Lilly just did the same thing with Cymbalta in the same week.  This, just as my brother was prescribed it, hoping for the generic to be released soon. $250 a month, out of pocket, or staying depressed and listless and in pain?

He chose the latter, and it sucks.

(Also, it wouldn’t hurt for Big Pharma to buy stock in Big Prison, either.)

 The problem isn’t that research and development costs a lot so much as, the drug companies spend twice as much on marketing as they do on R&D.  And then they bribe US legislators to make it illegal for Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices (which would fix Medicare’s budget issues all by itself).

Also, the original US copyright was some 20 years plus one extension. And the author (it was only about books back then) had to register. In Europe however there was the Bern convention that merged the various national copyrights, most of them variants of the French but also included the British that the US was based on, and gave rise to life+50 (later 70). This largely due to the French, as they wanted to cover more than simply the economic rights that the UK/US covered. The French included the social aspects, like how a third parties use of a work may color the social standing of the author. So they set a long period to allow a author to nix any use, like say political, that he did not agree with.

Note btw that USA only really signed on to the Bern convention in the 1980s. And was only really ratified recently. And that was why there was this hoopla about works originally published in Europe being taken out of the US public domain.

Meh, they are the same companies. They just wrap themselves in whatever flag is convenient for what they hope to achieve.

Ultimately it’s because each drug that comes to market cots millions to get on to a shelf, researching/making drugs is an expensive business.

If we relied on our governments to pay for it then it would just be one more thing to cut in favour of the military budget.

I’d like our governments to have better control over pharmaceutical companies, but you only have to look at the NHS I. The UK and their hideously crippled budget to see why making it a public industry is a flawed idea.

Perhaps the doctors in your country can prescribe anything “off label”. The ones in my country mostly can’t (and are you sure birth control pills for PMS is “off label”?). Or well… I’m not a doc, so I don’t know exactly what the rules are, but I have at least got a couple of times the “well… this medicine could help, but it is not approved for use in x, so I cannot prescribe it”, and yes, once the “x” was “for children under the age of…”.

As far as I have understood, the problem is that very few medicines are tested on children (or women, for that matter, as it is easier to test on men as they don’t have that monthly varying whacky hormone thingy… again, if I have understood correctly). One reason is the reaction shown above “OMG… they are testing it on _children_!!!!!”… and that doing tests on all the different demographics (age & sex) costs a lot. So, if it is enough to do a study on population X, why do it also on Y and Z? But kids will still need to use the drug, so… um… just hope that it won’t have any surprises?

To my understanding, patents, like copyrights, in the U.S. are more than mere monopolies. They’re supposed to incentivize innovation.

100 mg of meperidine kills the pain; 1,000 mg of meperidine kills the patient. Extrapolate.

Perhaps if you didn’t go in looking for ways to view it as “bottom feeding leeches” you’d find they aren’t necessarily. Big Pharma is an easy target for the uncritical eye – their products are expensive, they protect them with patents, and people need them – they *must* be bad, right? Well, let’s look at this a bit more.

Safe drug development is both time consuming and expensive. Running multiple phases of clinical trials across a large population is not trivial, it is not cheap, and it is not quick. There are huge numbers of people involved, from scientists, doctors, statisticians, etc – and that doesn’t even get into the patient populations! It’s complex – you have to control for sometimes massive variability and outside factors, and despite all of the unknowns, still do your best to treat patients, gather data, and keep them alive. And ultimately, the drug may not work, either due to lack of efficacy, side effects, or interactions, and this is frequently discovered very late in trials, after enormous sums of money have been spent.

So – you have a process that requires large numbers of extremely skilled people, long time horizons, and a large amount of capital – and commonly fails. A company may have dozens of drugs in the pipeline and none of them pan out. When they do come across one that does work, they use the profit from that to fund all the ones that don’t. I’m sure many people get rich in the process, but that process results in massive advancements in drugs, therapies, and research, all of which becomes public domain in *very* short order compared to any other industry. Look at the drug therapies today and compare them to 40 years ago – the advancement is utterly astounding.

People fail to realize just how expensive drug development is, and how often it fails. Either that or it’s just another inconvenient truth.

If IP law (and pharma law) were more intelligently written, drug companies might have motivation to do these studies earlier, and *help patients* earlier.  That this is being done now *as a patent extension measure* is exactly what *makes* this an IP talking point.

(For a start, it’s an argument against extending patents.  If patents were five years longer, under the current rules… Purdue wouldn’t be bothering to see if they can treat children until 2017.)

In other words, the skeezy behavior around IP and the continuation of poor pain control are both results of drug company greed.

“ it’s one of the few kinds of medicine where it’s EXTREMELY easy to titrate doses up/down based on body weight.  They also generally are not affected  by hormones and other meds.”  

Very very very unscientific method, if you ask me.  

Secondly, painkillers are a crap example here RE ped testing because in fact it’s one of the few kinds of medicine where it’s EXTREMELY easy to titrate doses up/down based on body weight.  They also generally are not affected  by hormones and other meds.  ESPECIALLY brute-force opiates like Oxy.  Anything from the poppy is very very flexible on dosing (due to various respiratory and structural damage I have a lifetime of experience with codeine cough suppressants–first life-threatening cough and infection was at 11 months).

This is just a naked grab for a patent extension for no good reason. 

If this were Apple I wouldn’t be as outraged. Not life-dependent or quality elevating medication. Pharmacudicals and other areas of medicine need to be treated differently because people depend on these things either to live, or to have a quality of living that makes being productive, or even just keeping from blowing your brains out either from the physical pain or the mental torment.

That is why I feel strongly about this. These people are profiteering off the suffering of others. They are not, in my eyes, allowed to look luxery goods as an example to follow.\

And At this point they would have to do an industry wide shakedown of Everything and rebuild from scratch then show off that they are a different industry that I will not see headlines that have anything to do with pharma and think by default they are bottom feeding leeches.