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The Truth About Drug Companies 
Last week Dr. Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, published an extensive article in the New York Times Review of Books summarizing her position and giving us an extended glimpse into her forthcoming book, The Truth About Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It . In she says that for the last 20 years, major drug companies have been much more concerned about marketing existing or imitation drugs than putting their money into researching newer, more useful drugs. To have someone at the very top of academic medicine write a book like this is amazing. It gives me hope that we can change the way medicine is practiced and sold to the American public. Dr. Angell is a physician herself and also a former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. I just want to briefly summarize some of her views. Angell says the pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable industry in America. And drug companies would have consumers believe that high prices paid for prescription drugs are necessary to cover the vast costs for research and development. However, expenditure reports of drug companies in 2000 reveal that the amount of sales revenue spent on marketing and administration (36 percent) is two and half times more than that spent on research and development (14 percent). In 2002, there were 78 drugs approved by the FDA, but of these 78, only seven were actually found to improve existing drugs. The rest were either slight variants of existing drugs (called “me-too” drugs because they piggyback onto successful drugs by making only a slight variant to get around the patent) or were drugs not any better than those already existing. More astounding, none of the seven new drugs was developed by the major U.S. drug companies, says Angell. In 2002, the average cost for a year's supply of just one of the fifty most-used drugs for senior citizens was $1,500. A senior citizen taking six prescription drugs without insurance to partially cover costs would have to pay $9,000 a year to fill the prescriptions. Only half to two thirds of senior citizens even have supplementary insurance to cover part of the costs of these drugs. Angell says sales from prescription drugs totaled $200 billion in 2002, and even this figure excludes money spent on prescription drugs administered in nursing homes, hospitals, and doctor's offices. The money spent is rising 12 percent per year, as more people are taking drugs. From 1980 to 2000, prescription drug sales tripled. With the exception of 2003, for the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has had higher profits than all other industries. In the 2001 Fortune 500 list, the ten appearing American drug companies each had profits higher than any other non-pharmaceutical company. In fact, Angell says the collective profits of just these 10 drug companies ($35.9 billion) outweighed the profits of all the next 490 companies combined ($33.7 billion). Rather than developing truly innovative drugs, Angell says that the “big pharma” is mostly putting out more clone drugs, pouring money into marketing campaigns for them, and trying to extend patents on their blockbuster selling drugs to retain the billion-dollar inflow as long as they can hold out. But these drug companies are power to be reckoned with. They have the largest lobby group in Washington D.C. and have much control over congress and the FDA. As awareness increases, however, and is brought to light by doctors like Marcia Angell, the foundations of the pharmaceutical industry are starting to shake, and the “perfect storm” is about to hit.
The Truth About Drug Companies By Marcia Angell
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