Offering Hope--at a Price

"America's Pharmaceutical Companies: New Medicines. New Hope." This was the tag line of full-page ads appearing in national magazines last year as part of a campaign by drug-industry trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) to gussy up its increasingly negative image. The ads featured handsome, smiling people in lab coats--just some of the "50,000 researchers at America's pharmaceutical companies [who are] dedicating their lives to making all our lives better." Perusing its promotional materials, you might get the idea the pharmaceutical industry is a nonprofit research operation out to save the human race by putting every disease that afflicts us "on the path to extinction," as one industry spokesperson put it.

But this message of hope has a dark side. Faced with a proposal to limit drug prices, industry representatives invariably respond by insisting the measure will put an end to research into terrifying diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer, hitting us where we live. "I can guarantee," PhRMA's Richard Smith warned reporters last year, "if you aren't already today, at some point in your lives every one in this room will be a patient in need of medical care. The question is: Will a medicine be there for you?"

Here is the industry driving home its point: "'If you touch our profits, the laboratories will close and you'll all die,'" says Alan Sager, a professor of health services at Boston University School of Public Health who has studied the drug industry. "It's a terror tactic."

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