Drug Company Rip Off Of The Day Number 3

I have visions of people stumbling across my little blog garden while they're surfing around the Internet before bedtime and being transfixed by what they see. So excited beyond belief at my writing that they cannot get enough, and certainly won't be able to get to sleep anytime soon as they had planned. Why do I have thoughts like this? Because I'm an egomaniac. Should my fantasy be happening to you as you read these words however, you may be thinking of reaching for some Nytol®. (diphenhydramine HCl 25mg) After all, it's probably America's best known sleep aid. I prefer scotch. But hey, to each his own.

Or maybe it's those damn allergies that are keeping you awake. The sneezing, runny nose, watery eye thing making you absolutely miserable. In that case you might be thinking of taking some Benadryl Allergy Relief® (diphenhydramine 25mg) Just watch out for the side effects though, it makes a lot of people drowsy.

Hmmmm...you know what would be funny? If I took some of that Benadryl Allergy Relief® (diphenhydramine HCl 25mg), slapped a different label on it, and sold it as a sleep aid since it makes so many people drowsy anyway. Except our friends at (surprise!) GlaxoSmithKline beat me to it. Look at the drug name inside the parenthesis after both Nytol® and Benadryl ®. Same stuff. (click here for an earlier post on how GlaxoSmithKline is a master at the "money for no research" game) I've given up trying to explain that to people though, as that peaceful blue label evidently makes you unable to comprehend what is in the section that says "active ingredients." Or maybe there's a scientific study out there on the effects of different labels and resultant drowsiness that I'm unaware of. Either way I'm sticking with the scotch.

An Update on Roche Sliminess

When last we left giant drug manufacturer Roche Company, we saw how they decided to price their 2 breakthrough cancer drugs, Avastin and Herceptin, at $100,000 and $40,000 a year respectively, not because they say that they were so expensive to develop, but simply because they can. Today we'll see how the terminally ill evidently just aren't a big enough demographic to meet quarterly profit projections.

Let me be clear on one thing. Both Avastin and Herceptin are major breakthroughs in cancer therapy when used in the right patients. Across the pond in the UK though, The Guardian Weekly tells the tale of how Roche aggressively (and by aggressively I mean "acting like slimeballs") marketed Herceptin for cases where the benefits are a little more dubious. I'll let The Guardian set the stage.

Just a few years ago, nobody had heard of Herceptin, although stories about a new generation of "targeted drugs" had begun to circulate, raising hopes of medicines with better cancer-killing powers. In 2002, Nice (Drugnazi here: Nice = "National Institute for Clinical Excellence". Isn't it cool how Europeans try to put a happy face on their Government agencies?) licensed Herceptin for use on women with advanced breast cancer; it undoubtedly saved lives. But then Roche did trials on women who had just finished chemotherapy for early-stage cancer. The company had not yet applied for a licence for this change of use in this country, but it decided to announce interim results showing that the drug halved the risk of the cancer recurring. The clamour for Herceptin began, and amid all the noise, any chance of a reasoned debate about the drug was lost.

Well why wouldn't there be a clamor for a miracle drug that can "halve the risk of cancer recurring?" Maybe because "halving the risk" in this case means 17.2% of women in the placebo group had a recurrence of their cancer, as opposed to 9.4% in the Herceptin group. "Halving the risk" sounds way better than "going from 17.2 to 9.4" doesn't it?

And then there's the way those pesky side effects can get in the way of a good marketing plan. 8.5% of women in the trial stopped taking Herceptin because they couldn't tolerate it, including 2.2% that developed congestive heart failure or warning symptoms of heart failure. More women had to stop taking the drug than were helped by it. Again, not the best material for marketing your product.

That's not about to stop those can-do people who need to make sales projections though. First Roche made a big deal by declaring they were stopping the trials early because it would be (ahem) unethical to withhold the drug from the placebo group. In reality, the trials were stopped at the first possible moment that Roche could start shouting how wonderfully they turned out, and at a point where, according to The Guardian:

We cannot possibly know yet, from the data available, whether the drug stops people dying - and all the "Last chance for breast cancer victim" headlines (as in yesterday's Sun) do not change that. The published results spell it out clearly in the New England Journal of Medicine: "Overall survival in the two groups was not significantly different.

