An ex-pharmaceutical sales rep has come clean after fifteen years of being in the drug pushing business. In her powerful book, Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher, Gwen Olsen explains why she left her lucrative career selling drugs for some of the biggest names in the business – Johnson and Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Abbott Laboratories.
Now she passionately advocates against the pharmaceutical industry, their unethical practices, and the hundreds of thousands of lives they lead to the grave. Olsen’s eyes were opened through a gradual course of tragic events.
No Such Thing As A Safe Drug
“It was an awakening process, a spiritual and consciousness process where I started observing what was happening, what some of the drugs were doing, the misinformation, the disinformation,” Olsen explains. “I was being encouraged to minimize side effects when I talked to doctors. I started to realize that these patients were literally being tortured by the drugs. There is no such thing as a safe drug.”
Her book unveils her experience selling pharmaceuticals and the dirty secrets the industry doesn’t want anyone to know. Olsen reveals that when drugs hit the market, no one knows even 50 percent of the side effects associated with the drug.
Doctors are convinced of the drug’s effectiveness and their patients literally become test subjects or lab rats for the pharmaceutical companies. Olsen even confesses, “we were being trained to misinform people.”
For years Gwen Olsen thought she was helping others by selling pharmaceuticals, but in 2004, a family tragedy opened her eyes to the truth.
“My niece was 20 years old, she was attending Indiana University and she was a pre-med student, an extremely intelligent, beautiful woman, and just a beautiful spirit inside and out. She was in a car accident and was prescribed vicodin hydrocodone for the pain, and became addicted.”
The vicodin destroyed her niece’s concentration, leading the young woman to turn to a stimulant drug called ephedrine. The drug helped her stay awake long enough to study for school.
“She had a drug interaction and ended up in the hospital, and they tagged her with a bipolar disorder, not a drug toxicity or a reaction to the drugs she was on. They started giving her more antipsychotics and mood stabilizers, and that set her on the road to becoming a mental patient,” said Olsen.
Soon, the young woman dropped out of school as the side effects of the medication took hold. The more she tried to wean herself off, the more violent the side effects became. A dependency had formed in the chemistry of her brain and the twenty-year-old battled a severe depression.
“Her mom was on her way home to take her back to the psychiatrist and get her back on drugs,” Olsen continued. “[That is when] my niece walked into her younger sister’s room and took an angel lamp that was filled with oil, and poured it over herself and ignited it, burning herself alive.”
The realization struck Olsen to the core and she left her career selling pharmaceutical drugs. Now she speaks out against the deception, telling the gripping story of her niece’s suicide.
“It was a promise made to her that I would not let her memory be sullied, and tell people what had happened to her. She would not be remembered as a mentally or genetically defective person, I would not allow that to happen. And I realize that there are thousands and thousands of people out there that need a voice, and I’m serving as that voice,” she says.
Today, one of Olsen’s biggest concerns is for the millions of children taking antipsychotics, which has grown exponentially in the past 10 years. These drugs are especially being given to kids in foster care, putting them in a virtual chemical straight jacket.
“A large number of psychiatrists are dishonest, because I see them giving people drugs that they know are brain damaging therapeutics, that they know do not have positive, long-term outcomes, that they know will not cure anything. They just take a list of symptoms and call it a mental illness or disorder.”
Children are given fake diagnosis left and right and put on mind altering drugs with suicidal side effects. Psychiatrists can diagnose mental illness today without any scientific proof. No blood tests, urine tests, or PET scans are required. The result is millions of children are labeled and stuck on these drugs, trapped in a culture of hopelessness.
“I was so disillusioned, as well as angry, when I found out how much deception, how much misinformation was taking place and how I’d been used in that game. I literally was the one on the frontlines. I was harming people unintentionally, but I was responsible. I carry a burden for that now.”
