Letters

From the July 2001 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

Tim Grimes
Moorpark, CA

Hooked

As a health care provider, I had a mixed response to Ronald Bailey's "Goddamn the Pusher Man" (April). His free market arguments as they pertain to the rights of the pharmaceutical industry are unassailable. But Mr. Bailey's assertions regarding the scientific laudability of the "better health through chemistry" credo of the drug industry deserve closer examination.

There is nothing wrong with quelling one's symptoms when one is in pain or discomfort. There is something very wrong with passing that off as having fixed the problem. Or in having that be considered the state of the art. That's the case for many drugs, like acid-blocking Pepsid AC; they do nothing to change what is actually wrong with the person. Ditto for Mr. Bailey's antihistamine drug. Ditto for asthma medications.

Drugs, contrary to Mr. Bailey's fervent belief, do not save us money. Drug errors kill 98,000 Americans every year, according to the Institute of Medicine. The New England Journal of Medicine, a rather conservative periodical not aimed at the sprout-munching, crystal-gazing, guru- worshipping, sandal-wearing crowd, reported that nearly 110,000 Americans die each year in hospitals from properly prescribed medication. We spend $75 billion each year on prescription medication and another $76 billion on hospitalization cleaning up the problems caused by those medications.

Taking the aforementioned body count to its logical mathematical conclusion, we find that legal drugs are the third leading cause of death in the U.S., behind only heart disease and cancer. Yet despite all this and Mr. Bailey's admiration of the pharmaceutical industry's ability to do research independently, the National Institutes of Health gave $3.5 billion for research to 25 medical schools.

All the while, non-drug therapies that work incredibly well, like chiropractic, chelation therapy, and nutritional therapy, are given short shrift by the government and private insurers. In fact, chiropractic receives a grand total of zero federal dollars for research. This is remarkable considering the reams of patient testimony gathered over a century of clinical practice testifying to the fact that chiropractic has proven benefits for patients suffering from asthma, headaches, PMS, poor immune function, ear infections, and spinal pain, to name a few.

The drug industry, with its ally the American Medical Association, has rigged the deck so that drugs, some potentially deadly or not very effective, are happily paid for by insurance companies. This has nothing to do with research. It has to do with politics and who will continue to receive the bulk of state, federal, and private money. Remember, the AMA et al. were found guilty of conspiring to eliminate the chiropractic profession. Given the incestuous relationship of the AMA and the drug industry, one does not need to be Oliver Stone to connect the dots.

I have little space in my capitalistic heart to spend pining for the poor, vilified drug companies. I have plenty of space to worry about the accumulative physiological and psychological damage we are accruing in an increasingly drugged culture and the plight of working families who only have orthodox care like drugs paid for in their insurance plans.

Charles A. Krieger
Doctor of Chiropractic
Astoria, NY

Ronald Bailey strives to make a case for what is, in reality, a double tax billing. The cited example of Xalatan is a double taking from taxpayers. First they funded the drug's development. Then once the drug was sold, taxes were taken from them again when the drug company "paid" corporate income tax, since corporations ultimately pass these taxes through to the consumer. So the federal government -- and Phar-macia and Upjohn -- used the U.S. tax system to exact hundreds of millions from American taxpayers. Sure, even bearing the full cost of production, these companies' customers and the United States may eventually see a net benefit, because of the value of some drugs in bettering lives, but let nobody be deceived: Both the NIH grant and the "income taxes" are takings.

The fact that smoking marijuana treats glaucoma much more cheaply, moreover without incurring a tax, is ignored by the article. There are almost certainly other cheap herbal preparations that could effectively treat or ameliorate various chronic conditions. The government and drug companies suppress such knowledge; it is criminal conduct of the vilest sort.

In short, the entire article is an apology for interlaced gangs of criminals -- for mafias. Was that Bailey's intent -- to covertly make a case for removing all subsidies and taxes?

Michael G. Jones
Palm Harbor, FL

Ronald Bailey's article makes some interesting attempts to defuse critics of the pharmaceutical industry, but I'm not fully convinced. Particularly troublesome to me as a sometime small-business proprietor is the assertion that the 20 percent profit calculation based on writing off research and development as "current expenses" would shrink to 9 percent if those expenses were depreciated. This seems to me to fly directly in the face of the way the rest of us calculate our taxes.

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