Pharmacists Convince Search Engines To Self-Censor

RogueShopper writes "The National Association of Boards of Pharmacists (NABP) has teamed up with Drugstore.com in a seemingly successful campaign to 'rid search engines of ads from rogue pharmacies.' Overture removed ranked ads at the request of MSN and Yahoo!, and AOL and Google complied, also. In an apparently selfless act Yahoo! also wiped out its entire directory tree for pharmacies. Meanwhile, anyone can cross the border, walk into a Mexican pharmacy and buy whatever they want. Big busines controlling content ... hmmm ... looks like it's getting closer to broadcast television. Thank god for DMOZ.org!" (Here's Google's cache of Yahoo!'s Pharmacies list).

Comments

Re:Changing markets, stale business

[ctr2sprt]

Drug companies spend tens of millions of dollars getting new drugs to market. If their investment isn't reimbursed, they'll just stop researching new drugs. The reason Americans pay so much for meds is precisely that nobody else does. Most other countries have government-provided healthcare, which means the gov't sets the prices it pays for meds. Those prices are usually orders of magnitude below levels that would allow drug companies to get their research investment back. So what they do is charge more in the United States, since they know we'll pay it. As a result, we face increasing health care costs across the board, and every year there are new cries for gov't controls of drug prices. Eventually we'll get it, drug companies will stop making money, and they'll get out of the business. Medical innovation will dry up, viruses will adapt to the existing medications, and we'll see epidemics.

Don't believe me? The flu shot problem, which some people are predicting will turn into an epidemic, is directly caused by price controls of flu shots. None of the flu shot makers were making any money off their product, so they got out of the game. That left only a handful of makers of the vaccine, and they can't keep up with the demand (and they can't keep up with new research: at least one new strain of the flu isn't vaccinated against in this year's shots). So people go without and the vaccine quality gets lower, and next year the problem will only be worse.

Sorry to go off on a bit of a rant here, but this is one of those cases where it really is important (in a life-threatening way) to protect intellectual property rights. It's probably not the best way, but until we've got another system in place to protect the drug companies who do the research, we can't cheat.

pharmaceutical companies spending

[falconwolf]

Yes, pharmaceutical companies do spend quite a bit on developing some drugs, but they don't spend a nickel on others. One case in point is Taxol, a drug from the Pacific Yew tree and developed by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The NCI gave the exclusive right to use all the data they had on Taxol, one of if not the largest selling cancer drug, to Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) for the measley price of supplying the NCI with $5 million of Taxol. The actual company that makes Taxol, as BMS doesn't make it themself, originally had a cost of $.25, a quarter, per milliliter but has dropped the production costs down. A generic producer has the price down to $.07. BMS then turns around and sales Taxol for more than $6 per milli, a markup of more than 2400% using the $.25 figure or more than 8570% using $.07. The total cost of a compleat treatment is more than $50,000. In 1996 BMS had world wide sales of Taxol at more than $800 million with 2000 sales at more than $1.592 billion. BMS stands to make several billions of dollars easily on Taxol in the next few years yet only had to provide not even 1% of that to the NCI in kind.

Why should the US taxpayers have to foot the bill for developing a life saving drug then turn around and spend so much for a drug their tax dollars paid for? Saying they don't pay it, that insurnace pays, won't work. Sure insurance will pay then raise their premium rates. And forget it if you don't have insurance.