Recently, through the launch of a new online database last week the U.S. government revealed that in 2013, doctors were paid roughly $380 million by medical device and pharmaceutical corporations for speeches and consultations, all within a five-month time frame. Big Pharma spends almost $20 billion annually marketing their products to doctors, which yields profits upwards of $300 billion per year in drug sales. A handful of these doctors were paid more than $500,000 apiece. Others were paid millions for the drugs and devices they helped to create. Doctors insist that this money doesn’t influence what they recommend to their patients. However, it’s extremely difficult to imagine what purpose the payments would serve if not to increase product sales through prescriptions. eDrugSearch.com has been warning the American people about these unethical issues and conflict of interests for years.

Drugs Come at a Price

In the United States, we spend vast amounts of money on medications. In fact, on a per-person basis, we spend the most out of every industrialized country the world despite the fact that we’re no better off as far as our health. It’s estimated that Americans spend about $2.7 trillion every year on medical care, and medications take up about ten percent of that cost. A portion of this cost is paid by the Government via the ACA, Medicaid and Medicare. Unfortunately, that part is funded by the taxpayers. The remainder of the cost is funded by skyrocketing deductibles, expensive co-payments and high premiums.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Big Pharma globally rakes in $300 billion a year, and its expected to increase to $400 billion within a few years. As a result of this pressure to keep up with sales, WHO has officially stated, “an inherent conflict of interest between the legitimate business goals of manufacturers and the social, medical and economic needs of providers and the public to select and use drugs in the most rational way”.

The Bigger Picture

The payments doctors are receiving are just a small piece of a much larger, and more profitable, puzzle for drug companies. Big Pharma also uses a marketing strategy called “product hopping”. This involves taking an existing product with a patent up for expiration and making small changes to it. According to the law, this makes it an entirely new product. Namenda, for instance, is commonly prescribed for Alzheimer’s, but its maker, Forest Labs, recently said it would stop offering the drug. Instead, it would release Namenda XR, the same drug slightly modified to make it extended-release. In the process, the company ensured that there could be no generic substitutes. This means Forest Labs sees more profits while patients are stuck paying the inflated costs. Drug companies have another trick up their sleeves. Even though a drug’s twenty-year patent is long expired, Big Pharma will still advertise their brand aggressively, leading patients to request prescriptions from their doctors.

The United States is one of only two countries in the world that lets pharmaceutical companies do direct-to-consumer advertising. According to John Mack at Pharma Marketing News in 2013 Big Pharma spent $3.8 Billion in dtc advertising and “The rich pharma companies got richer and spent more“. Another scheme called “Pay-for-Delay” costs us an estimated 3.5 Billion a year involves Big Pharma paying the makers of generic versions to hold off on their development, raking in huge amounts of money for both parties. Yet again, patients are stuck with obscene prices. In Europe, this is illegal. In the U.S., however, Big Pharma has successfully lobbied against legislation that would ban the practice.

Lack of Government Controls

Other countries have wholesale pricing for medications, but in America, the government isn’t allowed to negotiate for lower prices under Medicaid and Medicare. Indeed, this was one of Big Pharma’s support criteria for the Affordable Care Act. Their excuse? They needed the money for research and development. However, most of this research is done by the government through the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies actually spend millions more on advertising than on research and development. For every $1 spent on basic research, Big Pharma spends $19 on promotions and advertising. That’s to say nothing of the millions these companies spend on government lobbying. Just last year, that figure stood at $226 million, considerably more than military contractors spent on lobbying. In addition, drug firms use politics to gain an advantage. The industry gave more than $50 million on political candidates in 2012, earning it the title of the largest contributor to political campaigns.

The Crux of the Problem

At this point, you’re probably wondering why the American public tolerates this stunningly predatory business model. It would be a gross oversimplification to claim that nobody has a say in these matters due to Big Pharma’s impressive spending power and influence over government policy. If Americans were to become fed up enough with the status quo, the government couldn’t allow the companies to continue their price-gouging. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten fed up yet. Most people don’t even realize some of Big Pharma’s marketing schemes are going on because they’re done behind the scenes, and it doesn’t make the news. That said, it may also be a misconception that drug prices are simply the “free market” in action. It’s commonly believed that the market is separated from the government. Furthermore, people believe that the core principles of the free market mean that drug firms are able to sell their property for any price they see fit.

Few people understand that government and the free market can’t be separate. The government creates the rules, including deciding what products receive patents, how long they last, which payoffs aren’t allowed, the research that gets paid for and under which circumstances the government can ask for reduced prices. It’s not important to ask if the government should be making these decisions. If not for them, there wouldn’t be a market or any medications. The big problem is the way the market is set up. As long as Big Pharma is allowed to have a say in these decisions, the American public will continue getting ripped off.

The post Insidious Greed: How Big Pharma Rips You Off on Drugs appeared first on eDrugSearch Blog.

