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The Hidden Truth Behind Drug Company Profits
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. Here's the latest example: factories across the poor world are desperate to start producing their own cheaper Tamiflu to protect their populations - but they are being sternly told not to. Why? So rich drug companies can protect their patents - and profits. There is an alternative to this sick system, but we are choosing to ignore it.
To understand this tale, we have to start with an apparent mystery. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has been correctly warning for months that if swine flu spreads to the poorest parts of the world, it could cull hundreds of thousands of people - or more. Yet they have also been telling the governments of the poor world not to go ahead and produce as much Tamiflu - the only drug we have to reduce the symptoms, and potentially save lives - as they possibly can.
In the answer to this whodunnit, there lies a much bigger story about how our world works today.
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.
This is where the solution to the swine flu mystery comes in. Ordinary democratic citizens were so disgusted by the attempt to deprive South Africa of life-saving medicine that public pressure won a small concession in the global trading rules. It was agreed that, in an overwhelming public health emergency, poor countries would be allowed to produce generic drugs. They are the exact same product, but without the brand name - or the fat patent payments to drug companies in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.
So under the new rules, the countries of the poor world should be entitled to start making as much generic Tamiflu as they want. There are companies across India and China who say they are raring to go. But Roche - the drug company that owns the patent - doesn't want the poor world making cheaper copies for themselves. They want people to buy the branded version, from which they receive profits. Although not obliged to, they have licensed a handful of companies in the developing world to make the treatment - but they have to pay for license, and they can't possibly meet the demand.
And the WHO seems to be backing Roche - against the rest of us. They are the ones best qualified to judge what constitutes an overwhelming emergency, justifying a breaching of the patent rules. And their message is: Don't use the loophole.
Professor Brook Baker, an expert on drug patenting, says: "Why do they behave like this? Because of direct or indirect pressure from the pharmaceutical companies. It's shocking."
What will be the end-result? James Love, director of Knowledge Economy International, which campaigns against the current patenting system, says: "Poor countries are not as prepared as they could have been. If there's a pandemic, the number of people who die will be much greater than it had to be. Much greater. It's horrible."
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.
We all suffer as a result of this patent dysfunction. The European Union's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, recently concluded that Europeans pay 40 per cent more for their medicines than they should because of this "rotten" system - money that could be saving many lives if it was redirected towards real health care.
Why would we keep this system, if it is so bad? The drug companies have spent more than $3bn on lobbyists and political "contributions" over the past decade in the US alone. They have paid politicians to make the system work in their interests. If you doubt how deeply this influence goes, listen to a Republican congressman, Walter Burton, who admitted of the last big health care legislation passed in the US in 2003: "The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill."
There is a far better way to develop medicines, if only we will take it. It was first proposed by Joseph Stiglitz, the recent Nobel Prize winner for economics. He says: "Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way."
Stiglitz's plan is simple. The governments of the Western world should establish a multi-billion dollar prize fund that will give payments to scientists who develop cures or vaccines for diseases. The highest prizes would go to cures for diseases that kill millions of people, like malaria. Once the pay-out is made, the rights to use the treatment will be in the public domain. Anybody, anywhere in the world, could manufacture the drug and use it to save lives.
The financial incentive in this system for scientists remains exactly the same - but all humanity reaps the benefits, not a tiny private monopoly and those lucky few who can afford to pay their bloated prices. The irrationalities of the current system - spending a fortune on me-too drugs, and preventing sick people from making the medicines that would save them - would end.
It isn't cheap - it would cost 0.6 per cent of GDP - but in the medium-term it would save us all a fortune because our health care systems would no longer have to pay huge premiums to drug companies. Meanwhile, the cost of medicine would come crashing down for the poor - and tens of millions would be able to afford it for the first time.
Yet moves to change the current system are blocked by the drug companies and their armies of lobbyists. That's why the way we regulate the production of medicines across the world is still designed to serve the interests of the shareholders of the drug companies - not the health of humanity.
The idea of ring-fencing life-saving medical knowledge so a few people can profit from it is one of the great grotesqueries of our age. We have to tear down this sick system - so the sick can live. Only then we can globalise the spirit of Jonas Salk, the great scientist who invented the polio vaccine, but refused to patent it, saying simply: "It would be like patenting the sun."
To read Johann's article about how swine flu may have been caused by our hunger for cheap meat, click here.
