Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.
Support MFO
Donate through PayPal
Overview: Inside the drug industry’s plan to defeat the DEA
Here is a link to a lengthy and detailed article in The Washington Post which details how the drug companies worked together, at the height of the crisis, to weaken the federal government's most powerful enforcement weapon.
#MFO Members: Just to put things in perspective, millions of people would not be alive today if it weren't for the pharmaceutical industry ! Regards, Ted
@Ted And the industry has been compensated more than handsomely for it. When you pay as much as Americans do for medicine, the pharma industry should be held accountable for its missteps and shouldn't be allowed to intentionally sabotage the Hippocratic Oath of First Do No Harm:
A few thoughts that I have neither time nor energy to craft into coherent prose:
The pharmaceutical industry has discovered and produced many, many drugs that are a huge boon to mankind.
The industry pours vast oceans of money into research, most of which never yields a profitable drug.
Every time a company starts to make money, they are set upon from all sides, Republicans and Democrats alike, as being greedy and mercenary.
The companies are pressured and bullied into giving away their products to people who can't afford them.
The companies are the constant targets of lawsuits, the vast majority of which are meritless.
Prescription drug spending represents maybe 15% of all healthcare costs, and probably gives more bang for the buck than any other category.
They are simply an easy target for the rabble. No, they are not 100% pure. nothing is. but for the most part they are working hard to do great good, and there is no reason they (and their shareholders) should not reap the benefit of making such huge investments and accepting such gargantuan risks.
And yet as I've stated pharma has long been one of the most profitable industries on earth. It is not simply "rabble" suing companies--and frankly it's deeply offensive in my view to say so--when you have a product that has killed people and worse when the makers of the product knew it was killing people and intentionally suppressed or distorted the info on that product as Purdue Pharma did. And there are also plenty of pharma companies that spend far more money on marketing, lobbyists and developing me-too drugs where they change a molecule to protect a patent than life saving medicine. Turn on the TV and see how many pharma ads there are for "diseases" that sometimes seem manufactured out of thin air to increase revenue. This industry once tried to claim that adolescent girls should be on a psychoactive drug because their menstrual cycles made them uncomfortable. Sure, the industry saves lives, as does America's military. That doesn't mean it's justifiable for people to pay $100 for a pill that costs a company two cents to manufacture anymore than it makes sense for the government to be paying $10,000 to an arms manufacturer to make a hammer:
Pharmaceutical companies have some of the highest profit margins in the world, a distinction that has earned the industry criticism from both politicians and consumers, who often complain about the high prices of prescription drugs. According to a November 2017 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, consumer spending on drugs has doubled since the 1990s, mainly due to the high cost of prescriptions.
The same study pointed out that revenues and profit margins in the industry are on the rise. "We looked into changes in the drug industry and found that pharmaceutical and biotechnology sales revenue increased from $534 billion to $775 billion between 2006 and 2015," the GAO reported. "Additionally, 67 percent of drug companies increased their annual profit margins during the same period—with margins up to 20 percent for some companies in certain years." Spending on research and development increased as well, to $89 billion in 2014, from $82 billion in 2008.
I don't know any details of the Purdue Pharma case, so I cannot discuss it intelligently. (One is not required to have an opinion on every topic). If it happened as you say it did, then they were certainly bad actors.
As an aside, I will say that characterizing those who overdose as passive victims is totally one-sided.
As for tweaking a drug by changing a molecule, I agree with you. That's an abuse. It should be the physician's responsibility to prescribe the older, cheaper, essentially identical drug. Also taking a generic substance such as fish oil, and jumping through the hoops to turn it into a prescription drug, is also rather silly.
Can you give examples of diseases that are made up out of thin air?
That 2 cent cost to make the pill excludes an awful lot of expenses doesn't it? We could play that game anywhere. McDonald's should be selling their fries for a nickle because the cost of the potatoes, salt, and grease is almost nothing.
Beginning in 2000, the FDA approved four drugs to treat premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a form of PMS said to be so severe that it qualifies as a psychiatric condition.
The hitch: It wasn't even recognized as a mental disorder until 13 years after first drug treatments were on market.
