pay through the nose.
The drug industry has made spectacular growth since the war. In 1971 drug sales were estimated at sixteen billion dollars; and those of the biggest drug firm, Hoffman La Roche. were estimated in 1974 as $1.7 billion (£700 million).
In 1957 in the USA the rate of profit of the drug industry was the highest out of 15 major industries, with a rate of return almost double the average of all manufacturing sectors.
USELESS Although the pharmaceutical industry justifies its massive profits in terms of the financial risks, only 10-20 per cent of research results in a new drug with improved usefulness. This is not because of the difficulty of drug development as such, but because research is predominantly concentrated on relatively useless drugs (proprietary drugs), on chemical manipulations of the structure of existing drugs to beat the patent laws, on cosmetics rather than genuine medicine, and on producing new versions of old drugs which offer little advantage ned obsolence.
Also part of what is called research is in actual fact advertising and market research. Thus when Hoffman La Roche claim they spend £100 million annually on research, the actual amount spent on genuinely useful research is about 80 percent less!
The aim of the drug industry is to sell more drugs - to get doctors to prescribe more drugs to their patients. Klass shows how the interests of the drug industry have penetrated all levels of the medical profession and its practice.
DEFINITIVE He explains how consultants will push certain drugs as the definitive treatment when teaching medical students, and how the supposedly objective journals of medical science and the various professional bodies are financed predominantly on the advertising of the drug industry. Therefore, with few exceptions, the information and views imparted to the rest of the doctors are invariably less than objective!
The drug industry exploits the failure of the profession and the state to provide adequate training for doctors, especially after qualificanon, m oract to max caucauon with propaganda The results of all this for the Realth care of the working class are horrific:
1. They are prescribed drugs (always potentially dangerous) for which there is no need.
2. Powerful and expensive drugs are given for minor illness. Apart from the direct dangers to the recipients health, this encourages the development of resistant strains of disease for which there is no certainty that an effective replacement will be developed.
3. The use of drugs both in humans and animals is always potentially dangerous. The effects of drugs need to be continually monitored, as their harmful consequences may not become obvious for years. No such adequate scientific monitoring service exists. Thus, for example the effects of thalidomide on unborn children was not noticed for three years and over 500 children were maimed as a result.
Registration forms and agendas for the Conference 'The fight against the cuts in the NHS' organised by MCAPP in London on 11 October planare now ready. Write to Dr Paul Stern, 55 Bridge Lane, London N.W.11. for supplies The conclusion that is obvious from Dr Klass's book is that the development, production and use of drugs ís far too dangerous to be left to the anarchy of the capitalist mode or producuon and une nanas of the medical profession. It is on these points that Dr Klass is at his weakest. His view of the subversion of an 'innocent, honourable medical profession by the nasty profit-hungry drug industry is at best naive and at worst a deliberate mystification of the role of the medical profession. Klass is right about bourgeois medicine when he says: •We define health in the mechanical terms of orderly working groups. In other words, the ideology of medicine separates the physical factors in disease from social factors, and rejects the latter as insignificant.
But for Klass, the reason for this is a mystery. For capitalism the predominant function of medicine is to proviac a neatny workrorce sets of orderly working organs'. It is to this ideology and practice of medicine that the drug industry is geared. The medical profession, wedded as it is to the interests of capital, is incapable of treating more than the symptoms of the Following a 400-strong demonstration last Sunday, supporters of the united front Committee Against Death Sentences in Spain are effects of the capitalist crisis -nervous illnesses etc. Drugs provide the mast convenient and protitable way of doing so.
defending the working class against the ravages of the drug industry's profit-mongering. This defence can only be taken up by the workers' movement both inside and outside the drug industry. requires nationalisation of the drug industry without compensation under workers' control.
Doctors, pharmacists and drug research workers who want to put an end to the present dangerous abuses should use their knowledge to inform, advice and educate the workers' movement on the role nature and therapeutic use and danger of drugs. identify themselves with the socialist movement, otherwise they are powerless to oppose the exploitation drug firms.
Medical Committee Against Private Practice on 18 October in London offers them an excellent opportunity to do just that.
Such a profession is incapable of This urgently They have to of the sick and infirm by capitalism's The conference organised by the au teti to be taken times a day • J. D INCOLNS (M Dispens Archway "
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Nearly everyone has taken a drug at some time or another, either as a medicine or a food additive. Invariably they will have had to