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35 Comments so far
Show AllI work in a mental health clinic and, until a couple years ago, we were constantly visited by attractive sales reps from the drug companies who brought samples to the doctors and pens and pads and other advertising trinkets to us the support staff, but bought lunches once a month or so where a psychiatrist would come and talk about whatever drug was being pushed that week.
I think most of our doctors and nurse practitioners prescribed based on what they thought worked best for the clients, but the influence of the reps can't be discounted. The City/County changed the policy and the reps can't bring us pens and pads any more or see any of our prescribers without a prearranged appointment. I think they said the reason was to combat "the appearance" of undue influence.
Paranoid Pessimist August 5th, 2009 8:55 am.....What is your location? I'm in northern Florida and I can tell you that rule does not apply here.
San Francisco.
The pharma vendors have no shortage of medical practitioners to call on since most practitioners do not work in settings such as clinics where policies prohibiting pharma vendors are more likely to be implemented.
In 1946 George Orwell observed that language can corrupt our thoughts. "The invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases...can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain".. there was no question that the drug companies were attempting such an invasion...
Creating disease: "overactive bladder". In the mid 1990's the market for drugs for people who accidentally wet themselves was small. Many doctors believed incontinence was not a disease that should be treated with prescription medicine but a normal part of aging that could be managed by changing one's habits. They suggested patients avoid caffeine and drink less fluid before bed or on a trip to the store. Patients who nevertheless wanted a prescription drug could choose from an array of cheap medicines that had been on the market for decades and worked in a similiar way to Pharmacia & UpJohn's new potential "blockbuster" Detrol.
Pharmacatia & UpJohn launched their marketing campaign; by 2006 "overactive bladder' had become part of the American lexicon and Pfizer (which bought Pharmacia in 2002) was selling a billion dollars of Detrol and Ditropan (a companion touted as even more effective) a year.
The FDA regulators found time and time again that that company claims about their remedies for "overactive bladder" were not backed by scientific studies. They found that the studies conducted by the drug companies and their marketing firms were manipulated to make their products more effective than they really were.Celebrities, patient advocacy groups and doctors are free to make any claim they like about the efficacy of any drug, even for uses not approved by the FDA, which explains why drug companies hire them as consultants and marketing agents.THe FDA's actions had little effect. The agency's small staff charged with monitoring the industry's marketing campaigns, which were growing ever more sophisticated and secretative and so extensive they could cost hundreds of millions of dollars for a single drug, were like a couple of cops trying to enforce the NO HONKING signs posted on street corners in Manhattan.
It was not until academic researchers at Emory University reported that Detrol and Ditropan could harm the memories of the patients taking them, a study by British researchers in 2003 that found the cognition of patient's Alzheimer's grew worse when using these drugs, became widely known, that Pfizer's sales began to decline.
"I spent the first several years of my career doing full-time reseach on brain serotonin meabolism, but I never saw any convincing evidence that any psychiatric disorder, including depression (and ADD), results from a deficiency of brain serontonin," said David Burns, an adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University.."In fact we cannot measure brain serotonin levels in living human beings there is no way to test this theory" Some neuroscientistics would question whether the theory(mental illness is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain) is even viable, since the brain does not function in this way, as a hydrologic system.
IN 2005 researchers at Oregon Health & Science University set out to evaluate the scientific evidence that had been published on the medicines prescribed for attention deficit disorders. The oregon group included some of the few academic drug expers in the country who had refused to take money from the phatmaceutical industry. The Oregon researchers combed through the medical literature dating back to the 1970's, looking for studies involving Ritalin the other ADHD meds. THey found 2,433 articles, an amazing amount of research on one type of drug. Yet the numbers were decieving. Many of the trials were far too brief to provide reliable information. More troubling, some of the clinical studies had been designed in ways that biased their results so that the medicines appeared to be safer and more effective than they actually were. (removing people who responded well to placebos, or had adverse reactions from preliminary studies, only publishing results from the second trials.)
I'm not sure what the word 'hidden' in the title means. All of the evils laid out in the article have been well known for some time. The sins of pharmaceutical lobbying have been discussed on this site for years.
I wonder if it's occurred to the author that massive die offs among the populations of the developing countries is an outcome that is seen as desirable by many among the corporate elite. Those deaths wouldn't bother Big Pharma because these people can't afford their products anyway and, by getting rid of them, pahrmaceutical companies may believe that the pressure for more altruistic behavior on their part would diminish.
