Salon.com > Big Pharma

6 ways Big Pharma manipulates consumers

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 13:00:00 +0000

The blockbuster pill profit party is over for Big Pharma. Bestselling pills like Lipitor, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Singular and Concerta have gone off patent and sites which their ads sustained are withering on the vine. WebMD, for example, the voice of Pharma on the Web, with a former Pfizer exec serving as CEO, announced it would cut 250 positions in December.

But don't worry, Wall Street. Pharma isn't going to deliver disappointing earnings just because it has little or no new drugs coming online and has failed at the very reason for its existence. Here are six new Pharma marketing initiatives that are guaranteed to keep investor expectations high along with our insurance premiums. The secret? Recycling old and discredited drugs and marketing diseases to sell the few new ones.

1) Repurposing Ritalin

“Side Effects”: A chilly, mysterious thriller ends a strange and brilliant career

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000

It’s not enough to say that the absence of human feeling is characteristic of Steven Soderbergh’s films. It’s more that the absence of human feeling is Soderbergh’s principal subject matter, and central to his diagnosis of contemporary society and its pathologies. From his 1989 debut with “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” onward, Soderbergh has seemed divided between a yearning for human contact and a (supposedly) detached and dispassionate belief that it can’t happen anymore and maybe never could.

In Soderbergh’s new movie “Side Effects,” which he says will be his last as a cinema director, all human interaction is mediated by some abstract force, whether that’s money or a commodified and quotation-marked notion of sexuality or an impressive range of psychoactive pharmaceuticals, most notably a fictional antidepressant called “Ablixa” that serves as an enormous plot MacGuffin. This follows such recent Soderbergh films as “Contagion” (scripted, like “Side Effects,” by frequent collaborator Scott Z. Burns), whose true protagonist is arguably a pandemic virus; “Haywire,” in which almost every meeting between characters leads to violence; and “Magic Mike” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” tonally opposite but thematically linked films that depict human sexuality as a marketplace and prostitution as its governing metaphor.

Bad pharma: Drug research riddled with half truths, omissions, lies

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 16:00:00 +0000

Sponsors get the answer they want.

Before we get going, we need to establish one thing beyond any doubt: Industry-funded trials are more likely than independently funded trials to produce a positive, flattering result. This is our core premise, and one of the most well-documented phenomena in the growing field of "research about research." It has also become much easier to study in recent years because the rules on declaring industry funding have become a little clearer.

We can begin with some recent work. In 2010, three researchers from Harvard and Toronto found all the trials looking at five major classes of drug -- antidepressants, ulcer drugs and so on -- and then measured two key features: were they positive, and were they funded by industry? They found over 500 trials in total: 85 percent of the industry-funded studies were positive, but only 50 percent of the government-funded trials were. That’s a very significant difference.

Testimony set to begin in pregnancy drug case

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 13:54:00 +0000

BOSTON (AP) — Testimony is set to begin in a federal lawsuit brought by four sisters who believe their breast cancer was caused by a drug their mother took during pregnancy in the 1950s.

The case involves a synthetic estrogen known as DES, diethylstilbestrol, which was prescribed to millions of pregnant women between the late 1930s and early 1970s to prevent miscarriages, premature births and other problems. Studies later showed the drug did not prevent miscarriages.

The Melnick sisters, who grew up in Tresckow, Penn., say they all developed breast cancer in their 40s after their mother took DES while pregnant. They say their mother did not take DES while pregnant with a fifth sister, and that sister has not developed breast cancer. They are suing Eli Lilly and Co., seeking unspecified damages.

Opening statements and testimony are expected Tuesday in U.S. District Court.

The sisters' case is the first to go to trial out of scores of similar claims filed in Boston and around the country. A total of 51 women have DES lawsuits pending in Boston against more than a dozen drug companies that made or marketed DES.

Obamacare architect heads to Big Pharma

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 20:55:00 +0000

Liz Fowler, well known as the architect of President Obama's Affordable Care Act, never really left the healthcare industry. Before and after working as chief health policy counsel for Sen. Max Baucus (the position from which she drafted Obamacare), Fowler worked for the nation's largest health insurance provider Well Point. She was then appointed by Obama to oversee the implementation of her Obamacare legislation and now, as Glenn Greenwald flagged Wednesday, will be taking up a senior position with Johnson & Johnson.

As Greenwald noted:

Canadian Supreme Court challenges Pfizer’s Viagra monopoly

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 19:14:00 +0000

On Thursday, Pfizer, inventors of Viagra, lost their patent to the erectile dysfunction drug in Canada. The Canadian Supreme Court justices unanimously decided to end the pharmaceutical giant's monopoly over the drug, which -- under patent law -- should have a time limit.

"Pfizer gained a benefit from the (Patent) Act -- exclusive monopoly rights -- while withholding disclosure in spite of its disclosure obligations under the act," Justice Louis LeBel wrote on behalf of the court, Reuters reported. "As a matter of policy and sound interpretation, patentees cannot be allowed to 'game' the system in this way."

Pfizer's "game," according to the court, was in not providing enough details to identify the active ingredient in Viagra. "Pfizer had the information needed to disclose the useful compound and chose not to release it," the ruling said.

Now stripped of its patent, Pfizer will face generic competition in Canada. The little blue pill is Pfizer's sixth-biggest medicine, with annual sales of about $2 billion, Reuters reported, noting that the Canadian ruling is unlikely to significantly impact U.S. sales.

Why the “war on fat” is a scam to peddle drugs

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 20:19:00 +0000

For many years now, I’ve been talking to Dr. X about weight and health. Dr. X, who is one of the nation’s most distinguished medical researchers, is employed by the federal government, and isn’t allowed to make on-the-record comments regarding government health policy without getting those comments cleared first by Dr. X’s administrative superiors.

Dr. X has a theory about the government’s anti-fat crusade, which is that the public health establishment has been duped by Big Pharma into becoming unknowing participants in the following money-making venture:

Step 1: Convince Americans that not being thin is a disease that needs to be cured.

Step 2: Encourage the government to implement public health programs that, through lifestyle interventions, will purportedly make people thinner, and, by hypothesis, healthier.

Step 3: Document the complete failure of these programs in the medical literature.

Step 4: Get the government to approve a host of new diet drugs, since it’s now been demonstrated that lifestyle interventions don’t do anything to help reverse this deadly epidemic.

Step 5: Profit!

Big Pharma’s newest invention: Adult ADHD

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 15:54:00 +0000

There is good news and bad news about attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) -- that is, if you’re a drug company. The bad news is the kid market has peaked out with 4.5 million U.S. children now carrying the label. The good news is adult ADHD is an emerging market. In fact, adult ADHD, with symptoms similar to pediatric ADHD such as impulsivity, distractibility and difficulty paying attention, following instructions and meeting deadlines, is the next big thing.

"Immature adult market continues to offer greatest commercial potential," read a 2008 press release to the pharmaceutical industry from the market research agency Datamonitor: "Estimated to be twice the size of the pediatric ADHD population, the highly prevalent, yet largely untapped, adult ADHD population continues to represent an attractive niche to target."