Zantac’s Link to Cancer Hidden For Decades - Part 2

Both as nurses and as Americans many of us have lived with this pleasant fantasy regarding drug safety.

The fantasy is this:
Sometimes, corporations fudge numbers a little bit to try and make a few extra dollars
Sometimes, after a drug has been on the market for a long time and millions of people have taken it, only then very rare side effects are discovered
When that happens, victims are cared for
We have competent and vigilant people at the FDA watching over us
The judicial system punishes wrongdoers who put profits above patients
The legislative system puts laws and structures in place to protect the public, maximize transparency, and ensure accountability
The media investigates, interrogates, and is tenacious about uncovering scandals and putting them in the public spotlight

That’s the fantasy.

It has been confusing, angering, and dizzying to learn that none of that is true.

There’s no better example of how cold reality is so much worse than that happy fantasy than Zantac (ranitidine).

The inverse state of these systems doing the exact opposite of what they are supposed to do isn’t new. The ongoing scandal around Zantac is older than many of the nurse hosts here on Nurses Out Loud.

In a prior episode, we began to unpack just how deep the scandal with Zantac goes - undoubtedly one of the biggest pharma scandals ever:

Glaxo was aware of Zantac’s instability during development
Glaxo was first alerted by their competitor, SmithKline Beecham (makers of Tagamet), about Zantac’s NDMA problem
Glaxo conducted their own study, the Tanner Report, which verified the NDMA problem back in 1982
Executives at Glaxo withheld the NDMA problem from the FDA and each other
Glaxo vigorously defended the safety of Zantac while it was on the market
It became the best selling medication of all time
Glaxo made so much money from Zantac that they bought their biggest competitor, SmithKline Beecham, to become the GlaxoSmithKline of today
Zantac went OTC in 1988
Zantac was FDA approved to treat heartburn in 1995
Zantac has been taken by tens of millions of people
In 2019, an independent lab and compounding pharmacy, Valisure, reported safety issues regarding instability and NDMA formation
Ranitidine products were pulled off many shelves in 2019 and fully pulled by the FDA in 2020
Thousands of lawsuits ensued
In this episode, we address scandals happening in parallel: a failure of the mainstream media to adequately cover the Zantac scandal, the failure of the FDA to ensure the most basic of safety testing was done, and the failure of the judicial system to hold predators to account.

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