For corporations who covet the mineral resources of those areas, these die offs would remove an impediment to ruthless exploitation such as that seen in Nigeria and Appalachia.
As bad as things may look, there's more evil at work than most folks can imagine.
q
There are twice as many lobbyists employed by the pharmaceutical industry in D.C. as there are Congresspersons and Senators.
It's time for China to put the screws to the west.
China holds enough western debt to bankrupt the west.
If China told the UN and especially the WHO that they had a moral imperative to produce lower cost drugs for the world what can the WHO do?
If Roche stamps its foot and western counties try to put pressure through a bogus WHO, China tells them piss off and threatens to call in its debt.
The world economy will collapse without Chinese capital and the west would gladly sacrifice Roche for their greedy ends. Obviously the west has no morality.
The US may play tough against the Chinese, but you can bet your ass that Korea and Japan will cave in immediately
China could also insist that the world put the Stiglitz method in place.
It's time to grab the west by their economic balls.
The problem with your idea is that China cannot actually grab the US by the balls and start squeezing without also grabbing itself by the balls and start squeezing.
Why should China jeopardise it's relations with the US, the EU, for the sake for the rest of the world?
Because China holds so much of US debt, it isn't in China's interest to completely ruin relations with the US. The US can simply tell China to screw themselves. The US can declare all that paper debt that China holds as worthless, as mere paper.
Because China holds so much of US debt, because the Chinese economy depends so much on exports to the US, it isn't in China's interest to have the US economy collapse.
It isn't in China's interest to have the world economy collapse, not with how dependent China's economy is on exports.
The same is true of Korea and Japan. So, no, you can't "bet your ass" that Korea and Japan cave in immediately.
And no, China can't insist that the world put the Stiglitz method in place either.
If you're waiting for China to a knight in shining armour coming to the rescue, don't hold your breath.
"China cannot actually grab the US by the balls and start squeezing without also grabbing itself by the balls and start squeezing."
I just know there is a "Confucius Say" joke in there somewhere, screaming to get out.
My first comment on here was published and since diappeared - what's up with that?! I had the first comment on the article posted... and it's gone.
Ah well... I pointed out that pretty much most of the R&D money, the educational institutions and ironically even the trade delegations and international apparatus that enforce patents are already paid for with public money now. WTO, WHO, INTERPOL, you name it, the CDC, the NIH. military studies... all public money.
Thus these drugs should have been public property all along. No billion-dollar award is needed, big pharma and big science has received billions upon billions from taxpayers already.
Your first post was deleted by the pharmaceutical industry which recently purchased the internet with last years profits. Don't worry If you are upset by that I'm sure they have a pill they can sell you to make it all better.
To the Republicans in my family who pretend to hate "socialized medicine" I reply that more than 50% of the funds used in R&D to create top selling prescription drugs come from taxpayers through the National Institute of Health.
http://www.whale.to/m/drug.html
If they hate "socialized medicine" soooo much they should refuse to take any pill which was brought to market using public funds. They should demand only those pills developed through the mythical "free market" they childishly believe in with 100% private funds.
Not one of them has told their doctor to stop prescribing them leftist, liberal Michael Moore pills...proving they truly do like "socialized medicine".
'companies need the money to pay for the expensive science required to find new drugs'. Discovering a new drug can take more than a decade, executives say, and run up a bill that by 2006 was approaching one billion dollars.
This estimate comes from a group of professors at Tufts University's Center for the Study of Drug Development. The center was started in 1976..today it is funded mostly by the pharmaceutical industry and its corporate partners. Since its founding, the Tufts professors have surveyed drug companies and used the informaton to calculate how much must be spent to find and develop a new drug. The center's estimate, which has been widely quoted by the industry and media, has climbed rapidly. In 1979 the center said each new drug cost the industry an everage of $54 million to discover. By 1991 the cost had climbed to $231 million. Ten years later the Tufts researchers said the industry spent $802 million to develop a new drug.
A wide ranging group of critics has attacked these estimates. Nearly all these estimates consists not of actual costs but of what the Tufts professors call 'the cost of capital', or the money the companies could have earned if they had invested their research money in stocks or other money making adventures. The researchers also fail to adjust their estimate downwards for the billions of dollars in federal tax benefits that the pharmaceutical companies recieve each year by spending money on research
Furthermore, most of the nation's critical lifesaving drugs, like those that that cancer and AIDS, would not be sold today if taxpayers had not paid for the science that led to their discovery. Executives of the phamaceutical companies admit this. They explain that the job of the federal government is to pay for basic science that advances the understanding of medicine, which the companies then "apply" to create new products. For example, Bristol-Myers Squib's bestselling cancer drug Taxol was discovered by scientists funded through government grants. The federal government then paid to manufacture the drug and test it in patients, before granting a licence to Bristol-Myers to sell it.