GlaxoSmithKline’s modus operandi-marketing a disease rather than selling a drug-is typical of the post-Prozac era. “The strategy [companies] use-it’s almost mechanized by now,” says Dr. Loren Mosher, a San Diego psychiatrist and former official at the National Institute of Mental Health. Typically, a corporate-sponsored “disease awareness” campaign focuses on a mild psychiatric condition with a large pool of potential sufferers. Companies fund studies that prove the drug’s efficacy in treating the affliction, a necessary step in obtaining FDA approval for a new use, or “indication.” Prominent doctors are enlisted to publicly affirm the malady’s ubiquity. Public-relations firms launch campaigns to promote the new disease, using dramatic statistics from corporate-sponsored studies. Finally, patient groups are recruited to serve as the “public face” for the condition, supplying quotes and compelling human stories for the media; many of the groups are heavily subsidized by drugmakers, and some operate directly out of the offices of drug companies’ P.R. firms.
The strategy has enabled the pharmaceutical industry to squeeze millions in additional revenue from the blockbuster drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a family of pharmaceuticals that includes Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, and Luvox. Originally approved solely as antidepressants, the SSRIs are now prescribed for a wide array of heretofore obscure afflictions-GAD, social anxiety disorder, premenstrual dysphoric disorder. The proliferation of diagnoses has contributed to a dramatic rise in antidepressant sales, which increased eightfold between 1990 and 2000. Prozac alone has been used by more than 22 million Americans since it first came to market in 1988.
According to a study in the British Medical Journal, pharmaceutical companies spend $19 on advertising a new drug for every one dollar spent on the research and development process....
He said the cultivation of direct personal relationships between industry representatives and physicians is nearly universal at all levels of private and public healthcare. For example, he said, the pharmaceutical industry gives gifts both large (e.g., sponsored trips) and small (e.g., pens and note pads) to encourage particular prescribing patterns — a boon to the industry at the potential cost of harm to the patients, or at best a waste of money by consumers, insurers and the government....
Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin, co-directors of the Center for Medicine and Media at Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, said disease-awareness campaigns may seem caring or educational but are often just marketing in disguise. The campaigns often follow three basic steps: lower the bar for diagnosis, raise the stakes so people want to get tested and spin the evidence about a drug’s benefits and risks. These steps were seen in campaigns on testosterone deficiency, bipolar disorder and restless leg syndrome....
“Everyone’s legs feel restless now and then, or they feel occasional stinging or burning sensations in their eyes. But far less people have symptoms severe enough to need medical treatment. The problem is that manufacturers increasingly target people with mild symptoms in order to turn them into patients. Unfortunately, treatment may offer little benefit and may not outweigh side effects, cost and inconvenience,” Woloshin said.
Woloshin said pharmaceutical company print or online advertisements sometimes feature quizzes that include symptoms associated with a condition, but which the drug did not help in clinical trials.
“Consumers naturally think, ‘I see the list of things on this quiz. The drug must treat these things,’ even though it doesn’t. It’s a trick,” Woloshin said.
I think this discussion has been blown miles off course. Has any one even looked at the WP article. I myself will never do business at Walgreens again!
Comments
Regards,
Ted
The pharmaceutical industry has discovered and produced many, many drugs that are a huge boon to mankind.
The industry pours vast oceans of money into research, most of which never yields a profitable drug.
Every time a company starts to make money, they are set upon from all sides, Republicans and Democrats alike, as being greedy and mercenary.
The companies are pressured and bullied into giving away their products to people who can't afford them.
The companies are the constant targets of lawsuits, the vast majority of which are meritless.
Prescription drug spending represents maybe 15% of all healthcare costs, and probably gives more bang for the buck than any other category.
They are simply an easy target for the rabble. No, they are not 100% pure. nothing is. but for the most part they are working hard to do great good, and there is no reason they (and their shareholders) should not reap the benefit of making such huge investments and accepting such gargantuan risks.
Regards,
Ted
As an aside, I will say that characterizing those who overdose as passive victims is totally one-sided.
As for tweaking a drug by changing a molecule, I agree with you. That's an abuse. It should be the physician's responsibility to prescribe the older, cheaper, essentially identical drug. Also taking a generic substance such as fish oil, and jumping through the hoops to turn it into a prescription drug, is also rather silly.
Can you give examples of diseases that are made up out of thin air?
That 2 cent cost to make the pill excludes an awful lot of expenses doesn't it? We could play that game anywhere. McDonald's should be selling their fries for a nickle because the cost of the potatoes, salt, and grease is almost nothing.
To say nothing of the vast oceans of money spent bribing the United States Congress.
https://jsonline.com/story/news/investigations/2016/11/16/one-condition-drugs-came-before-disorder/93823042/ https://motherjones.com/politics/2002/07/disorders-made-order/ https://huffpost.com/entry/malady-mongers-how-drug-companies-sell-treatments-by-inventing-diseases_n_5b1ab5e4e4b0adfb8268c762