The beauty of the pharma model is that their products are purposed toward human wellness, so that the corporate business model can escape much of the criticism that would otherwise be leveled at it. For every person who points out the problems pharma cause, another ten will chime in with a reprimand because surely pharma are only there for our good.
Of course they do good, or rather, many of their products do. Against that, you need to set the fact that they are a poisonous cancer that has its tendrils anywhere and everywhere they can make a buck, by perverting the way things work in order to shift the money in their direction, and it certainly doesn't matter if people get hurt in the process. At least with the tobacco industry, everyone knows they are merchants of death. With pharma, they come in the guise of an angel; but the truth is that - taken as a whole - they are an angel of death. Look at how they operate:
- In the US, because the market is so immense, they spend hundreds of millions on lobbying. Their declared lobbying spend in 2009 was $264m, and they had more reps in Washington than there were Congressmen.
- Their principal PR and legislative pressure effort, though, is handled by their front groups. They own about ten 'alphabet soup' pseudo-health organizations with names like the American Chest Association who are funded by and work to the agenda of the pharma industry. The job of these groups is to carry out astroturfing PR on behalf of pharma - they act as if they were genuine health groups seeking improvements in funding for research, and seeking new legislation to improve health. In fact they work strictly to the orders of the industry and receive hundreds of millions of dollars for doing so. A Director of one of these 'charities' can earn $750,000 for example, and some have over a hundred board members. Their job is to influence the media and government, always to pharma's benefit, and always to protect or improve profits. And their main job is the most important of all: to get legislation that eliminates commercial rivals and helps pharma create more profits.
- A secondary front is fought for them by TC, tobacco control. The researchers, academics and others who comprise the tobacco control industry are a highly vocal and influential force in health policies and legislation. Almost all of them depend in one way or another on pharma funding. TC is now the single largest factor in the continuing loss of life due to smoking, as they have resisted tobacco harm reduction with a bitter campaign of propaganda and lies. Consequently, the reduction in the smoking death rate in developed countries falls at a pathetic and hardly noticeable rate (0.4% per year in the UK, for example). In Sweden it fell by 40% due to tobacco harm reduction. E-cigarettes hold the promise of exceeding that rate by a very wide margin. Ask yourself why anyone would oppose the single thing that is proven to work, and try to maintain the status quo even when that means hundreds of thousands of needless deaths every year. Answer: pharma funding, and therefore their jobs, is at stake. Tobacco Control are pharma's whores, and nothing more.
- Because e-cigarettes will grievously hurt pharma's bottom line, we have become their #1 target. NRT sales are a billion-dollar a year market, then add to that all the other quit-smoking drugs such as varenicline, buproprion and so on. But the chemotherapy drugs used to treat sick smokers, plus all the associated income streams, make that look like chump change. We are talking about billions and billions here - and the minimum that e-cigs will hit that bottom line by is 50%. In Sweden the number of smokers was reduced by 40%, and the number of smoking-related deaths by the same amount, as a result of Snus - and pharma is absolutely desperate to ensure the Sweden scenario does not spread. E-cigs are much more popular than Snus, as the uptake has eclipsed that for Snus, so pharma profits look to be in danger of taking more than a 40% hit - perhaps 50% or even as much as 60%. For every life saved by e-cigs, pharma loses several thousand dollars. Now multiply that by ten million, and you have their worst nightmare. They will do anything to prevent it, and the consequential death of hundreds of thousands - millions, in time - does not appear on their balance sheet.
- The Sweden scenario was so repugnant to them, they managed to engineer an EU-wide ban on Snus. This has been in existence for ten years. If the minimum percentage of lives that would have been saved in Europe is 10% of the annual 650,000 smoking deaths, and that would be 65,000 saved a year. In fact it would most likely be higher than this. You can chalk up hundreds of thousands of deaths in Europe directly to pharma protecting their income by suborning the EU health commission.
- Pharma's big guns are currently aimed at e-cigarettes, as this new form of THR will cut the number of smokers by an unprecedented amount - almost certainly more than Snus. By 2013, 6% of smokers in the US will have converted, and thus be lost to pharma: no more NRT sales, and a much-reduced likelihood of needing chemotherapy drugs and all the other treatments. It is impossible for an e-cigarette to cause lung cancer as there is no smoke. Pharma's money has been judiciously placed, and easily-suborned countries have banned e-cigs. Now we await a Europe-wide ban since the EU have shown themselves happy to take the money at any price, and the price of an EU ban on e-cigs will be millions of unnecessary deaths from smoking; every one of which can be laid at pharma's door.
- The medical profession and the health industry as a whole have been so perverted by the pharmaceutical industry that they are now incapable of thinking and acting for themselves. They end up, every time, working to pharma's advantage, in every aspect of their endeavours. Take any and every aspect of the health industry's operations, and see if you can find a way - any way - that it works to the detriment of pharma's interests, even (and especially even) when it is not in the best interests of patients. The basics of Western medicine are now quite simply surgery or pharmaceutical interventions. Until very recently, anything else was regarded as quackery - nutrition for example. There is still intense pressure to see anything other than the knife or pills as non-mainstream medicine. Even these other avenues like nutrition have cleverly been brought under pharma's influence. In Europe, pharma has successfully managed to elimainate a very large percentage of natural health supplements and nutritional aids, by forcing them to qualify as medicines, at huge cost, or be withdrawn. Few small manufacturers can afford the £750,000 and three years it takes to get a pharmaceutical license, and as a consequence withdrew their products or went under. How's that for harmless plant extracts that have been used safely for 50 years? Their sin was that they took money out of pharma's pocket - so they had to go.
- Pharma owns government, at least in any sphere related to medicine. A big statement to make, but you only need to look at actions, not words, to see this. They certainly own the FDA, whose staff will be the first to tell you this. Their staff have even been told by senior management that their client is the pharmaceutical industry, not the general public. The FDA works to protect the pharma industry, not the public. If public good accords with pharma's, then all is fine; but consider what happens when the two diverge. Who wins then, at the FDA? Clue: it's not the public.
Please note that in the above discussion, we are talking always about senior management, not the rank and file. The doctors, academics and technicians who work for these organizations do their best; but management decide the final result. It's why the evidence-based decisions of FDA technical staff are overturned in favor of better-paying decisions (for pharma), by management. Just look up the history.
The greatest success of the pharmaceutical industry has been to persuade people that their intentions are good, instead of being seen for what they are: a profit-hungry cancer that kills hundreds of thousands to make their money. Pharma is a corporate income generator like any other: money is the goal. Like any other business, they have to eliminate compeitors in order to maximise profits; but the problem is that because of the market they are in, their competitors are often doing a much better job. That doesn't matter to a balance sheet.
Pharma will sell you a pill to fix your problem, as long as it pays. But beware if you can fix people better, faster and cheaper than pharma - they'll eliminate you in a heartbeat. And if keeping their hands on the money kills millions, well, that's life. The big guy wins.
Wake up.