It is also unquestionable that it's far less costly simply to follow in a competitor's footsteps, copying their work before adding your own twist (and marketing the result as "an improvement")
Of the nations twenty-one most important drugs introduced between 1965 and 1992, fifteen were developed using knowledge from federal-funded research.
But the most troublesome problem with the Tufts estimate of the cost of discovering a drug, however, is that there is no way to verify it. The pharmaceutical companies actual research costs are one of the world's most closely guarded secrets.
And that's IF the drug is actually new! In a lot of cases you have something being remarketed for what were considered side effects. I believe - I am not a researcher but once had a job in a company that provided services to big pharma - that the repurposing of a drug that already passed Phase I testing (i.e. side effects on healthy people) saves the company the largest amount of money in human testing.
Remember AZT? That was a failed chemo drug repackaged to become a failed AIDS drug, to the tune of billion$. And hey, "They were gonna die anyway", right? Right..?
not to go off-topic, but one might also stop controlling, ultimately with violence, bankruptcy and incarceration, those beneficial substances that occur naturally, and which, in a number of cases, are the very substances from which the eventual meds are based...
In 1980, as an incentive to get American scientists to work harder, lawmakers passed a measure that allowed researchers recieving federal grants to patent and profit from their discoveries. The law was known as the Bayh-Dole Act..it reversed decades of policy. Before this law, any discoveries made during studies paid for by the federal government had been in the public domain- that is, they had been owned and controlled by the taxpayers who paid for them.,.
In the same year the Supreme Court unleashed a deluge of industrial science by allowing the first patent to be placed on a living organism..reversing the ruling of the U.S. patent Office and opning the door to the patenting of genes, cell lines, tissues and organs..
These two changes put dollar signs in the eyes of college administrators and their faculties. Between 1980 and 1995 univ. researchers helpd start 1,633 new companies. In 1997 alone researchers at Stanford Univ. filed 128 new patents, created 15 companies and earned $52 million from licenses of its products..the role of the academic as a referee to the drug companies' clinical trials became a minor one. And the moderating force that kept scientific studies honest and impartial began to disappear.
By the mid-1990's, many American doctors had grown frustrated with the financial limits imposed on them by health maintenance organizations and other forms of managed care that became popular in the 1980's and 1990's as a way of restraining medical costs. Watching their salaries stall, the doctors were easily seduced by the welcoming arms of the drug industry, where the money still flowed. They found they could significantly boost their bank accounts and upgrade their lifestyles by winning favor with the pharmaceutical sales representative and joining a company's payroll as a speaker, consultant, researcher, or advisor or by serving all these functions at the same time.
Drug companies employ a "publication planning" strategy: flooding the world's medical journals with articles and clinical studies that, when taken together, would create an image of a product so safe that doctors would be convinced to prescribe it. As the pharmaceutical companies realized the powwer of this marketing technique, they increased spending on what they called research and development, although it would have been more accurateely decribed as "selling and promotion."..at the same time they gradually took control of most of the country's medical research. In 1980 the pharmaceutical industry paid for just 32 % of the nation's medical research. By 2000 the companies' share of total research spending had grown to 62%.
With ghostwriters and pharmaceutical executives editing the research papers each step of the way, the marketers could pick certain words and phrases that helped boost the image of the product. Dangers of a medicine could be toned down.Benefits of a drug could be pumped up. A serious injury in a patient taking a drug in a trial might be referred to simply as "an event". The words "adverse reaction" might be changed to the more benign "side effects". A drug that worked only slightly better than a sugar pill might be described as having "proven efficacy. It was all a m,atter of degree. The ghostwriters were like photographers who airbrushed family portraits, softening blemishes and facial lines until their subjects looked far better on paper than in real liofe.
Omnicon and the other ad agencies had grown rich from a new stream of advertising revenue, one worth millions of dollars a year, when the FDA decided in 1997 to allow prescription drug commercials on TV. At the same time, the pharmaceutical industry had been paying ad firms to ghostwrite publications, to organize dinners and meetings for physicians, to create medical education courses, and for public relations work they alled "managing the media" Now the ad firms were expanding their services to include scientific research and clinical drug trials.
