The hidden truth behind drug company profits

[Better Believe It]

Johann Hari: The hidden truth behind drug company profits
Ring-fencing medical knowledge is one of the great grotesqueries of our age
August 5, 2009


This is the story of one of the great unspoken scandals of our times. Today, the people across the world who most need life-saving medicine are being prevented from producing it.

Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist – and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels – is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes.

Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive, but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.

Although it's not the goal of the individuals working within the system, the outcome is often deadly. The drug companies who owned the patent for Aids drugs went to court to stop the post-Apartheid government of South Africa producing generic copies of it – which are just as effective – for $100 a year to save their dying citizens. They wanted them to pay the full $10,000 a year to buy the branded version – or nothing. In the poor world, the patenting system every day puts medicines beyond the reach of sick people.

The argument in defence of this system offered by Big Pharma is simple, and sounds reasonable at first: we need to charge large sums for "our" drugs so we can develop more life-saving medicines. We want to develop as many treatments as we can, and we can only do that if we have revenue. A lot of the research we back doesn't result in a marketable drug, so it's an expensive process.

But a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 per cent of their budgets go on developing drugs – usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 per cent, drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs – medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.

As a result, the US Government Accountability Office says that far from being a font of innovation, the drug market has become "stagnant". They spend virtually nothing on the diseases that kill the most human beings, like malaria, because the victims are poor, so there's hardly any profit to be sucked out.

Please read the complete article at:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-hidden-truth-behind-drug-company-profits-1767257.html

Interesting fact in the article I wasn't aware of:

Jonas Salk, the great scientist who invented the polio vaccine, refused to patent it, saying simply: "It would be like patenting the sun."

[napi21]

1. There's no doubt in my mind that most of their $$ goes into

marketing, advertising & executive compensation. I'm really sick of seeing every damn TV show sponsored by some drug to cure some illness you never knew you had! I wish Congress would revoke authorization to advertise prescription drugs on TV like it used to be.

[prolesunited]

2. Socialize the costs, privatize the profits

They've perfected this scam well.

[4lbs]

3. Drug companies also don't seek cures anymore. They seek ways to make major illnesses manageable

chronic ones, where the person regularly gets his/her $100 monthly "fix" of prescriptions.

Big PhRMA is following the narcotic drug-pusher-on-the-street model.

Don't have them spend $2500 one time to cure it, but have them pay $100 monthly for the rest of their lives.