My new target

Drug companies. Pharmaceutical behemoths. The corporations with the highest profit margins in the world. I think it’s time they became the target of wrath.
These companies — which seem to have government officials in their pockets due to incredible campaign contributions — are seemingly unfettered in their business practices.
One thing that has always pissed me off about them is their continual insistence that they must charge so much for drugs because of “research costs.” In fact, drug companies spend the majority of their cash on marketing, not research. In addition, many of the most important drug treatments were researched and created by university researchers using government money. So why are the drug companies reaping the cash? And what have drug company researchers given us? Pills for heartburn and men who can’t get it up.
Now, there’s this interesting (but obvious) tidbit that seems like something you’d expect when you let the fox guard the henhouse. Did you know that drug companies usually perform their own drug trials? Wouldn’t you expect that an impartial third party would do it, in concert with scientific method? Oh, no — that would be bad for business:

The pharmaceutical industry has repeatedly violated federal law by failing to disclose the existence of large numbers of its clinical trials to a government database, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

Doctors and patients say that compliance with the law would go a long way toward addressing their growing concerns that they are not being given the full picture about the effectiveness of many drugs because they are not told about drug trials that fail. The issue has gained urgency with recent disclosures that the publicly available research on treating children with antidepressants obscured the fact that in most studies, the drugs were no better than sugar pills. Drugmakers chose not to publish those studies.

… As of Friday, the database, ClinicalTrials.gov, listed 5,754 ongoing studies, but only 13 percent were industry sponsored. The federal government, mainly the National Institutes of Health, accounted for 55 percent. Those proportions are in stark contrast to the true picture, DeAngelis said. “Over 80 percent of trials are funded by for-profit companies, not by the government,” she said.

As a postscript, can I just say that I am sick and tired of drug commercials? Anyone visiting this country must think that we are all pill-popping, impotent, overweight, lethargic, acid-stomached bunch of creeps with toenail fungus….
oh, wait.

Also, there’s a new phenomenon out there — the fake drug commercials. You know, these “dietary supplements” masquerading as prescription drugs, with slick commercials on cable and satellite — the video version of the spam we all receive constantly, only better produced. They’re for blister-packages of pills that claim to cure stress, enhance “potency”, increase breast size or penis size, and more. If history goes in cycles, we’re obviously back in the era of quackery and fraud. What’s saddest about this is that people believe it.