Pharmacrap

Following up on the Pharmaclout post information she sent, La Belle Soeur Jean sends this Capitol Roundup article from junglegeorge. (Hey George, and thanks - did you know she was doing that? I am busting people right and left today.)

Drug companies are not burdened with anything like the research and development costs they claim — an alleged burden the industry uses to justify profits about three times the average Fortune 500 company.

So argues Public Citizen, a non-profit consumer group founded by Ralph Nader 30 years ago.

...Additionally, the group maintains that at least 55 percent of the research projects that led to the discovery and development to the top five selling drugs in 1995 were conducted by taxpayer-funded scientists. (emphasis mine)

And as La Belle has pointed out, the costs are in lobbying fees.

Capitol Roundup:
Public Citizen also charged that the drug industry spent some $262 million on political activities in the 1999-2000 election cycle.

The amount is unprecedented for the industry, Public Citizen claims.

This includes an expenditure of $92 million for some 625 lobbyists to work the halls on Congress.

As a side note to this article, I have a pet peeve about research that stems from my graduate school days. Some day I'll rant about that. But the short version is: public funding of research needs to be much higher than it is, and the results need to be public, and any profits made from it need to be put back into more public research. But, that's just an opinion. Here are some facts: When you see research published out of a state university - even the most lauded of them - and you are tempted to believe that means it is independent research, resist the temptation. Public funding is nowhere near enough to keep state universities going, and so corporate interests are funding research projects in public institutions. And they own the rights to the results, which means, if they don't like them, they don't publish them. Which means that there will be researchers who will manage to find the results that the corporate sponsor is looking for. And it doesn't have to be done by altering the data (which happens, I can assure you). It can be done simply by applying the appropriate statistical analysis to the data, looking at your data from a different angle, and selling that angle.

And there you have the most important thing I learned in two years of grad school - and perhaps the only thing I remember. That and there is a balance to be struck between speed and accuracy which varies with the import of the task and the effect on its outcome. Which is how I excuse my typos.