Big Pharma reveals true motives

This is interesting. The Big Drug Dealers, a/k/a pharmaceutical corporations, held a big confab in Sydney to bemoan their increasingly trashed public image. Seems it's interfering with profits. This quote sums up their concern for the public.

Senior Manager of Corporate Affairs External Affairs for Bristol-Myers Squibb, Michael Moore (no relation to the U.S. filmmaker), recounted that the industry had built "third party support" amongst "our key stakeholders in government, among the medical profession and the health consumer representatives."

However, he was far from persuaded that the industry should or could win over a sceptical public. "Whether that wins the hearts and minds of Joe Public out there I don't think it will, and, at the end of the day, I don't think it matters so much because we will still sell product whether or not Mum and Dad in the suburbs like pharmaceutical companies," he said.

PR bigwigs however tell them to ignore the public at their own profit peril.

Curtis took a different view. "Winning the hearts and minds," he said, "would enable us to support our pricing needs. It might enable the debate about prescription medicines to shift from price to value." (In the drug industry "price" is equated with government moves to contain costs while "value" is interpreted as much higher prices that reward big pharma companies with a premium for their patented "innovative" drugs, even if they are little different from existing drugs).

You hear any talk about public safety here? Yet these are the guys, (whose own products claim hundreds of thousands of lives a year), who underwrite the prohibition of illegal drugs, like the dangerously natural marijuana, to "protect the public."