Americans spent $250 billion in 2005 on prescription drugs, more in 2004 than they did on gasoline and fast food, twice as much in that year as they spent on either higher education or automobiles. They spend more on medicines than do all the people of Japan, Germany, France, Spain, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina combined.
Only about 10% of the price of most brand name pills goes to cover the cost of the raw chemicals and manufacturing, the pharmaceutical industry has plenty left even after paying for advertisements, research and the high salaries and expensive perks of its executives. From 1995 to 2002 they were the nation's most profitable industry. In 2004 the pharmaceutical companies turned nearly sixteen cents of each dollar of revenue into profit, according to Fortune magazine. That compares with the median profit earned by America's five hundred largest public companies that year of a little more than five cents.
The vast majority of drugs-more than 90% only work in 30 to 50 percent of the people....across all drug categories today an average of 50 percent of the people treated with individual drugs are recieving treatments that are not efficacious for them.
Early studies indicate that prescription drugs and their abuse play an equal role in highway fatalities than alcohol, far more than illegal drugs.
"Our Daily Meds" by Melody Peterson
Sioux Rose
JOHN S: Extremely helpful post. Thank you so much for sharing it! The insidious stealth action on the part of big pharma, along with these statistics make for useful research data.
Perhaps the karma of war & militarism truly return as karmic blowback in the form of having so many persons ill, depressed, obese, or imagining side-effects to lives of quiet desperation. Drugs R' U.S.
Most of this discussion is focused on the economics - graft, corruption & racketeering - of big pharma and it stinks.
However, as Mr. Hari reports, the main victims are the poor across the world. So, in addition to the economics, might we also detect the creeping stench of eugenics?
Evil is always adroit at utilizing whatever perverted rationale is at hand. It's what keeps american talk radio busy.
I saw a report in the UK Guardian that the Kariolinska Institute in Sweden is nearing human trial completion on a neuro med that safely activates areas of the brain responsible for cooperation, bonding, empathy and the like, without negative side effects. There are already psychotropic drugs like this on the commercial market and on the street, but all apparently produce unwanted side effects like DNA breakage, slowed P-300 wave reaction time, memory impairment and so forth. The European media have variously nicknamed the new drug the anti-war pill, the SOMA pill, the Civilization Drug, et cetera. Swedish pharma researchers say that the new drug, which does not produce any sense of high or euphoria, was originally conceived to treat criminals diagnosed with sociopathic disorders and other anti-social disorders that can be traced to specific malfunctioning or non functioning areas of the brain.
There was serious speculation by some UK sociologists and psychologists that because the drug has posed no known dangers to normal brains after 12 years of clinical trials, it could come into widespread use in the general population since it also mildly mediates atypical aggressive impulses in normal humans as well.
One Danish sociologist noted that European marketing of the drug in the US would probably be never be welcomed, saying that if the drug's ingestion by US industry executives themselves ever became routine, "...it could pose a unique threat to how the American CEO's operate their industries."
"It would just have to be for the general population there...", he said, "not for their CEO's or military people, and probably not for their politicians either."
can you direct me to that report? thank you...
What is the name of the drug? Any links to the trials?
"Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism." Neil Postman
"...people are not so much denied human rights like free speech, but are rather conditioned not to care."
CB oxytocin or related?
Every time we repeal regulations and protections with the idea of freeing up the playing field for more innovation, what takes over is greed for profits, which overrides everything--creativity, integrity, honesty, sincerity and wisdom. The profit motive ruins everything from medicine to banking.
I saw a great movie recently, "Side Effects" with Kathryn Heigl, who executive produced the movie. It was done on a shoestring. The director was a former career pharmaceutical sales rep. The movie is an indictment of an irresponsible, greedy and often fraudulent pharmaceutical industry. It brings out how there are even some doctors who refuse to prescribe a new drug until it's been on the market for at least a year, as a safety measure. It shows how a pill produced for a dime is marked up to 12.00 a pill, and will cost 580.00 for a month's prescription, making it unaffordable to many who need it, while sales reps make bonuses of the kind that you can buy a house with one bonus check. The movie also brings to light the insidious practice of developing drugs basically to sell to the public, to convince the public they need, such as antidepressants, through marketing strategy.
