I don't think that drug companies are evil, but I also don't respect their sales and advertising practices. We all know that Merck knew the problems with Vioxx, and suppressed the cardiovascular risks. Bayer was fined for misrepresenting risks of Yaz in consumer ads. Johnson & Johnson was sanctioned for its Risperdal antipsychotic for off-label marketing. Eli Lilly employed irresponsible marketing strategies that down-played the increased risk of diabetes to physicians and promoted off-label usage of Zyprexa. All of these misrepresentations were foisted on us by the drug reps. It's amazing that they can even look us straight in the face.
The drug companies are also instilling their amoral behavior in research. The University of Illinois at Chicago?s Center for Pharmacoeconomic Research that over half retracted drug studies were attributed to scientific misconduct, including "data falsification or fabrication" and "questionable veracity" -- triple the retraction rate of other biomedical research. Merck routinely generated clinical study reports and review articles, "ghost-written" by the company?s marketing department. Spanish researchers found that only 34.5 percent of drug company-funded studies versus 65.1 percent of studies funded by other sources identified significant adverse events from inhaled steroids.
Drug companies are rewarded for significant research costs by an insanely long patent periods and often obscene prices, squeezing sick people. Almost alone within the other segments of the health care system, they are allowed to act in this predatory way, capitalists among the sheep.
Hey, did I forget to say that I don't think drug companies are evil?
