Pharmaceutical Marketing as Organized Crime

One of the Links on my blog is to Howard Brody's blog, Hooked.  He blogs about medical ethics in the Pharmaceutical industry, or, more often, the lack of it.  He recently did a book review on a book by a European Researcher, Peter C. Gøtzsche, Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare (New York: Radcliffe Publishing, 2013).  Here are some of the zingers in the book.

Throughout the book, Gøtzsche uses the organized crime motif to characterize the drug industry. This is quite deliberate and measured. He argues that something counts as organized crime when:

• They kill people
• They lie about what they do
• They routinely break the law as a part of their business practices
• They use their ill-gotten gains to corrupt the government regulatory apparatus so as to be allowed to continue to operate

Gøtzsche is a physician, epidemiologist and research methodologist, and has achieved prominence as head of the Nordic Cochrane Center, a part of the Cochrane Collaboration which is generally recognized as the most reliable and independent assessor of medical data—a sort of gold standard if you want to know: how good is the evidence that any treatment works for any disease? So this guy is not one to fly off the handle and make charges that he cannot document with solid evidence.

• “In the United States and Europe, drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.”(1)
• “The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs. Blatant lies that—in all the cases I have studied—have continued after the statements were proven wrong.”(2)
• “The book addresses a general system failure caused by widespread crime, corruption and impotent drug regulation in need of radical reforms. Some readers will find my book one-sided and polemic, but there is little point in describing what goes well in a system that is out of control. If a criminologist undertakes a study of muggers, no one expects a ‘balanced’ account mentioning that many muggers are good family men.”(2)