FDA-Drug Industry Partnership Results
Re “How a New Policy Led to Seven Deadly Drugs,” by David Willman, Dec. 20:
After reading about the half-dozen dangerous prescription medications rushed to market with the complicity of a compromised Food and Drug Administration and the anticipated deaths that resulted, I wondered for about two seconds how this could be. Quite simply, because it is good business. The name of the game for the pharmaceutical companies is to get the drug out. If the release proves limited, for just a year or two, due to the inconvenient deaths of a significant number of patients, then in that time they can still make back their investment and score a very sizable profit, in the amount of $1 billion or $2 billion in worldwide sales. That does leave enough cash in the kitty to defend against lawsuits, to mount a positive ad campaign to counter negative publicity and to buy enough politicians to keep the FDA business-friendly.
This wretched situation will continue until legislation is passed to toughen the FDA’s conflict of interest standards and the ability of citizens harmed by these companies to obtain sizable damage awards in the courts. Under a Bush administration this won’t happen without a large and sustained movement to force the issue.
STEPHEN FINE
North Hollywood
* Regarding thalidomide, please let me add some information on the other side of the story. For those of us who have brain cancer for which there is no cure, some of our greatest hopes are agents such as thalidomide, endostatin and angiostatin, which are anti-angiogenesis agents. Due to 30 years of work by Judah Folkman, it has been shown that these agents starve tumors of their blood supply and have been shown to stop tumor growth on mice. Although still at best one or two years away for use on humans, we have much hope in this area.
I commend the FDA on its decision to allow the use of thalidomide.
TOM BISHOP
Placentia
* After reading your excellent article on drug approval, it is evident that the FDA is not just a partner with the pharmaceutical industry--rather it is a wholly owned subsidiary. The fact that one of the deadly drugs, Lotronex, was never sold in any other country says it all. Also, we no longer need to wonder why prices for prescription medicines are so much more expensive in this country than in any of the other industrialized countries.
TERRY L. MALONE
Anaheim
* Pardon me if I don’t share any enthusiasm for going back to the good old days of the FDA when it dragged its heels forever and hardly approved anything. The bureaucrats worry about deaths and disabilities caused by newly approved medicines because these are the only casualties that attract unfriendly attention their way. As individually unfortunate as these may be, however, they are insignificant alongside the legions of lives the FDA has truncated over its misbegotten existence by delaying approval of remedies that were both safe and effective.
If the FDA had been permitted to go its accustomed glacial way with the approvals of protease inhibitors, millions of AIDS patients now alive would be in the ground. They would occupy plots in graveyards already crowded with heart patients denied beta-blocker drugs for years by FDA foot-dragging after these life-saving compounds were in routine use in Europe.
DICK EAGLESON
Gardena