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[…] Ex Pharmaceutical Rep Reveals Horrors of Prescribed Drugs — Clever Journeys […]
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Thank you. Buying the book to offer retail
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Little experience in training for Pharmacy Tech, much experience in life. I went 15+ years with an undiagnosed seizure disorder. Not all seizures are Grand Mal, mine are Temporal Lobe. While intoxicated, I crashed a motorcycle, flying down the street like a piece of trash. I survived, but the Motorcycle didn’t. Went to the hospital, I was patched up and released. But within the year, I started seeing colors in my vision, and a blind spot, that lasted about 45 minutes, several times per week. Technically it’s called a Scintillating Scotoma. I also had transient memory loss, and bizarre feelings.
Doctors threw antidepressants at it, but it made them worse.
One doctor gave me Phenytoin, another doctor told me not to take it. Had I taken it, my problems would have ended then, I’m on Phenytoin now.
The scintillating scotoma, several times a week. After years, one doctor tried Ergotrate. It radically slowed the frequency. It’s used for women after child birth, the pharmacy didn’t want to fill it, but they spoke with the doctor. As I was on a Beta Blocker, I asked if the doctor would try a moderate dose of Inderal and discontinue the Ergotrate. He agreed and it worked even better.
But the seizures worsened. I was in Pharmacy Technician School, and I started experiencing Aphasia (couldn’t speak), and anesthesia of the throat, and once, overcome with a bizarre feeling, I pushed back on my chair (in Pharmacy Tech school) and smashed into the wall, the instructor asked if I was OK, and I screamed at him “No I’m not F-ing OK”. Went to a different Neurologist and after testing, he diagnosed seizures, put me on Phenytoin, and all the symptoms, and visual symptoms, stopped. He ordered a coronal MRI, the same facility that the year before told my doctor nothing was found, found an Encephalomalacia, no doubt from the motorcycle crash years before. It was a soft spot at the focus of my seizures caught by the new scanning technique.
Doctors just pushed medicine, even if it made my symptoms worse, as the seizures were yet undiagnosed. But they refused to listen to my complaints of side effects, so I had to refuse some of the things they tried.
I can clearly see the truth in this woman’s story.
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Incredible and enlightening. Wow.
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Jack. Do you have contact for author as thus book is not available wholesale through normal channels
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It’s been at least 8 or 9 months ago since I spoke to her (prior to my heart surgery) and just getting around to writing about this. Here are two ways to reach her.
https://gwenolsen.com/buy-book/
https://gwenolsen.com/get-in-touch/
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Americans’ and Canadians’ health seems to come second to maximizing profits, in particular those amassed by an increasingly greedy pharmaceutical industry; the same pharmaceutical corporations that intentionally pushed their very addictive and profitable opiates — an ethical and moral crime for which they got off relatively lightly, considering the resulting immense suffering and overdose death numbers.
… When a federal government promises Canadians universal generic-brand medication coverage (and such promises almost never happen here) the pharmaceutical industry reacts with successful threats of abandoning their Canada-based R&D (etcetera) if the government goes ahead with its ‘pharmacare’ plan. Why? Because such universal medication coverage, generic brand or not, would negatively affect the industry’s plentiful profits. The profits would still be great, just not as great.
A late-2019 Angus Reid study found that, over the previous year, due to medication unaffordability, almost a quarter of Canadians decided against filling a prescription or having one renewed. Not only is medication less affordable, but other research has revealed that many low-income outpatients who cannot afford to fill their prescriptions end up back in the hospital system as a result, therefore costing far more for provincial and federal government health ministries than if the medication had been covered. …
Furthermore, while I have willingly taken three COVID-vaccine injections (as well as the annual influenza shots for decades), I nevertheless feel the term ‘science’ generally gets used a bit too readily/frequently, especially for political/corporate purposes.
Also, I’m cautious of blindly buying into (what I call) speculative science, in general. Owing to increasingly common privatize-sector research aiming for corporate profits, even science, and perhaps by extension scientific ‘fact’, has become commercialized. Research results, however flawed, can and are known to be publicly amplified if they favor the corporate product, and accurate research results can be suppressed or ignored if they are unfavorable to business interests, even when involving human health.
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I’m informed and depressed. Seriously, thanks for your enlightening comments.
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Well then make your local big pharma representative happy and get a prescription for the latest fix-all, anti-depressant wonder chemicals.
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