugs in Cambodia. Their account describes how patients often request antibiotics for common colds, to pour onto wounds, and to feed to animals. Illegally practicing doctors and pharmacists in Cambodia admitted that they would often prescribe based on customer requests rather than appropriate medical guidelines. As the BIJ noted, “This kind of misuse speeds up the creation of drug resistant bacteria, or superbugs, which are predicted to kill 10 million people by 2050 if no action is taken.”

Although India is generally acknowledged as the epicenter of this growing global threat, there has been little coverage on the shady business practices in India by companies like Abbott and Sun Pharma. In 2017, HuffPost discussed the findings of a 2016 PLOS Medicine study on antibiotic resistance in India, but only briefly mentioned the role of pharmaceutical companies and their sales representatives, failing to identify them as a driving force in the growing problem. A 2019 Telegraph article identified the role of doctor shortages in the rise of antibiotic resistance, but did not discuss pharmaceutical companies as being part of the problem.

The only substantial corporate reporting on the unethical sale of antibiotics came from a six-month investigation by the New York Times in 2016 that found pharmaceutical representatives from Abbott pressuring their India-based employees to sell to quack doctors, plainly in violation of Indian law and the company’s own ethical guidelines. However, the article did not make any connection between these practices and the rise of superbugs in India. 

Although superbugs have attracted some attention, their cause and importance remain poorly understood by the public. The Independent and BuzzFlash republished the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s report; otherwise, the role of pharmaceutical companies in the rise of dangerous superbugs has been drastically underreported.

Madlen Davies, Rahul Meesaraganda, and Ben Stockton, “Drug Company Reps Give Quack Doctors Fridges and Televisions to Sell Antibiotics,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, August 19, 2019, https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2019-08-19/drug-company-reps-give-quack-doctors-fridges-and-televisions-to-sell-antibiotics.

Student Researcher: Allison Rott (North Central College) 

Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College) 

The post #19. Antibiotic Abuse: Pharmaceutical Profiteering Accelerates Superbugs appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.