Pharmaceutical Companies: Legal Drug Dealers

Doctors are supposed to help people get over an illness that they are battling; perform check-ups so that we know our health is alright; even though we live in a capitalistic society where it is all about competition and increasing profits, certain professions need to not take a business oath and remember why they initially wanted to become that profession. Doctors these days are making a lot of money from pharmaceutical companies; these companies invite doctors on trips to places like Hawaii, and all the doctors have to do is tell a patient about that pill that the company is trying to sell. Some pharmaceutical companies even hire medicine marketing firms like TarketRX; their job is to come up with symptoms that each medicine could treat so that the pills could be marketed to a demographic.

Paroxetine (better known as Paxil in the U.S.) is an antidepressant. It is licensed only for adults, but doctors are allowed to prescribe any medicine if they think it will help their patient(see picture to the right) ; a practice called “off-label” prescribing; around 7,000 children a year were on the drug in the UK; and many more in the U.S. Many teens that take these antidepressants end up committing suicide because the drug ends up increasing aggression in the young adult. The new cholesterol lowering guidelines are proving to be a windfall for statin drug manufacturers like Pfizer and Merck: most news articles and medical advice concerning the new guidelines recommend drugs—and drugs only—to reduce cholesterol level. As a result, the guidelines are perhaps better described as profit generators for pharmaceutical companies. 6 out of the 9 panelists that issued the new decision about cholesterol levels have received grants or consulting payments from statin drug manufacturers; the panelists get paid “consulting fees” and grant money, the guidelines are arbitrarily lowered to a level that suddenly puts millions more Americans into the “high cholesterol” categrory simply by changing the definition, the popular press runs headlines screaming that millions of people should now suddenly be taking statin drugs for life, and the drug companies receive a windfall in sales and profits. The doctors are getting “consulting fees” for doing nothing more than signing a blank piece of paper, the researchers are getting “grant money” to carry out research that almost always supports the drug companies, and the mainstream media is receiving billions of dollars in ad revenue as long as they keep pushing drugs to customers, both in advertising and news content.

The problem is that none of this has anything to do with real health. Prescription drugs simply don’t make people healthy; they mask symptoms, and these statin drugs have a bewildering array of dangerous side effects such as sudden death, loss of sex drive, osteoporosis and hormonal imbalances. Prescription drugs are not needed to be healthy; the whole system of promoting these drugs is an unprecedented con being perpetrated on the American people. In fact, the system is downright criminal; the FBI should be investigating and prosecuting the players of this industry, using the RICO laws designed to bring down organized crime (see picture to the right). The economic logic of the medical-industrial complex is straightforward, prescription drugs and high-technology medical devices account for a growing share of medical spending; both products are expensive to develop but relatively cheap to make so the profit from each additional unit sold is large, giving their makers a strong incentive to do whatever it takes to persuade doctors and hospitals to chose their products. Hospitals and doctors need to remember the reasons why they became doctors; if they wanted large payoffs, they should of become politicians; doctors should only prescribe medicine that they really think is going to be helpful, not the most profitable.