February 2001
Editor's Notes
by Kristin McCahon
Quick! Name a friend or relative who takes a prescription drug. You probably laughed at the question. Where do you start in making such a list? Wouldn't it be quicker just to name the friends and relatives not taking a prescription for some ailment or other? From a short course of routine painkillers and antibiotics to longer-term doses of more complex anti-depressants, birth-control pills, hormone replacement therapies, cholesterol-reducing drugs, and cancer-fighting cocktails, almost all of us have had, or are taking, one prescription medication or another.
And think how remarkably our lives are improved because of those medications. More often than we'd care to admit, they literally make a life-and-death difference to us. On those occasions when their effect seems less, when we would have eventually recovered from an accident or illness without them, they help mitigate pain, fight infection, and enable us to continue being net contributors to society.
Despite the beating the pharmaceutical industry often takes in popular literature (most recently from John LeCarré in The Constant Gardener), most of us rely on, and are grateful for, the little green, or little blue, or little pink footballs we ingest from time to time.
Does this mean that drug companies are uninterested in profits, and are in business just to make our lives better and win our gratitude? Obviously, no. Drug developers and manufacturers are in business to make money. They are doing so by providing something that you and I need—sometimes desperately. That our need translates into their profit sounds mercenary, but there is another side to this coin. Drug companies take part of the profits from our purchase of their products and plough that money back into more research and development. Some years later, thanks to this investment, a new drug emerges that helps us in a better or different way than before.
It is easy to slam what we may see as "obscene" profits from any industry, and particularly an industry that appears to benefit from our suffering. But our relationship with the drug industry is complex, as the articles in this issue of Fraser Forum reveal. We would be wise to understand more about it before condemning it.
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