The profit inflated prices of prescription drugs, and the irresponsible marketing of them, downplaying their dangers while exaggerating their usefulness, feed into the unaffordability of health insurance and into the price of medical malpractice insurance.
the profit on 'legal' drugs is obscene, as is the deliberate attempt to cloud negative or nonexistent effects...the profit on the 'illegal' drugs is also obscene...could it be the same entities are controlling and profiting from both, entities both within and without our national government? A recent article posted here on CD alluded to the Afghanistan 'conflict' conceivably lasting for many more years, which always intrigues me, due to the vast majority of the world's heroin coming from there...there is a strong link between illegal drugs and the Viet Nam 'conflict', as well as much of our messin' in Mexico, Central and South America...if one is bored, a search for and re-reading of the material unleashed via the San Jose Mercury News several years back about Freeway Rick and the CIA might arouse...
Once one delegates one's life, from philosophy to physical support, to the market, one becomes vulnerable to all sorts of hanky-panky...
Will any of us ever experience a single moment of life not framed and dictated by an ultimately-violent other? Is our life's purpose to meander from the birth canal to the grave, thinking and behaving as directed?
I have been open about my enjoyment of marijuana, but there is also a flip side: an inherent distrust of 'products' created by men to sell...whatever positives or negatives one with first-hand experience might associate with marijuana use, for example, at least one need not consider human motivations to be much responsible for either...that, to me, is incredibly reassuring...God save us from ourselves...
This whole mess from Big Pharma comes from society's acceptance of putting quantity over quality. If more people can be convinced to put quality care before obscene profits, going local on production and delivering better quality with it would be so main stream. Why do farmlands get torn down all over the world to produce those medical factories? Simple, it's all about the whole-sale volume sale for-profit scheme. Supposedly, farms unless they're factory ones don't generate loads of profit but the drug factories do. However, our governments fear losing power since they're in bed with Big Pharma that helped them get there. In addition, people have been conditioned in believing that quantity, not quality matters. I think we've all fallen into that trap in our life times. Think about the food and medicines you take. 50 years ago, smaller servings and dosages would last longer but today's foods and medicines are disposable and we keep coming back for more so soon so fast. This is exactly what Big Pharma, Food, Insurance, Oil, etc ... had in mind when they profited from volume sales with no regards to people's health and safety.
Ah the work of a tech in a retail pharmacy! - to turn the suicide from antidepressants, the diabetic from medication - to turn away the cardiac patient who comes to the counter a few dollars short:
Just business!
Just business that companies charge what markets pay
Just business that people can pay more or less
& so just business some cannot pay to live.
Business that one would keep one's job
& a few dollars more than the cashier
at the front of the store.
I am glad some people work as pharmacy techs. I'm glad I don't.
Why no mention of the TAMIFLU/RUMSFELD CONNECTION?
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_bird_flu.htm
somehow this article brings to mind a quote by Jean Jacques Rousseau:
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows,
"Beware of listening to this impostor, you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
it wasn't so much the 'founder of civil society' as of the arrogant, myopic and hyperindividualistic, selfish society... shame on the patenters and commodifiers of life-saving drugs who coldly withhold needed medicine from those in need...it is indeed 'one of the great grotesqueries of our age'!!!
"You don't own the land. The land owns you". (Chief Seattle)
there is no u.s. govt. its just a front that corps. use to bleed the citizens dry.they won't be happy until they have all your money and we are their slaves.with a pauper prison run by them
and they charge you for your imprisonment guaranteeing your
indebtedness till you die! i have a friend who has been a
scientist in cancer research for nearly 35 yrs. he said that
they have a cure for most cancers now but there isn't any
money in it. this man is a straight up lefty like most of us
here and i have known him for 25 yrs. he isn't a liar.
if your part of the elite you can buy the cure if not
tuff titties! drug comps. should be right at the top of the corps. to be nationalized when democracy is restored.
Senator Dodd's wife, Jackie Clegg Dodd has her own firm
doing business with many Pharma agencies. Who's side is
Dodd On? My side or Jackie's side?
Nothing will change because "We the people" are too geeked out on anti-depressants to give a sh*t. People just want to complain and not take action.
Everyone gets what they deserve.
The elderly mother of a friend has breast cancer. She is on Medicare and also has private insurance as a supplement, through some part-time work she has been able to do. Her cancer medications cost a fortune, but neither Medicare nor the insurance cover it...and she's ineligible to get any help from cancer organizations, because she has "too much money" (she owns her home and has a little bit of retirment to live on)...what is wrong with this picture?