More on Marcia Angell’s book

The Truth About Marcia Angell

Thanks to a research-intensive (and, therefore, capital-intensive) pharmaceutical industry, pharmacy shelves now contain dozens of antibiotics and blood pressure medications. Similar treatments are available as well for other medical problems, such as arthritis, hypertension, abnormal lipids, and heart failure, and new vaccines have virtually eradicated many dreaded childhood illnesses. Moreover, greater understanding of the molecular mechanisms of disease has provided the wherewithal to make these drugs far safer and more effective.

These stunning successes notwithstanding, the pharmaceutical industry has become a lightning rod for critics. In her new book, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It, Marcia Angell, Harvard Medical School lecturer and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, blasts the drug industry, accusing it of profiteering, having become “a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit,” and using “its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the U.S. Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.”

Dr. Angell maintains that the pharmaceutical industry’s reputation for innovation is a myth, that in fact it “feeds off the NIH” and that new drugs “nearly always stem from publicly supported research.” She makes much of the fact that the drug industry, “corrupted by easy profits and greed,” has high marketing and administrative costs, and blames the companies for the paucity of genuinely innovative and affordable new drugs.

Many of these accusations are questionable; some are patently unfair or untrue.

In 1999, the NIH thoroughly investigated whether its research funding commonly leads to the development of pharmaceuticals, the profits from which taxpayers might be entitled to share. Of 47 drugs that had earned revenues of $500 million or more, NIH support had figured significantly in only four, two of which were actually the same drug. The NIH supports primarily pre-commercial, fundamental research into the biochemistry, physiology and molecular biology of cells and organisms, in health and disease.

Read the entire article. Then think carefully about the unintended consequences of over regulating the pharmaceutical industry.