Drug Companies the new corporate bad guys

A new corporate villain - drugmakers?

The drumbeat of revelations has damaged the industry's credibility. A majority of Americans (55 percent) now think drug companies should be more closely regulated and two-thirds of Americans say drug prices are unreasonably high, according to Harris polls this year. Most significantly, only 44 percent say pharmaceutical companies serve their customers well. That's down 35 percentage points since 1997, the biggest drop in approval among any of the 15 industries the poll tracks. Only four industries - health insurance (36 percent), oil (32 percent), managed care or HMOs (30 percent), and tobacco (30 percent) - now rank lower.

Apparently the drug industries PR is no longer working. People are begining to realize that the prime motivator for the industry is making a buck not making people healthier.

"Contrary to its public relations, this is not a very innovative industry," writes Marcia Angell, a former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and author of "The Truth About the Drug Companies," in an e-mail. "The notion that the pharmaceutical companies discover lifesaving drugs is largely myth. Of the 487 drugs they brought to market in the past six years, 78 percent were classified by the FDA as not likely to represent improvements over drugs already on the market, and 68 percent didn't even contain new chemical compounds (just old drugs in new combinations or formulations)."

The current patch of criticism that has come upon PhRMA is "deserved," adds Dr. Jerome Kassirer, another former editor in chief of NEJM and author of "On The Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health." "They exaggerate the amount of money that's used to produce new products. They are producing too many drugs that don't have any special added value, a bunch of 'me too' drugs."