Drug Companies & Corruption
Marcia Angell has an excellent essay in the January 15th, 2009, New York Review of Books, on corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. It's structured as a review of three books (Side Effects, Our Daily Meds and Shyness) that works to tie them together into an indictment. Angell herself is the author of The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It.
The industry is making a minimal step toward responding to this growing chorus of complaint, by voluntarily banning gifts to doctors of pens and mugs and soap dispensers and who knows what else. Check out No Free Lunch for much more on this.
Drug companies refraining from doling out engraved pens and the like will reportedly cost the promotional industry $1 billion a year. How much these practices have been costing the rest of us is much harder to estimate.
Previously on Biopolitical Times:
- Pap smears or Botox? Cosmetic makeovers and conflicts of interest
- Protecting research subjects from a broken system
- PhRMA and BIO self-image: Downtrodden and besieged
- Goozner and the Integrity in Science Project on Conflicts at the FDA
- Conflicts of Interest at the National Academies' Committee on Conflicts of Interest