On the MOVE! Long live John Africa. Thank you for your kind and generous invite for me to address you today. You, as students of medicine, will soon inherit one of the most revered titles in western life, not General, nor President, but Doctor, as those women and men entrusted with that high honor and serious possibility of protecting the public health. There is a threatening obstacle to you all, as well as your patients, the relentless greed of drug companies.
As we scan today’s headlines, the news flashes about the recent scandal involving the arthritis drug Vioxx. When news stories reveal that the Food and Drug Administration failed to protect the health, and indeed lives, of thousands of Americans, many of whom suffered heart attacks, strokes and even death as a result of Vioxx use, the question looms, where was the FDA? Where was the government?
It appears that the government, academia, and many physicians were bellying up to the cash window of many of the nation’s major pharmaceutical companies, and not protecting the health and welfare of the public. The answer lies in the offices of many of the members of Congress on Capitol Hill, where the interests of the wealthy drug companies takes precedence over the lives and health of Americans.
The answer also lies in the nation’s newspapers and on broadcast cable TV stations, not because of the news reporting, but because of massive direct-to-consumer advertising known as “DTC.” You’ve seen the ads. They are masterpieces of subliminal seduction; a rustic bucolic scene lit in soft sun-swept pastels, underscored by sweet violins and even a hip, funky bass line, occasionally. It draws you in and a confident voice seems to confide in you, “Having trouble sleeping?” Add any other ailment, it doesn’t matter, the soft, seductive voice suggests you tell your doctor about Viatrexx or some other new, improved super-drug.
Studies show that these ads are extremely effective, largely because viewers or readers assume – wrongly, as it turns out – that in order for such ads to appear, they had to have been cleared by the FDA or some other similar agency. While the FDA has an ad office called the Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising and Communication, it has steadily declined its enforcement of DTC guidelines since 1998. In the first half of that year, the FDA issued eighty-four notice of violation or warning letters. In the first half of 2001, they issued some thirty-eight such letters.
Indeed, there are no such regulations directly targeting DTC ads. And what exists are guidelines meant for doctors, not regulations meant to protect the public. Moreover, in the mad rush for more dough, drug companies simply create isomers, or chemical cousins, of profitable drugs so that they can create a new market, often with negligible or little true health benefits. To top that off, they often fund big university studies to skew research and provide misleading data to support their advertising campaigns.
In this repressive era when drugs are maligned and likened unto implements of the devil himself, prescription drugs which, as in the case of Vioxx, cause disease, dysfunction and death, cause little more than a few days of doldrums at the stock market. Thousands of people injured, narcotized into comas, heart attacks and death, for years, and the consequences are little more than an occasional traffic ticket
The high prices attached to prescription drugs are another scandal, one unlikely to be improved by the recent election, while drug courts claim this is due to the costs of research and development. Why is twice as much spent on marketing as on R and D legalized drugs are $25 billion per year. Industry DTC ads have almost tripled in the four years after 1996 to 2.5 billion alone in 2000 and efforts on the horizon, under the Bush regime, to deepen and broaden the reach of corporate drug kingpins in the area of schools and everyday American life. Can anyone question whether this administration is bought and sold by the corporations of the nation’s top 50 multinational. Dollars seven are pharmaceuticals. It’s time to wage a broad, deep, popular struggle against this drugging of the American people. It’s time to rein in those dangerous and misleading DTCs. It’s time to take the poisonous profit motive out of the leading pharm firms to treat people because they are people, not because they are wealthy.
From death row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal. I thank you members of the National Medical Student Association, again, for your kind invitation. Thanks. Dr Ricardo Alvarez, it is a rare honor to address you as I am not only a captive facing death, but an herbalist, a practitioner of what you’d like to call complementary medicine. So, health to you and all your patients to be. As young doctors in training you can help transform this scandalous state of affairs. I thank you. On a MOVE! Long live John Africa. To health. This is your brother from death row, Mumia Abu- Jamal.
These commentaries are produced by Noel Hanrahan for prison Radio.
