The Other Drug War

For years The Other Drug War, the one being waged by global drug companies to maintain their substantial control over US laws and regulation, was almost entirely invisible to Americans. Over the last five or so years, the war is increasingly in our faces:

• astronomical drug prices
• obvious control of the Congress and the FDA by the drug companies
• more recently loud scandals over information withheld or distorted about drugs
• endless mass market promotion of drugs
• scandals over promoting drugs to doctors for off-label uses
• and on.....

More recently, even to the lay person, it is obvious that despite all of the drug industry blather, most drug "innovation" revolves around near knock-offs and marginal "improvements" of existing blockbuster drugs or, worse, the introduction of what seems now, due to the ceaseless drug industry marketing,to be a senseless parade of what I have come to call "stiff dick drugs". Drugs that may be of serious value to some small population, but are now marketed through every sporting event to males, chiefly, as methods to "enhance performance". All of this going on while we are still waiting for drugs to attack truly massive health problems like malaria, AIDS, and other mass-killers.


But, I am getting distracted here in my unhappiness with the shoddiness of our vaunted hyper-profitable drug industry, back to The Other Drug War

Today, there were new stories in the media about Congress working on legislation to legalize or legitimate the importation of drugs from Canada. So far, this has been bottled up by the leadership. The interesting aspect of this string of stories is how it illustrates the total domination by the drug companies in their Other Drug War over American politics. No one in Congress or the White House or the mass media is even mentioning the question of why we have high drug prices in the US and what might be done to make the US drug market more competitive and responsive. In the guise of some witches brew of thinking involving intellectual property, free markets, and dynamic capitalist innovation, no one speaks aloud about the treacherous behavior of the drug companies. Here we have set them up with a monopoly via the patent system and yet we allow them to spend billions and billions on marketing to consumers and doctors that they then build-in to their cost structures plus the monopoly profits.

What a deal!!