“The marvel of drugs has always been great to my mind; you can madden a man, calm a man, make him incredibly strong and alert or a helpless log, quicken this passion and allay that, all by means of drugs” Says Wells, but as the hike of controlled drugs and increase of abusers far out number the US population growth it suggests that our Pharmaceutical companies are more interested in profits then the good of medicine . The result, a steady rise of substance abusers. According to Joseph A. Califano Jr., former U.S. secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. “There is not a perfect relation between that and the rise in abuse. But there is enough to suggest there is a relation.” Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of OxyContin, a painkiller originally intended for end-stage cancer patients is now widely used amoung the general population. According to a study done by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University it showed that Purdue “aggressively marketed” the drug for lesser pain resulting in more prescriptions. The company also designed OxyContin in a way that allows abusers to crush and snort the pills, overcoming its time-release formula and allowing a narcotic rush.
But pain prescription are not the only profitable target for the industry. French company Sanofi-Aventis has created what financial analysts exclaim to be most promising new drug (Acomplia) a new diet drug.
They predict multibillion dollar sales. Another,GlaxoSmithKline is proposing an over-the-counter version for a culture plagued by obesity. Glaxo plans to draw on some of the same marketing techniques it used in 1996, when it successfully commercialized Nicorette chewing gum and Nicoderm skin patches, which had formerly been sold only by prescription. “Here was a new miracle to be added to this strange armoury of phials the doctors use!” said Wells But at what cost? an addictive society?
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