Michael Geist has a great story in today's Toronto Star called No good reason to bow to U.S. pharma's lobbying. Geist used to regularly have interesting articles in the Technology section of the Globe and Mail on Thursdays, back in the frothy boom days when enough tech advertisers bought enough pages to warrant a standalone section, and I'm glad to rediscover his intelligent, disinterested writing.
What I particularly like about the article is its plain talk about lobbying and the pharmaceutical industry's attempts to control public perception of Internet phramacies, particularly those operating out of Canada. Reading through the article the machinations of big business, big lobbyists and their affects on government policy are revealed. Geist picks apart the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) arguments one by one in what I would characterize as a gentle way, considering how patently (!) wrong and simply wrought the arguments are.
Moreover, the story of the pharmaceutical industry's successful lobbying efforts is instructional and indicative of how business is conducted in our country. Lobbyist present a story representative of an interest group. Our elected governments consider that story in framing legislation. The net effect being that big corporations become enfranchised, and citizens' interests are comprimised. The story remains the same in many other similar oligopoly industries: agribusiness, automotive manufacturing, oil and energy, financial services, etc.
In the last few month the pharmaceutical industry has suffered from bad story after bad story: shabby approval processes slickened with the distribution of research dollars and the infestation of regulatory bodies with industry shills, drugs pulled from the marketplace long after being ostesibly approved. I put forward that the industry should more accurately be called what it is, a cartel, and we would have an easier time dealing with it as citizens.
Posted by James Sherrett at February 7, 2005 11:47 AM