Review
Have pharmaceutical companies dispensed with ethics in favour of a quest for global dominance - making medicine the ultimate commodity, asks Claire McCauley.
- Power, Politics and Pharmaceuticals
- Cork University Press
Power, Politics and Pharmaceuticals
Shrouded in an elitist mystique, the pharmaceutical industry has enjoyed decades of unrivalled “in-house” secrecy, protecting the integrity of their drug designs. However, recent public controversies have prised open the laboratory doors and exposed these companies as transnational corporate giants who are active ingredients in the expansion of globalisation.
Power, Politics and Pharmaceuticals is a collection of articles written by a multidisciplinary group of contributors; ranging from experts in drug regulation and pharmacoeconomics to social science. Putting the existing systems which regulate the pharmaceutical industry under the microscope, it examines how and why these companies have undergone such an economic mutation and, through this, offers a unique hypothesis on the structure of power in the world today.
These articles portray the pharmaceutical industry as virus-like, invading all sectors of influence until becoming an opaque, yet significant, transnational presence in the world marketplace. Vying for global custom it trades with governments desperate for economic regeneration, prepared to soften policies such as low corporate tax rates and the availability of land sites that meet industrial locational requirements securing much-needed foreign investment.
It details, shockingly, the extent of the role played by the pharmaceutical industry in Ireland’s economic upsurge, arguing that the Celtic tiger’s drug induced performance was enhanced when sixteen of the top pharmaceutical companies established facilities in the Republic. Between 1996 and 2003, Ireland’s exports of pharmaceuticals increased by an incredible 1,514% accounting for almost a quarter of Irish exports.
These investigations also expose an ingratiating “partnership” between the industry, healthcare professionals and the academic world through funding research facilities and up to 80-90% of post-graduate training. The recent controversy surrounding Glaxo Smith Kline and key clinical trial data on an anti-depressant suggests that this ethical entanglement enables drug companies to subtly influence their own research agenda, suppressing unfavourable findings.
Most shocking, however, is the accusation that Pfizer, whose market value of $266 billion, larger than the combined GDP of the eighteen biggest economies in sub-Saharan Africa, legally blocked attempts to produce cheaper versions of HIV/Aids drugs in the disease ravaged continent. Such behaviour could be described as a pharmaceutical regime, parasitically earning off the very people it claims to serve.
While the topics Power, Politics and Pharmaceuticals cover are vast and the terminology quite scientific, it is brilliantly edited to make for insightful yet uncomfortable reading. Despite its blistering attack on the industry it argues for independent, patient accountable regulation as the remedy to return it to a patient, not profit led organisation.
When medicine is traded on the global economic floor like oil or steel then the very ethos of healthcare has a price. What this book argues passionately is that beneath the white coats of the pharmaceutical world there are the designer suits of corporate commerce manipulating the costs of our health, our lives and even our deaths.
