E-drug: Salon.com: The drug companies' racket
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[Copied from Ip-Health with thanks. KM, co-moderator]
The drug companies' racket
Pharmaceutical giants are finally bending to worldwide public pressure
on AIDS drugs, but we're still victims of their profiteering.
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By Arianna Huffington
April 20, 2001 | For more than three years, the big pharmaceutical
companies have been spit-shining their image as mankind's saviors while
simultaneously waging a legal battle to keep low-cost versions of
lifesaving drugs from the millions of people dying of AIDS in Africa.
On Thursday, the 39 drug companies suing the South African government
dropped their lawsuit. Typically, they're spinning it as a humanitarian
gesture, but it really is the only way to extricate themselves from the
public relations nightmare their coldblooded effort had become. You can
see why they've never tried to develop a truth pill.
From AIDS activists who started protesting two years ago to Nelson
Mandela, who this week called the lawsuit a "gross error ... that is
completely wrong and must be condemned," the public outcry had reached a
crescendo the industry could no longer afford to ignore.
This, after all, is the same industry that last year spent $1.7 billion
on TV ads promoting its products and painting itself as a paragon of
virtue and compassion.
Ironically, it was not long after I had seen for the umpteenth time
Pfizer's heartstring-tugging TV spot proclaiming "Life is our life's
work" that I heard the drug companies -- including Warner-Lambert, which
merged with Pfizer last summer -- were waving the bloodstained white
flag in Pretoria.
That it took the world turning on them -- and three long years of
thousands of people dying -- to get them to drop their suit proves that
the industry's collective slogan should be "Profit is our life's work."
And lucrative work it is. Last year, according to Fortune magazine, the
pharmaceutical industry was the most profitable in America by far. This
profitability, however, came with a human price tag.
In a series of investigative reports that just earned him a Pulitzer
Prize, the Los Angeles Times' David Willman exposed the risks taken with
the public's health by drug companies in their frenetic drive for
ever-higher profits. He uncovered documents that reveal how
Warner-Lambert, which produced the now-banned diabetes drug Rezulin,
willfully ignored evidence of the drug's life-threatening liver
toxicity, and even managed to get senior Food and Drug Administration
officials to disregard the warnings of their own medical experts.
This collusion between the pharmaceutical industry, the FDA and the
Congressional Oversight Committee -- which more often resembles the
Congressional Turn-a-Blind-Eye Committee -- is becoming deadly.
Literally. Nine drugs have been pulled off the market for safety reasons
in the past four years after causing more than a thousand deaths and
countless serious injuries.
And according to drug safety expert Thomas Moore, these numbers only
scratch the surface of the suffering. "I believe the number of people
injured by these drugs," he told me, "is grossly underestimated because
only a small fraction of cases are reported. We have a flawed system
that gives drug companies the benefit of the doubt, and as a result,
thousands of people are dying."
This lack of real government oversight is compounded by the industry's
aggressive marketing tactics -- which make it seem like these powerful
drugs are just like any other consumer product.
It's a misperception with lethal side effects. Just as Hollywood knows
how to make a blockbuster movie "open big," the pharmaceutical companies
have learned how to build interest in their latest blockbuster drug. As
a result, new, relatively untested drugs are being sampled by millions
of people soon after they are approved, so when something goes wrong,
the fallout is widespread.
A particularly loathsome example of this involves Duract, a painkiller
that research proved could damage the liver. But under pressure from
Wyeth-Ayers, Duract's manufacturer, the FDA approved the drug anyway,
with a warning to physicians about its toxicity. The drug company wasn't
about to let a little thing like fatal liver damage get in its way.
It pushed the flawed drug so effectively that more than 2.5 million
prescriptions were written in the 10 months before Duract started
racking up liver-related deaths and was yanked off pharmacy shelves. As
they say in that other kind of drug ad, "Speed Kills."
But bamboozling the American public on the way to massive profits only
earns you a slap on the wrist. Glaxo Wellcome was reprimanded a
remarkable 14 times for misleading consumers about its asthma drugs
Flovent and Flonase. You'd think they'd have gotten the message after
rebuke No. 4. Or 9. Or 12. And the FDA recently wagged its finger -- for
the third time in 14 months -- at Pfizer and Pharmacia for running
deceptive TV spots touting Celebrex, their jointly marketed arthritis
drug.
Hoping to explore this less-than-stellar track record further, I put in
a call to Pfizer and was transferred to the company's Department of
Corporate Reputation. I kid you not, that's what it's called. When I
asked about obtaining a copy of some of its ads, I was told this
wouldn't be possible because of my "tight deadline."
I guess 36 hours wasn't enough time for anyone to fax me the script of a
30-second ad that seems to air every 60 seconds. I understand -- I'd
also be embarrassed if my ads overstated product effectiveness or
contained the hyperdefensive tag line "We have fathers, sisters and best
friends, too." Some of those best friends are apparently employed at the
FDA.
And why not -- it's easy to bond with government officials who are
ignoring warnings from their own medical specialists and issuing
toothless scoldings to the industry.
It's now abundantly clear that the decision to allow drug companies to
inundate consumers with ads for prescription drugs was a serious
mistake. It should be reversed, but that's easier said than done. The
industry has covered its legislative flank by making extremely generous
contributions to elected officials on both sides of the aisle -- more
than $18.6 million during the last campaign alone.
But the industry's surrender in South Africa shows that public pressure
and grass-roots protests really work. So let's build on this victory and
rid our airwaves of the plague of prescription drug ads.