What’s really “driving” drug profits
What’s really “driving” drug profits
A reality we can’t a-Ford to Dodge
The other day, I stumbled across something online that struck me as perhaps the best, most succinct illustration of how corrupt and ungovernable the drug industry profit machine has become. It was a “list” type article that directly compared the U.S. pharmaceuticals business to the automobile manufacturing industry.
The piece makes 15 points of comparison between the two industries, with the aim of showing just how unbelievably profitable and unaccountable the domestic drug biz really is. Of course, I’ve made this point many times over the years in my newsletter and in the Daily Dose, but never before have I seen the picture painted in such a vivid and easy-to-grasp way. Simply brilliant.
Among the points of comparison:
- Based on the drug industry’s typical 30,000% mark-up, the average car would set you back 4.5 MILLION DOLLARS. The same car in Mexico or Canada would cost less than $5,000 – 1/900th of the price. (This seems a bit of stretch, even to a quick-to-damn-Big-Pharma firebrand like me. The article doesn’t specify exactly how this number was calculated – but even if across-the-border drugs are only a third or half the price of U.S. medications, this still makes the point)
- Vehicles without safety systems of any type – bumpers, seatbelts, airbags, crumple zones, etc.- would be deemed safe by the National Transportation Safety Board (the car-biz equivalent of the FDA).
- Less-then-favorable crash test results would be suppressed from the public (100% legally, I might add), and any researcher that publicized these negative findings would be blackballed from the industry (like what happened to the man who blew the whistle on Vioxx, Dr. David Graham).
- Detroit would hype “new” cars that are virtually identical to those made in the 1970s. (Drug makers change drugs slightly once their patents expire, then re-sell basically the same meds to the public at premium prices).
See what I mean about this perspective being a very illustrative one about the true nature of the prescription drug racket? What’s even more telling is what the piece claims would happen if the car biz got what the drug makers are close to getting in the way of collusion in their corrupt money-lust from the U.S. government. Keep reading
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If the efforts of the U.S. auto makers to monopolize the domestic market and immunize themselves against accountability for the quality of their products mirrored the maneuverings of the drug business, here’s what we’d be up against
- All imported cars would be banned. You’d be forced to buy a domestic car at nearly 900 times what a comparable model from Nissan, Toyota, VW, BMW or Subaru would cost. Further, if you went to Canada to buy a car and drove it home, you could be stopped, searched, or otherwise harassed (see Daily Dose, 6/11/2004 for more on this).
- All forms of alternative transportation – bicycles, motorcycles, busses, subways, skateboards, whatever – would be outlawed (just look at how aggressively Big Pharma is lobbying Congress for stricter regulation of supplements).
- Lawsuits against carmakers for faulty or nonexistent safety systems, poor performance, or false advertising would be illegal, or next to impossible. Think this can’t happen with the drug business? They’re lobbying Congress aggressively for it right now to make sure another Vioxx snafu can’t harm their wallets.
Does any of this sound like a free market to you? It doesn’t to me. Yet this is the kind of sway the world’s most profitable business, the pharmaceutical industry, has over our limp-wristed and corrupt FDA
Kinda makes you want to pull up stakes and get the hell out of Dodge, doesn’t it?
Always driving the point home,
William Campbell Douglass II, MD
