ETC Blog

In an article appearing in this month’s issue of Nature Biotechnology, Dr. Henry I. Miller declares that activism against the pharmaceutical industry is “unconscionable.” His pharma-apologia is thoroughly conventional: it is the high cost (“upwards of $800 million” per drug) and high risk of drug development – not profit-grubbing – that prevents the industry from making drugs any cheaper or any more widely available than they are. Therefore, he finds opposition to an industry — which, according to him, “has improved the public’s health and well-being for decades” — “difficult to explain.” Nonetheless, he gives it a shot and the explanation he comes up with is “paranoia” on the part of pharma critics whom he believes are also mendacious and manipulative.

Perhaps Dr. Miller, overwhelmed by his duties at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (dedicated to “advancing liberty,” i.e., free markets and limited government) missed the publication in 2004 of Marcia Angell’s The Truth about the Drug Companies (excerpted here) in which she dissected the $802 million R&D figure that drug companies love to quote and explained how this “imaginary number” came into existence. (She estimates the actual average cost of bringing a drug to market at well under $100 million.)

While we appreciate Dr. Miller’s enticing attempt to attribute opposition to the pharma industry to paranoia (for which surely there is drug treatment available), pharma’s astronomical profits (more than $6 billion in 2004), intense lobbying of federal officials (in the US, pharma spends more on lobbying than any other industry) and well-documented conflicts of interest are more likely causes. For more details on pharma’s systemic ills, read ETC Group’s latest Oligopoly Inc Communiqué and to keep up-to-date, subscribe to AHRP’s email service .