“There is a story roaming through my head, one that’s insisting to get out. It was born in over 100 interviews with genuine, loving, caring health care professionals, researchers and advocates last year.

We kept picking up a theme, a sense that the game was rigged, that we’d already played and lost but didn’t know it. Our health has already been Bought. It’s a risky story to tell, but would be a tragedy to passively consent to with silence.”

The movie trailer begins at the 1:03 mark.

The post Has Big Pharma Really Taken Over Medical Research? appeared first on eDrugSearch Blog.

Boy, Big Pharma is good.

They repeat the same story again and again and pretty soon the media is repeating it again and again, too. Forget digging, researching, checking for yourself — none of the conventional techniques of journalism seem to be powerful enough to withstand Big Pharma’s daily drip-drip-drip propaganda stream.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Big Pharma’s bought-and-paid-for Washington politicians have been taught to spout the same fictions as well.

On the issue of the safety of buying drugs from Canadian pharmacies, the clear and indisputable facts are (1) Canada’s drug approval standards are as good, if not better, than those of the United States, and (2) no American has ever been harmed by ordering drugs online from a licensed Canadian pharmacy.

And yet, Big Pharma lies and lies and lies until actual journalists buy into their nonsense.

The same is true on the issue of high drug prices. Facts are facts, and the fact is that Americans pay a premium of about 67 percent for prescription drugs compared to residents of the rest of the world, according to PharmaTimes. There is no country in the world where residents pay as much for drugs as we are forced to pay in the United States.

Now, common sense would lead you to believe that we’re being ripped off — wouldn’t it?

Amazingly, however, the drip-drip-drip of Big Pharma disinformation has been just as effective with the price issue as with the safety issue.

Since Big Pharma knows that Americans love our freedom, and cherish (at least until recently) our free market economy, they blame the rest of the world — those socialists in Europe and elsewhere — for America’s high drug prices. They say that the rest of the world imposes price controls on drugs, which forces poor Big Pharma to charge Americans more in order to fund research and development on new medications.

And drip-drip-drip, it gets reported as fact by one news organization after another.

Oh, brother. Do you really think Big Pharma would sell drugs to the rest of the world if they weren’t making a lot of money doing it? Of course they wouldn’t. They’re doing just fine.

They’re just not making the obscene profits that they make in the United States.

Now then: do you really think Big Pharma is making obscene profits because America has a free market system? Well, if you took economics in school, one of the first things you’d learn is that an unobstructed free market tends to push down prices over time. So if this were really a free market economy when it came to drug prices, wouldn’t you assume that competition would emerge and ultimately drug prices would come down to a level that people could afford?

Well, yes, they would come down — if drug prices were actually determined by the market. But they’re not.

In truth, our government is very involved in setting the drug prices you pay. They are involved because of a patent system that allows drug companies to have monopolies on the drugs they produce — and that allows these companies to extend their monopolies virtually indefinitely by gaming the system. This gives Big Pharma all the power in establishing prices — and the consumer none.

It’s a wink-wink nod-nod system, with an FDA that has been completely defanged by “pro-market” politicians and completely corrupted by Big Pharma’s money.

Guess what? Monopolies aren’t “pro-market,” they’re anti-market.

Not only that, monopolies are un-American.

America is about competition. Let the drug companies compete — not only with Canada but with each other — and our skyrocketing drug prices will come down to earth, and fast.

The post Why do Americans pay so much more for prescription drugs? Separating fact from fiction appeared first on eDrugSearch Blog.

While reading Benjamin Gluck’s Internet Pharmacy Law blog, I came across a reference to an “Internet pharmacy verification and information service” I hadn’t yet heard of: LegitScript.

I like the professed mission of LegitScript: to improve online pharmacy safety by offering a database that allows consumers to enter a pharmacy’s name and find out whether it’s legitimate or not. LegitScript apparently intends to make money by providing a verification seal to online pharmacies that meet its standards. I say “apparently” because LegitScript verification is currently provided free of charge.

All of which sounds fine — until you look a little closer.

You see, LegitScript claims ALL Canadian pharmacies are unsafe. Even the most established, reputable pharmacies — licensed and inspected by the Canadian government — get classified as rogue online pharmacies by LegitScript.

Is this because these pharmacies are actually unsafe? Of course not. Consumer Reports — not exactly a rogue organization — advises consumers to buy from Canadian pharmacies. And FDA officials cannot identify a single American injured as a result of drugs purchased from licensed Canadian pharmacies.

So what’s this nonsense about? And more pointedly, what is LegitScript really about?

Well, just doing a little Googling, I found out a few things about LegitScript.

I discovered that its founder, John Horton, was a White House aide for George W. Bush from 2002 to 2007, serving in the office of National Drug Control Policy. I learned that Horton had given money to the 2008 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, the candidate most strongly in the corner of Big Pharma in its fight against Canadian drug reimportation. The company is based in the Washington, D.C., area, home of the Big Pharma lobby. All of which makes me wonder who’s funding LegitScript — and why.

