Big Pharma's Drug War
'Back in 1976 Henry Gadsden, chief executive of Merck, just before retirement lamented to Fortune magazine the tragedy that his company’s market was limited only to those who were afflicted with illness when his dream had long been to sell to healthy people, therefore having a market that potentially included every person in the world. Well one can imagine the internal chuckle Mr. Gadsden would have enjoyed scanning the New York Times front page on September 2nd, 2009 (a day before the Pfizer settlement was announced) where it was gloriously revealed, this in a headline of course, “Taking Big Risk for Big Payoff, Industry Seeks Cancer Drugs.” The article bluntly explains that, after years of the industry ignoring the fatal disease, recent scientific breakthroughs and the opportunity to charge people dying from cancer outrageous amounts of money is finally too tempting to resist.'
'It’s ironic that the Times alludes in passing that drug companies have become perhaps the most powerful force in the country by fulfilling Gadsden’s utopian vision of treating the healthy. Through infinite amounts of marketing and promotion, including consumer advertisements in the form of countless TV ads the kind of which are illegal in all other industrial nations (except New Zealand), and even more effort aimed at co-opting the medical establishment through high paying consulting jobs and ‘continuing education’ seminars for doctors as well as an army of sales people pushing their wares all over the country, drug companies have built vast empires selling mostly the same potentially dangerous drugs of questionable effectiveness under different brand names for allegedly chronic, so called ‘lifestyle’ conditions, the number of which continue to grow practically exponentially'.
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