Your Dangerous Drugstore
By Marcia Angell
... Polls show that among American businesses, the pharmaceutical industry now ranks near the bottom in public approval—above tobacco and oil companies, but well below airlines and banks and even insurance companies. This situation contrasts sharply with the generally high regard in which the industry was held just a few years ago. ...
Much of what is wrong with the industry is explained in several recent books. They include Merrill Goozner's The $800 Million Pill, which shows that most innovative research on serious diseases like cancer and HIV/AIDS is done not by drug companies but in government and university labs. Jerry Avorn's Powerful Medicines discusses the risks and benefits of the drugs themselves, and shows that many of them fall far short of their marketing pro-mises. John Abramson's Overdosed America presents a clinician's view of the misinformation that leads doctors to prescribe unnecessary and possibly harmful drugs. Jerome Kassirer's On the Take explains how the medical profession has allowed itself to be seduced by the billions of dollars lavished on it by the drug companies (for example in subsidizing medical meetings of all types). Sharna Olfman's No Child Left Different takes a critical look at the promotion and overuse of psychoactive drugs in children. Selling Sickness, by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, explains how the pharmaceutical industry increases sales by convincing essentially normal people that they have chronic conditions (such as erectile dysfunction) that require lifelong drug treatment. Although each of these books emphasizes different parts of the system, they are remarkably consistent when they overlap, and together they make a damning case, not just against the industry but against our entire system for developing, testing, and using prescription drugs. ...
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19055>
Carl