"Overall survival in the two groups is not significantly different!!!!!" probably wouldn't make the best marketing pitch I'm thinking. Better to recruit an army of Breast Cancer survivors to counter the science that isn't going your way. But c'mon, you might be saying, playing to people's raw emotions in such a way is surely beneath any reputable organization.

It would be beneath a reputable organization, but we're talking about drug companies. Back to the Guardian:

"Halfway through the following week, the phone goes at home," says Jardine, professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London, writer and well-known television presenter. "It's a really nice woman. She says to me, 'I read about you in the paper and I gather you'd like access to Herceptin and you can't get it.'"

By now, however, Jardine had decided that she did not want the drug. "I said, 'No - that's not the case with me. I have decided not to have Herceptin.'

"She said, 'Even if you don't want it yourself, would you come and talk to some of our seminars because we're running a big campaign to promote Herceptin? Either we could find funding for Herceptin or, if you really don't want it or decide against it, there would be fees for appearances.'

"I said, 'Could you tell me where you are from?' She said, 'We work for Roche'.

'"I wasn't feeling well. I said, 'Would you please get off the phone?' Then I hung up.

"There was no mistaking the directness of the approach - she said she would make it worth my while."

I couldn't say it any better than Jardine. Would you please get off the phone Roche?

Read the whole story here.

Dear Republicans; The Jihadists Want To Destroy You As Well.....

Ok, so you may have picked up by now that my politics are a bit left of center. That being the case, I was anti-war before being anti-war was cool, and I loathed Mr. Bush back in the day when doing so made you some sort of sicko terrorist bent on ending western civilization. Don't assume everyone to the political left and/or who is against the Iraq war is a pacifist though. I firmly believe that, as Malcolm X would put it, "sometimes you have to have a conversation with your enemy in the only language they understand." So I was more than a bit intrigued when I came across a story about a group of protestors who had actually grown a pair and were using tactics a bit different from the typical namby-pamby "oh please stop your policy that we think is incorrect" protest parade. From The New York Times:

As dozens of mourners streamed solemnly into church to bury Cpl. David A. Bass, a fresh-faced 20-year-old marine who was killed in Iraq on April 2, a small clutch of protesters stood across the street on Tuesday, celebrating his violent death.


"Thank God for Dead Soldiers," read one of their placards. "Thank God for I.E.D.'s," read another, a reference to the bombs used to kill service members in the war.

Damn. I thought I was pretty hard core, but protesting at a funeral is a line I'm not gonna cross. Ever. Who the hell are these people? The Weathermen? Al-Queda In America? Relatives of dead Iraqi civilians? Back to the Times:

To drive home their point — that God is killing soldiers to punish America for condoning homosexuality — members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., a tiny fundamentalist splinter group, kicked around an American flag and shouted, if someone approached, that the dead soldiers were rotting in hell.

Christians. Should have known. So, God kills soldiers .......who are part of an organization that will immediately expel any member who publicly admits to being a homosexual...because God hates homosexuals? Ummm....just a thought, but wouldn't it be easier and more effective for God to flood Amsterdam or break off the San Francisco peninsula into the ocean if he hates gays so much? Not to mention a little easier for us mere mortals to pick up on the message he was trying to send.

Before you move on with your life, do me a favor and imagine for a couple minutes the press coverage if it had been Arabs or other Muslims who were doing such a thing, and ask yourself why these people are getting a relative free ride because they practice their hate in the name of Jesus and not Mohammed.



Read the whole story here.

Freak of The Week

Today I had the pleasure of listening, for I swear to God over 5 minutes, to a customer tell me why he was switching all his prescriptions to my happy little pill store. It was because, he not-so-calmly explained, that when he showed up at his former pharmacy for refills, they "pulled a gun on me and told me I had 30 seconds to get off their property." Not to be humiliated in such a fashion, the customer then told the gun-puller that "he shouldn't point that thing at me unless you mean it" and then knocked the weapon out of his hand with a flick of his arm, as he learned to do in "over 40 years of martial arts training" (he looked to be about 25 years old)

Imagine my surprise when all the meds he wanted transferred turned out to be antipsychotics. Imagine my longing to run him off at gunpoint myself.

Clear Channel Killed The Radio Star.

