Marketing Dangerous Things

NEWS ANALYSIS

Pricey Drug Trials Turn Up Few New Blockbusters

By ALEX BERENSON

The $500 billion drug industry is stumbling badly in its

core business of finding new medicines, while aggressively

marketing existing drugs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/18/business/18assess.html?th

It is pretty clear that our drug industry has felt secure in its profit-making drive to peddle whatever to whomever by whatever means. One sees the daily deluge of ads pushing this or that high priced drug that one is supposed to pressure one's doctor into prescribing.

The most recent Medicare rip-off on drugs placed no limits on prices to be charged by our U.S. drug companies and moves are afoot by the Republicans to block imports from Canada -- one of the many nations that bargains down our greedies to more reasonable pricing of their newest.

The rash of disasters now hitting the drug industry of me-too-for-profit items (not doing more than existing low cost generics) may bring divine retribution for such dangerous profiteering unless, working through the Bush administration, the industry can put trial lawyers out of business as the last recompense for families who have lost not only loved ones, but bread winners in this profit-making extravaganza.

Now on to the tobacco industry, which has been killing nearly half a million Americans each year and which is now looking for new outlets for its deadly products overseas.

And then there is our profiteering with such lovely weapons as land mines which going on killing innocents for decades, as do uranium contaminated artillery shells, and our polluting of the global atmosphere -- "to maintain the American economy" -- guess who?

Such madness can occur only in a nation that has completely cut itself off from the eyes of the world -- an 'American democracy' that manifests itself in a 'vampire' culture that feeds not only on its own but any others that it can seduce with its deadly products!

Needless to say self-regulation by these psychopathic greedies will not do it! Perhaps divine intervention is the only way. There are some biblical (prophetic) precedents for curbing such murderous hubris! Certainly there are increasing numbers of those out there who believe we have such retribution coming. Imagine ten of those suitcase nuclear weapons that the Bush administration has declined to collect from the disbanded former Soviet Republics going off simultaneously in major U.S. cities -- at least our guys in Iraq would be relatively free from the fall out. It is obviously a very different kind of homeland security that we need than that tainted ex-police commissioners or their equivalents can provide. People have been conditioned to kill monsters and that is what we as a nation are rapidly becoming. Machiavelli warned his princes against making themselves hated. It is hate that kills!