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by Donald B. Ardell, Ph. D.
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Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)

A Dozen Really Good Reasons Why You Should Fine-Tune A Wellness Lifestyle In Order To Reduce Or Eliminate Your Need for Drugs, Now And In The Future

Thursday August 26, 2004

Under our free institutions anybody can poison himself that wants to and will pay the price.
Mark Twain's Autobiography

There are many good reasons to think and behave so as to need fewer if any drugs, most of your life. The extraordinary high costs of prescription medications and the possibilities of bad reactions are two among them. However, this essay focuses on a dozen variations of a third reason. That third reason is the nature of the corporations that manufacture drugs, and the legions of vendors who promote and sell them. In a few words, most are really bad actors, which is a nice way of saying they're scum of the earth. Therefore, if you live well so as to diminish the chances that you will personally add to the enrichment of these scumbags, well, good on you.

Why do I suggest drug vendors are such bad actors? Here are a dozen ways they earn this infamous label, in my estimation.

1. They advertise too much! Note the prevalence of drug ads during the evening news on all the networks. Channel surf and the same ad might be playing on several stations! The ads portray all drug takers as happy, healthy, stress free and devoted to their meds. 
   
   
2. They have created vast numbers of drug addicts. The fact that the drugs are legal does not lessen the fact of addiction. Citizens of the land of the free and home of the brave spend $200 billion a year on prescription drugs. 
   
   
3. They jack up prices continuously and the addicts, many of whom must trade off drugs against home heating, food and other essentials, pay the price. According to an article by Marcia Angell in the NY Review of Books ("The Truth About the Drug Companies," July 15, 2004, Volume 51, Number 12), "the price of Schering-Plough's top-selling allergy pill, Claritin, was raised thirteen times over five years, for a cumulative increase of more than 50 percent--over four times the rate of general inflation."
   
   
4. They turn otherwise honorable, extraordinarily talented and decent medical research scientists into pharmacological prostitutes. They do this by offering handsome honoraria, gifts, junkets and other inducements to NIH and other researchers, whose subsequent recommendations give, at best, the appearance of conflicts of interests and, at worst, reveal sell outs to the drug manufactures who fund them one way or another. (See "Reject the New Cholesterol Guidelines In Favor of A Wellness Alternative")
   
   
5. They make the poor pay more! This is really lame! The drug barons have created a pricing structure that requires Medicare recipients without supplementary insurance to pay substantially more than prosperous customers, like HMOs, the VA and Rush Limbaugh--all of whom can afford to buy in bulk (with attendant discounts and rebates).
   
   
6. They engage in massive misinformation campaigns. They want us to believe that prescription drug costs are high because they invest so much in research and development(R&D). Thanks to favorable legislation, drug companies now spend relatively little for research--universities, small biotech startup companies and the federal government (NIH) do that for them. In fact, the drug companies spend little in this manner relative to their budgets--most of the spending is on advertising direct to consumers, as you know if you watch TV at all.
   
   
7. They do less innovation and more re-branding. The re-branding belies their boasts of huge research investments to justify exorbitantly high prices; it also diminishes the chances that consumers might benefit from genuine advances. According to Marcia Angell's article cited above, only a few "truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies or the National Institutes of Health (NIH)." Apparently, most new brand medications are simply variations on established drugs already on the market with patents about to expire.
   
   
8. They are monopolists. They conspire to restrain trade in products they patent to prevent competition. Good for them, bad for the people dependent on the drugs. This is especially galling, considering that they profit so from the subsidies of publicly sponsored research in American universities and the NIH. Consider this from Angell's assessment: "This industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself... The combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion)."
   
   
9. They pretend to be a home-based industry, but most are global conglomerates headquartered elsewhere, mainly Europe. The prices charged US customers, however, are much higher in the US than anywhere else. Revenue from prescription drug sales worldwide was $400 billion in 2002, of which half came from American drug users.
   
   
10. They are vigorously opposing efforts by price-conscious, savvy buyers to "reimport" drugs sold in Canada and Mexico for substantially less than in the US. As I explained in a recent essay about ACSH, an industry front group, absurd fears are raised by some drug companies and their friends that saving money in this fashion is dangerous, if not unpatriotic!
    
    
11. They are consistently accused of "overcharging Medicaid and Medicare ($875 million paid to M&M to settle civil and criminal fraud charges in the marketing of its prostate cancer drug, Lupron), paying kickbacks to doctors, engaging in anticompetitive practices, colluding with generic companies to keep generic drugs off the market, illegally promoting drugs for unapproved uses, engaging in misleading direct-to-consumer advertising, and, of course, covering up evidence."  How come Bush did not add drug companies to the list of Evil Empires Iran, Iraq and North Korea? 
    
    
12. They fail to give Americans good value on the dollar; by virtue of the abuses noted above, drug companies are a big part of our dysfunctional medical system problems. 

The suggestion that drug companies are rapacious will not be a shock to most Americans. A recent survey published by Harris Heritage (June 22, Volume 4, Issue 11) asked a large number of adults which industries do a good/bad job of serving their consumers. Of 15 industries rated, pharmaceutical and drug companies ranked eleventh. The four worst ratings went to health insurance, oil, managed care and tobacco companies--suggesting to me that consumers have not fully caught on just yet.

While the dozen concerns noted above plus the two mentioned at the beginning (high costs and risk of bad reactions) may or may not motivate you to live well, surely the best reason to reduce your need for drugs ought to be the rewards associated with healthy lifestyles. Living well is its own reward--even if all drugs were free and wondrous and made by angels. It pays to be healthy---financially and in terms of quality of life. It's just kind of nice to know that by being as healthy as you can be via positive lifestyle initiatives, you are NOT contributing to a quite distasteful industry.

By the way, while I agree with nearly everything Twain had to say in lectures and commentaries, I take exception to his notion (surely tongue-in-cheek in the celebrated "Following the Equator") that "the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not." Just the same, it was a good line when he wrote it (1897) and still is today, so who's complaining? 

Be well. Always look on the bright side of life.

Domain: physical
Subdomain: lifestyle habits

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