The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It by Marcia Angell
If you want, or need to know what the modern drug industry is all about from a regulatory, or financial standpoint, this book is REQUIRED READING. If you are a security analyst for a Wall Street firm, and you cover the drug industry, and you haven’t read this book, I have three words for you – Shame On You.
If you are in Wall Street, and you read this book, don’t tell anyone because the drug companies will cut you out of any investment banking business you may want to do. They don’t want you to have this information.
A professional who cuts through all the jargon wrote this book. She gives you the reader what you need to know, to have a comprehensive understanding of the growth of the drug industry in the United States and the world. Dr. Angell has instant creditability as the former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). As you might be aware, this periodical along with England’s Lancet are the two most prestigious medical journals in the world, and that’s saying something.
What the author has to say about Big Pharma is saying something else. Her comprehensive understanding, and willingness to tell the truth is nothing less than a gift to all of us, who seek the truth about the way things work. This book is a GIFT to the American people. It is a book that the major drug companies would have paid NOT to have been published, and you need to know that.
There are some serious problems that our drug industry is facing. There are other problems that are systemic to our country that the drug industry is responsible for, where the bad in fact may outweigh the good. The author PULLS NO PUNCHES in going through them with you.
Let’s just go through a couple of issues, and you’ll see why you need to read, study, and act on what the author is saying. As a player in this industry, I know that Dr. Angell knows what she’s talking about. She also has my complete admiration and respect. In writing this book she is BURNING BRIDGES, and you have to respect someone who is willing to hurt herself financially, to do the right thing. This is a woman that could easily serve on two or three Boards at a $100 grand or more apiece, but not after writing this book.
· You will learn how the drug companies outright lie about how much money really is spent on Research and Development. The companies are using this catchall phrase as a basket into which they dump other expenses to build this number up as much as they can to use it for their own advertising advantage.
· You will learn how the drug companies really pour the vast bulk of their financial resources into marketing the products they sell, rather than creating them.
· You will be shocked to learn that the vast number of new, and important drugs is not produced in the laboratories of the major drug companies at all. They are produced in federally funded university settings, or smaller biotechnology firms.
· You will be blown away to know that several Federal laws have virtually mandated that these discoveries than be licensed to the major drug firms for marketing and distribution.
· You will see how the so-called military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell speech to America (Goggle it), applies to the drug industry as well. There is a government-drug interlocking process that is basically adverse to the democracy that we live in.
· Dr. Angell shows you how this process works directly against the financial interests of every living American. It results in each of our citizens paying far more for American made drugs than people outside the United States pay for our own drugs.
· The reasons for the outrageous excess cost of the Senior Citizen Drug Plan implemented under President Bush will be obvious to you after you read this book.
When it comes right down to it, this is the finest book on this topic on the market today. The drug companies if they could, should buy every copy, and burn it. They don’t want you knowing this information, which is information you need to know. BUY THIS BOOK.