I'm sure that's not news to most of you, but for those of you unaware, Clear Channel is a company spawned from the deregulation of the broadcast industry in 1996. In case you've ever wondered why every fucking radio station sounds the same these days, one reason is that Clear Channel alone owns over 1,200 stations across the country.

The first format to get the Clear Channel treatment was country music. Just listen to Johnny Cash sing about shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die and try to imagine one of today's fluffy-hair under the $500 cowboy hat pussy boys on mainstream country radio try something like that. I started hearing the difference years ago but had retreated into my Frank Zappa and Velvet Underground collection for so long I had no idea just how bad it had become...... until the other day, when I came across Country Music Television. I couldn't look away. It was horrible beyond belief and I had to keep looking back to make sure it wasn't some sort of joke. It reminded me of the novel 1984, when the music for common people was actually random sounds and words spit out by a computer and no one was the wiser. I honestly wonder if there isn't a Clear Channel computer somewhere spitting out this dreck. Beyond the incredible simplicity, two themes emerged in the subject matter of the songs:

1) The singers are proud. Always proud. And if they are somewhere very different from where they started, they should be very proud of where they are from.

2) They are always happy. The days of country music being about getting drunk and beating your dog are over. These days, no matter what shit-ass hand life has dealt you, you are happy and workin' hard. All the better to keep John Q. Dumbass Redneck from realizing he's getting the shaft in the New World Order.

So I'm thinking about this and I figure I can do as well as any corporate robot at writing a song. Think I'll give it a shot.

I'm a Mississippi girl in the big 'ol city/
life is hard and not always pretty/
but I'll get by/
until I die.

I got my Momma's old hymnal and a piece of back bacon/
my feet hit the floor and my ass starts a shakin'/
gotta move my hips/
to get those tips.

Once in awhile when I'm down and out/
I open my legs and a baby comes out/
in 9 months then/
I'm back in debt.

Ok....I usually only write things like that after a martini or two. I can only conclude after reading what just came out of my keyboard that today I'm one step closer to insanity. The trip is kinda fun though.....

One Class I Don't Want To Take

Customer calls me up to bug my life at work today, and in the middle of the general psychobabble, tells me that his doctor "uses me as an educational exhibit for having the cleanest catheter"

Mind you, the reason he was calling had nothing to do with a catheter, and the subject wasn't brought up again.

I Guess I'm glad he has something in his life to be proud of.

Not That I'll Ever Voluntarily Have Anything To Do With Children.

I suppose in the abstract I'm glad that people are out there creating a future tax base for the money that will end up in my Social Security check, but my contacts with the little banshee-devils never go well. I don't like them, they don't like me. It's best for all concerned that we avoid each other.

For some unknown reason though, I found myself in the children's section at the local bookstore the other day and what should catch my eye except for a book on.....farting. It wasn't a bad read really. I learned that the average fart contains about 4 ounces worth of gas. I never would have guessed that, I thought they would be way smaller.

I left wondering why they can't teach something at least a tenth as interesting in the continuing education I'm forced to take to keep my license, and with a new book to share the next time I get roped into one of those "Oh you have to come over to see the baby" hell events.

The Jihad Watch Never Stops.

I was going to try and take a break from the seriousness of the last few posts today with a dumb customer story or two, but just like a whack-a-mole game, the right-wing jihadists and Christian Fascists keep popping their heads above ground at a rate that makes it challenging to keep up. It's no longer news when some self-righteous prick looking to boost their self esteem by playing the power trip game won't give some lady her birth control. We're beyond that now. In what, less than a year? We've moved on to "you don't deserve vitamins or antibiotics because you're a slut" From The Stranger In Seattle:

Cedar River Clinics, a women's health and abortion provider with facilities in Renton, Tacoma, and Yakima, filed a complaint with the Washington State Department of Health this week alleging three instances where pharmacists raising moral objections refused to fill prescriptions for Cedar River clients. The complaint includes one incident at the Swedish Medical Center outpatient pharmacy in Seattle. According to the complaint, someone at the Swedish pharmacy said she was "morally unable" to fill a Cedar River patient's prescription for abortion-related antibiotics.

The complaint also includes an incident from November 2005 in Yakima, in which a pharmacist at a Safeway reportedly refused to fill a Cedar River patient's prescription for pregnancy-related vitamins. The pharmacist reportedly asked the customer why she had gone to Cedar River Clinics and then told the patient she "didn't need them if she wasn't pregnant."

