[Ip-health] Marcia Angell: Your Dangerous Drugstore

[James Love]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19055

Volume 53, Number 10 =B7 June 8, 2006

Your Dangerous Drugstore
By Marcia Angell

On April 5, 2006, a New Jersey jury found that Merck's arthritis drug
Vioxx caused John McDarby, a seventy-seven-year-old retired insurance
agent, to suffer the heart attack that left him debilitated in 2004.
(The drug was not blamed for the heart attack of a second plaintiff
in the same case.) The jury also found Merck guilty of consumer fraud
for not warning doctors and the public of the drug's cardiovascular
risks. McDarby and his wife were awarded $4.5 million, plus another
$9 million in punitive damages because the company was found to have
misled the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Merck now faces
about ten thousand similar lawsuits, and has vowed to fight every one
of them. So far, there have been verdicts in four cases=97two for Merck
and two against (the McDarby case and an earlier one in Texas, in
which the plaintiff was awarded $253.5 million, which under Texas law
must be cut to $26.1 million).[1] If there are more losses, and the
chances are there will be, Merck, despite its defiant talk, may
ultimately have to try to reach a settlement instead of fighting each
case.[2]

The defeat was not just a loss for Merck, but for the industry as a
whole, which has seen its reputation plummet in the past few years.
Polls show that among American businesses, the pharmaceutical
industry now ranks near the bottom in public approval=97above tobacco
and oil companies, but well below airlines and banks and even
insurance companies. This situation contrasts sharply with the
generally high regard in which the industry was held just a few years
ago.[3]

There are three main reasons for the drop in public esteem. First,
people are growing increasingly skeptical about the industry's
justifications for its high and rapidly escalating prices. To many,
it looks more like simple profiteering than what the industry claims
it is=97a necessity to cover high research and development costs.
People are beginning to realize that even after the pharmaceutical
industry's much-vaunted R&D expenditures, it still has enough left
over to make it consistently one of the most profitable industries in
the US. Second, as more people began to purchase drugs from Canada in
recent years, it became generally well known that prices in the US
are much higher than in other countries. While the industry claims
that other countries are "free riders," it seems to many Americans
that it is the drug companies who are free riders. Finally, many
older people have become all too aware of the fact that the new
Medicare drug benefit, as a result of pressure from the powerful
pharmaceutical lobby, specifically prohibits Medicare from using its
huge purchasing power to bargain with drug companies for lower prices
(even though it is allowed to regulate doctors' fees and hospital
payments). This prohibition adds to the disillusionment with a bill
that is not only weirdly byzantine but provides far less help than it
might, and it increases resentment toward the pharmaceutical industry.


   [snip]

---------------------------------
James Love, CPTech / www.cptech.org / mailto:james.love@cptech.org /
tel. +1.202.332.2670 / mobile +1.202.361.3040

"If everyone thinks the same: No one thinks."  Bill Walton