As we’ve reported here before, Big Pharma and its proxies, like the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy and the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, have dramatically stepped up their disinformation campaign against Canadian drugs in recent months.

Why now? Clearly, it’s because both John McCain and Barack Obama have promised to legalize consumer purchases of Canadian drugs. With public support for drug reimportation at 80 percent, how can you blame them?

So Big Pharma has got to spread enough nonsense — scare enough people — to bring those poll numbers down. That way, Big Pharma’s water-carriers in Congress can feel comfortable blocking any proposed reimportation legislation.

Who knows? Maybe LegitScript’s ambition is to displace PharmacyChecker as the verification system that Google uses to vet pharmacies for its ad network. If LegitScript were successful in doing this, no Canadian pharmacies would be allowed to advertise through Google — a major victory for the U.S. pharmaceutical industry.

I’m speculating here, of course. But I’m wondering if eDrugSearch.com, PharmacyChecker, RxRights, CIPA, MIPA, IMPAC, Consumer Reports, and others who support the right of Americans to purchase drugs from safe and licensed Canadian pharmacies should band together to challenge this disinformation campaign.

What say you, friends?

Here are some other groups that support personal drug importation from licensed Canadian pharmacies:

• American Association of Health Freedom
• American Academy of Family Physicians
• National Federation of Independent Business
• National Retiree Legislative Network
• National Education Association
• National Farmers Union
• Telephone Pioneer Family Campers

Source: www.govtrack.us

The post Are ALL Canadian Pharmacies “Rogue” Online Pharmacies? LegitScript Thinks So. appeared first on eDrugSearch Blog.

The post Want pharma reform? Good luck — they’ve already bought off both parties appeared first on eDrugSearch Blog.

Reports that [as] Merck & Co. and Schering-Plough Corp. kept under wraps for more than a year findings that Vytorin does not deliver results it spent more than $100 million advertising to consumers is much more than a PR disaster for the drug’s co-marketers.

Coming on the heels of a New York Times story that Pfizer’s $2 billion drug Lyrica treats a condition, fibromyalgia, that a lot of doctors don’t think exists, the Vytorin news is fanning the flames of public mistrust for the $5 billion direct-to-consumer drug industry — and the ad business in general.

“The pharmas are in big trouble in terms of credibility,” said brand expert Rob Frankel, who runs his own consultancy at RobFrankel.com. “They’re just above Congress and used-car salesmen.”

Accompanying this story is an editorial headlined, “Drug Companies One Step Away From More Regulation.” In it, Ad Age warns:

If drug companies aren’t more careful, they’re going to come down with a case of regulatory pneumonia and the bad-publicity flu.

We’re firm believers that a company selling legal and safe products should be allowed to advertise them. But as is often the case, an ounce of prevention goes a long way. In particular, drug marketers would be wise to tread carefully when rushing the next blockbuster not only to market but onto the airwaves.

We understand that research isn’t cheap. And a blockbuster such a Viagra or a Lipitor goes a long way in paying for life-saving drugs. But what’s much more expensive than research and marketing is fighting lawsuits on numerous fronts or being silenced across the board by the government…

We know that research doesn’t pay for itself and that drug marketers need to make money, but those thinking of making the hard sell for new drugs should consider the physician’s motto: “First, do no harm.”

The post Ad Age: Drug companies are begging for heightened regulation appeared first on eDrugSearch Blog.

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HOW CAN YOU not be aware that the flu season is now “officially” open? Actually, unofficially, it started toward the end of the summer vacation when the allergy season was at a wane.

Now you notice someone coughing, sneezing and feeling miserable in every second TV commercial (this combined with the allergy season, means that there is always someone coughing, sneezing and feeling miserable throughout the entire year).

Turn on the TV, and instead of watching the family happily frolicking in green meadows and colorful flower gardens after ingesting the particular product that financed the commercial, you observe the wise, tough-as-nails wife supplying her wimpy, wheezing, bundled-up husband with the appropriate potent drugs designed to turn him into a less wimpy and more productive head of the household again.

Soon you’ll see him get kicked out the door right into the frigid fracas of an icy dog-eat-dog business world, completely healthy again, and without that red shiny, dripping nose.

The post Bring out your meds: flu season is here appeared first on eDrugSearch Blog.

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• John Mack is all about pharma marketing.
• Peter Rost is obviously obsessed with dissing Pfizer — but is he also obsessed with promoting BrandWeekNRX?
• Ed Silverman is on the FDA’s jock.
• The Angry Pharmacist is REALLY angry.Enjoy!Pharmalot
  
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  Pharma Marketing Blog

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  Pharma Blogosphere

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  Pharma Giles

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  BrandWeekNRX

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  Question Authority

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  GoozNews

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  In the Pipeline

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  The Angry Pharmacist
  

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  Scientific Misconduct Blog

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  eDrugSearch Blog

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