You can read the whole story here.


I remember as a young drugnazi intern saying things like " Your pharmacist couldn't care less if you're getting a birth control prescription filled, as a matter of fact, I'll tell you exactly what he's thinking when he's filling it. 'Oh thank God, no counting on this one, just slap on a label and out the door'"

As a not-quite-as young drugnazi with a full fledged license, my first thought when I heard the incredible story of a pharmacist (who looking back I think was the evil Karen Brauer) who got fired from a K-mart for refusing to fill a birth control prescription was,"Where in the hell does that woman work that she has the TIME to pull a stunt like that?" Then I laughed at her stupidity and didn't give it another thought.

And now, with a gray hair or two popping up, It seems like the times are passing me by. Well fuck time. There will always be an island of sanity in the incoming tide of religious fascism sweeping the planet wherever the drugnazi is employed. A drugnazi.....protecting you from fascism.

Pharmacists For Life, Unless It's A Genocide

Regular readers of my little blog garden may remember how I mocked Kemi Olunloyo, a Georgia pharmacist who was planning a pharmacy-type radio talk show in Atlanta. I found the idea way lame, and couldn't resist the opportunity to be a smart-ass. It was all in good fun though, and Kemi herself even made an appearance here to put in her 2 cents. Point being, she was a good sport about the whole thing and more than likely is a decent person. Today however, you'll be introduced to a whole other level of evil in my profession. A pharmacist not to be mocked, but hated. And I don't mean the irony tinged way I've used that word to get a laugh when I'm talking about customers. I mean hated. Loathed. Despised. I know real hate is an ugly emotion not to be taken lightly, but read on for the tale of someone truly deserving of all the hate you can throw her way.

Meet Karen Brauer, President of the outfit "Pharmacists for Life." You may have seen Karen on Fox News, CBS, or CNN, read about her in the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Economist, the leading pharmacy trade magazine Drug Topics, or in your local paper that picked up a story quoting her from the AP and thought to yourself that this Pharmacists for Life outfit must be some big, powerful organization with a giant headquarters somewhere on K street, ready to deploy an army of lobbyists over to the halls of government power to get things done. Or you would think that they'd at least have an office. Think again. According to the group's 2003 IRS filing (most recent available) they raised and spent less than $30,000 and had no paid employees. (Information via Mediamatters.org) Even though that's not a lot of money as far as these advocacy groups go, I would think they would have at least been able to afford a copy of Microsoft Frontpage and/or someone who knows how to use the web-page building program to make a page that isn't...um...hideously fucking ugly, but evidently not, as you can see here. Just in case your eyeballs were starting to melt at the sight of such an incredibly poorly designed web page, or you just didn't feel like boosting this woman's ego by adding to her hit count totals, let me show you a couple highlights from their home page. This first one is her take on the news that an Indian tribe in South Dakota may open a Planned Parenthood clinic on it's reservation, thereby keeping some access for women in a state that just outlawed almost all abortions:



"Sioux tribe gonna scalp 'em own braves, don't need white man to exterminate self"



Well.....that certainly adds some sober, clear-eyed analysis to the debate on this issue, doesn't it?

Next we have this:










"Guv 'Slobodan' sends threatening enforcement letter to IL pharmacists, dictatorial grip tightens, demands they wear 'scarlet letter' showing they have a conscience"


I'll translate that bit of lunatic ranting for you. She's referring to Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who has signed an executive order in his state to ensure that women have access to emergency contraception. Blagojevich, as far is known, has yet to show up for work at the statehouse wearing military fatigues or that odd looking hat depicted on Brauer's website. She seems to be commenting on the governor being of Serbian origin. Evidently this is funny in the world of the Christian fascists.

So let me bring the theme so far into focus. The "Pharmacists For Life" choose to mock the victims of what might be the most successful attempted genocide in world history (estimates vary from 2 million to over 100 million Native Americans systematically killed), and to make light of one of the most recent genocides in world history. (only 8,000 dead, but hey, the hats were cooler). Lordy. With friends like this, life sure as hell doesn't need any enemies.

