I have just read, Dean Baker: How to End Corruption in the Drug Industry by an article from Naked Capitalism. The article raises many of the big issues within the Pharma market, particularly within research. It then suggest some solutions that arguably can fix this corruption. Overall, the problems it sites are rather obvious issues within the industry that would make any reader a little hesitant before trusting their doctors prescription. On the other hand, I personally do not see the solution to be as clear cut as she implies.
The main issue brought up with Pharma’s research methods is that
“most of their so-called research is on ‘new drug applications.'”
Basically most of the research done nowadays is not to discover new drugs that are needed to cure illnesses; rather they Pharmas spend the majority of their research budget on finding other uses for thier drugs so that they can be marketed for these new uses, essentially attempting to gain an edge of the generics when the patents run out. Clearly this is a problem. The research branch of a pharma company like Pfizer should not be used as an extension of marketing. Medical research is meant to be for finding cures for increasingly more prominent and more dangerous diseases, or at least that was my understanding. It is not meant to create new “talking points” for industry salesmen. This point, I believe, shows the transformation of what was once productive labor, the advent of new drugs that have the promise of alleviating symptons or possibly curing an ailment, into unproductive labor, the creation of new marketablity.
Another problem within Pharma research is that the testing done on a specific drug is done by the company itself, “who has a direct material stake in their outcome.” This is indubitably a conflict of interest. Some of the negative effects of this are
“concealing test results that show drugs to be harmful or ineffective, payoffs to researchers for publishing favorable articles in professional journals, bribing doctors to prescribe certain drugs.”
A way that she suggests these problems can be eliminated is by having exclusively government funded research. By moving the sponsorship into the public sphere, first and foremost, it can be insured that there will be no alternative motives for a drug to enter into the market. The government would pay for the research by
“appropriating a sum of money approximately equal to what the industry now spends on clinical trials (around $20bn a year). It can then arrange long-term contracts (10-12 years) with independent testing firms, who would then decide which drugs to test. Renewal and expansion of the contracts would depend on the effectiveness of the contractor in finding and testing new drugs and preventing unsafe drugs from coming to market.”
There would also be full disclosure of the research, publishing everything online, accessible to all. This would in theory work the same way the press should, giving independant researches the ability to check the government’s work and therefore making the government research accountable to the public. With methods like this and strict regulations, the belief is that prices will be forced to become lower, making persciption drugs more affordable and more widely accessible as well as more acurately match their cost of production.
Personally one of the biggest flaws in this theory is that too much power is awarded to the government. This I believe is seen through the example of George Bush and stem cell research. The Government already sponsers some medical research, but only the type of research it believes is proper and ethical. Because of this America is now 8 years behind the world in stem cell research because President Bush decided that it was not moral to conduct such studies. By giving the government complete power in deciding what should be researched and how much money to alot to a given product, it is possible that there will be less corruption in the development and marketing of a certain drug but is also possible that the country will only be ingaging in selective research and cut itself off from crucial medical advances.
