Quotes About Pharmaceuticals

Drug companies say they need to charge ever-higher prices to cover their research costs, but they spend far less on research and development than they do on marketing and administration, and afterwards they actually keep more in profits.

Socialized medicine allows a nation to exclude a U.S. product from its market if the U.S. firm does not make generous enough price concessions. Accordingly, what has developed is a system within which U.S. firms make large profits on new drugs in the U.S. market, but very low profits on sales everywhere else.

In 2004, Warner-Lambert, a division of Pfizer Inc., pled guilty to two felonies and agreed to pay $430 million for fraudulently promoting the drug Neurontin.

To ensure fair competition, there must be effective controls on currency manipulation, and monopoly pricing needs to be outlawed on such items as intellectual property, especially pharmaceuticals.

The goal of re-importation is to provide American consumers with access to drugs at the world market price - not the inflated price now paid only by Americans.

One in every three pills taken by Americans, for example, are generics produced in India, which itself gets two-thirds of pharmaceutical ingredients from China.

In 2003, GlaxoSmithKline paid $88 million in civil fines for overcharging Medicaid for its anti-depressant Paxil.

People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.

Imports create competition and keep domestic industry more responsive to consumers. In the United States, we import everything consumers want. So why not pharmaceuticals?

A few drugs - such as beta-blockers, statins and glycogen control medications - have proved very effective at managing hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and strokes. Most insurance plans charge something for them. Why not make drugs like these free? Not for everyone, but just the groups for whom they are provably effective.

Drug discovery is terribly expensive, just to find out how one drug could or could not work and all its side effects.

When it comes to dead bodies in current psychotropic trials, there are a greater number of them in the active treatment groups than in the placebo groups. This is quite different from what happens in penicillin trials or trials of drugs that really work." —DAVID HEALY, PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY AT CARDIFF UNIVERSITY, WALES (2008)1

Anti psychotics—a class of drugs previously seen as extremely problematic in kind, useful only in severely ill patients—were the top revenue-producing class of drugs in 2008, ahead even of the cholesterol-lowering agents.12 Total sales of all psychotropic drugs in 2008 topped $40 billion.

The theories that patients with depression lack serotonin and that patients with schizophrenia have too much dopamine have long been refuted. The truth is just the opposite. There is no chemical imbalance to begin with, but when treating mental illness with drugs, we create a chemical imbalance.

With psychiatric medications, you solve one problem for a period of time, but the next thing you know you end up with two problems. The treatment turns a period of crisis into a chronic mental illness. - Amy Upham

Rather than fix chemical imbalances in the brain, the drugs creat them.

Prior to being medicated, a depressed person has no known chemical imbalance.

In 1967, one in three American adults filled a prescription for a "psychoactive" medication, with total sales of such drugs reaching $692 million.

Wallace Laboratories hired Salvador Dalí to help stoke Miltown fever, paying the great artist $35,000 to create an exhibit at an AMA convention that was meant to capture the magic of this new drug.

I'm the poster boy for Propecia. It's amazing.

If you take five milligrams of melatonin—which is often a standard dose that's sold over the counter in the U.S.—Roxanne said you risk "blowing out your melatonin receptors," which would make it harder to sleep without them.

Big Pharma was offering the solution that an isolated, materialistic culture thought it needed—one you can buy. We had lost the ability to understand that there are some problems that can't be solved by shopping.

The term doesn't really make any sense, she said: we don't know what a "chemically balanced" brain would look like. People are told that drugs like antidepressants restore a natural balance to your brain, she said, but it's not true—they create an artificial state. The whole idea of mental distress being caused simply by a chemical imbalance is "a myth," she has come to believe, sold to us by the drug companies.

Nine million Americans--4 percent of adults--are using prescription sleeping pills, and vastly more are using over-the-counter sleep aids.