HEALTH: Big drug companies geared to profits rather than research

[UpInArms]

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_28-6-2004_pg6_16

Washington: For the last 20 years, the American pharmaceutical industry has become more of a marketing machine than a discoverer of new and useful drugs.

The industry now sells drugs of dubious benefit using its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including Congress, the Food and Drug Administration, academic medical centres and the medical profession itself, according to an expose in the current issue of New York Review of Books.

Americans spent $200 billion on prescription drugs in 2002 through direct purchases at pharmacies and mail order. The figure includes the 25 percent markup for wholesalers, pharmacists and other middlemen and retailers, but not the large amounts spent for drugs administered at hospitals, nursing homes or doctors’ offices. Total worldwide sales for prescription drugs in 2002 were $400 billion, 50 percent of them in the United States. Beginning in 1980, Congress enacted a series of laws designed to speed the translation of tax-supported basic research into useful new products to improve the position of American-owned high- tech businesses in world markets. Businesses and universities were also allowed to patent discoveries emanating from research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the major distributor of taxpayer dollars for medical research. Until then, such discoveries were in the public domain, available to any company that wanted to use them. This gave a big boost to the nascent biotechnology industry. Small biotech companies proliferated. They worked in association with universities for drug development, hoping for lucrative deals with big drug companies which could market the new drugs. This freed the dug companies from relying on their own research for new drugs.

<snip>

In 2002, the profits of Big Pharma fell from 18.5 percent to 17 percent of the combined profits of Fortune 500 companies. However, the combined profits of the 10 drug companies were more than the profits of the other 490 businesses put together. The next year, the profits of the Fortune 500 drug companies dropped to 14.3 percent of sales, but still well above the median for all industries of 4.6 percent for that year. The top 10 pharmaceutical companies spent only 11 percent of what they earned in sales on research and development in 1990, the figure rising to 14 percent in 2000. The biggest item in their budget is “marketing and administration, which accounted for 36 percent of their sales revenues in 1990. The proportion remained unchanged over the next decade.

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[Don_G]

1. Plus They're Heavy Contributers To The GOP

And the Bush family has connections out the whazoo with Eli Lilly.

[Massacure]

2. Ban public advertising of drugs

There are plenty of generic drugs that are just as effective as the big company ones.

[Terry_M]

3. Well I was thinking instead of banning it completely

They could limit it to say 5% of the previous year's expenses or something similar, but anyway I don't think anyone has the guts to do this.

[AP]

4. They only come up with treatments. Haven't cured a disease since polio.

And it took a public effort (march of dimes) to do that.

Why? No money in cures. Only money in treatments.

[keithyboy]

5. Don't look now, but the Fed gov't foots most of the costs of research thru

its grants and contracts and then they allow the pharmaceutal companies to have licensing rights and charge outrageous prices for drugs developed and tested with NIH funds. Dr. Bernadine Healey tried to confront this issue as Director of NIH but was quickly run out of office by the RW conservative biomedical research cronies who stood to make much money from the patents and licensing fees. People just don't know how their tax dollars are wasted. They have been brainwashed to believe that the government wastes their money on welfare and social aid programs. If they only knew. But who is going to tell them...certainly not the US media. And the people I've known to blow the whistle at NIH have had their research careers ruined or if they were in the administrative ranks they were harrassed or otherwise fired of sat in a corner and demeaned.

[PassingFair]

6. One word

duh!

[Magleetis]

7. Yea but

they need all that money so they can do research and invent new drugs, and save lives, and donate to the GOP, and control the health industry, and drive Mercedes, and.....

[Mnemosyne]

8. Patriot Act II has provision

protecting eli lilly, et al, from being sued over the thimerasol in vaccines.

Anyone have any idea what that had to do with domestic security????

NOTHING!!!

[Moderator]

9. Not Latest Breaking News material; moving to Editorial/Other