Richard Smith: Is the pharmaceutical industry like the mafia?
10 Sep, 13 | by BMJ Group
▻http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2013/09/10/richard-smith-is-the-pharmaceutical-industry-like-the-mafia
The piece that follows is my foreword to a new and fascinating book by Peter Gøtzsche, the head of the Nordic Cochrane Centre, entitled Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare. I hope that this piece might prompt you to read the book. I was not paid for my foreword and will not receive any payment from the book.
Peter does acknowledge that some drugs have brought great benefits. He does so in one sentence: “My book is not about the well-known benefits of drugs such as our great successes with treating infections, heart diseases, some cancers, and hormone deficiencies like type 1 diabetes.” Some readers may think this insufficient, but Peter is very clear that this is a book about the failures of the whole system of discovering, producing, marketing, and regulating drugs. It is not a book about their benefits.
The characteristics of organised crime, racketeering, is defined in US law as the act of engaging repeatedly in certain types of offence, including extortion, fraud, federal drug offences, bribery, embezzlement, obstruction of justice, obstruction of law enforcement, tampering with witnesses, and political corruption. Peter produces evidence, most of it detailed, to support his case that pharmaceutical companies are guilty of most of these offences.
And he is not the first to compare the industry with the Mafia or mob. He quotes a former vice-president of Pfizer, who has said:
“It is scary how many similarities there are between this industry and the mob. The mob makes obscene amounts of money, as does this industry. The side effects of organized crime are killings and deaths, and the side effects are the same in this industry. The mob bribes politicians and others, and so does the drug industry …”