Don't take my word that Karen Brauer is evil though, take it from Karen Brauer. Here she is on the FAQ of her website, talking about pharmacists who refer patients to another pharmacy because they don't want to fill oral contraceptive/morning after prescriptions:

Material cooperation with such an evil can never be licit even if it may be lawful, as it is in today's society. In fact, pharmacists aware of the evil nature of such a scenario would have a duty as a pharmacist and a person not to cooperate in such an evil even under pain of serious adverse ramifications. Some authors, hiding their publicly stated support for any and all baby killing, have erroneously stated shameful opinions which equivocate on the rights of conscience and thus claim a pharmacist may have a right of conscience, but if all else fails, he must cooperate with the evil in our example. Such thinking shows the irrational absurdity and confusion in the minds of those who adhere to such ideas.

Wow. referring a patient to another store sure must make you evil in Brauer's mind, as the word is used 4 times in that paragraph. Now here she is on Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: I got you. Now, when the customer complained, what happened there? Did you refer that customer to somewhere else?

BRAUER: I asked -- I -- she did not complain to me. OK? What happened is, she came in for a refill. I informed her that we did not carry the drug at the time. And I offered to call a copy of her prescription to the pharmacy of her choice.

O'REILLY: And then she complained. But did you -- how -- why would she complain about that, if you didn't have the drug on hand?

BRAUER: Somehow she found out that this pharmacy actually did have the drug at the time.

O'REILLY: So you lied to her.

BRAUER: Yes, I did.

O'REILLY: Ohh. Well, that wasn't good.

BRAUER: The situation concerning her privacy and concerning the people present did not really -- it was not really amenable to giving her information about her drug.

Again:

And I offered to call a copy of her prescription to the pharmacy of her choice.

Thereby making you one evil bitch using your own criteria. Not to mention a liar. Oh, and someone who sees the deaths of millions of people as material for humor. Also a person the mainstream corporate media repeatedly seeks out for comment who gets her bullshit called not by CNN, but by someone calling themselves the Drugnazi. Up is down, black is white my friends. We live in scary times.

Drug Company Evilness, The Latest In A Continuing Series.

It may be impossible to top this one. I HOPE it's impossible to top this one. Today the Drugnazi will introduce you to Avastin, the latest breakthrough med from Genentech Corp. for cancer of the colon, lung and breast. I'll let The New York Times complete the introduction:

Doctors are excited about the prospect of Avastin, a drug already widely used for colon cancer, as a crucial new treatment for breast and lung cancer, too. But doctors are cringing at the price the maker, Genentech, plans to charge for it: about $100,000 a year.

That wasn't a typo. One Hundred Thousand Dollars a year. An amount of money less than 20% of all households in The United States earns. Enough to buy you a different Toyota Tacoma Prerunner to drive for every day of the week. Enough for me to take about a year long vacation. Too fucking much for a drug that means the difference between life and death.

I can hear the sorry corporate apologists chiming in now with their all too predictable defense of the very corporate entities that screw them regularly. It takes soooo much time and money to develop a breakthrough medicine they'll say, and the prices need to be so high to cover these costs. You hear them repeat that like a parrot every time someone has the bad manners to bring up the fact they are being ripped off by Big Pharma, and I'm sure there are plenty of people out there saying that about Avastin. Except in this case Genetech and it's majority owner, Roche, don't agree with them. back to the Times:

Until now, drug makers have typically defended high prices by noting the cost of developing new medicines. But executives at Genentech and its majority owner, Roche, are now using a separate argument — citing the inherent value of life-sustaining therapies.

If society wants the benefits, they say, it must be ready to spend more for treatments like Avastin and another of the company's cancer drugs, Herceptin, which sells for $40,000 a year.

"As we look at Avastin and Herceptin pricing, right now the health economics hold up, and therefore I don't see any reason to be touching them," said William M. Burns, the chief executive of Roche's pharmaceutical division and a member of Genentech's board. "The pressure on society to use strong and good products is there."

Translation? We're charging this much because we can. And if you don't like it, you can literally roll over and die.

Genentech made over $4,600,000 A DAY during the first quarter this year by the way. Up 48% from a year ago.

I'm an atheist, but you know, should I be wrong about the whole God thing, It'll be way cool to watch people like William M. Burns burn in hell.

read the whole Times article here if you'd like.