Big Pharma Scare Tatics

How the pharmaceutical industry influences American consumers
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, especially in this case. Lloyd Grove, a columnist for the New York Daily News, says that the pharmaceutical lobby in the United States, a group called PhRMA, actually commissioned the writing of a fiction novel designed to scare Americans into avoiding prescription drugs from Canada. The book was supposed to tell a story of terrorists who altered prescription drugs from Canada in order to kill Americans who were buying them over the internet or crossing the border to buy them at lower prices. Bizarre, huh? What an interesting tactic to try to convince people to pay sky-high prices -- monopoly prices, in fact -- for prescription drugs in the United States. But that's only part of this story.

When the book project fizzled, the authors were offered $100,000 to keep quiet about the deal, says Grove. The book was also supposed to be "dumbed down" for women, because apparently women make up a large part of the prescription drug buyers in the United States, and the people in charge of this project wanted to make sure women could "understand it."

How disrespectful can this pharmaceutical industry be? To what lengths will it go to try to convince us that drugs from outside the United States are unsafe? I wouldn't be surprised if the industry actually commissioned a terrorist attack on drugs from Canada. Then it could say, "Look how unsafe drugs are from Canada! Now you have to buy them here in the United States."