The pharmaceutical industry is a billion-dollar industry many times over. In a recent article from S/P writer John Glynn called “Big Pharma: Big Brother’s Heavily Medicated Cousin“, the author describes the industry thus:
“Big Pharma has come to represent something dishonest, malevolent, and thoroughly distasteful. An enigmatic entity consisting of corporations, regulators, politicians, and a growing number of physicians, Big Pharma has a vice like grip on western culture, shadowing us all like an ominous cloud.”
The Biggest of the Big Pharma Companies
The issue is always going to come down to money. Not just the bottom line, but the feeling that Big Pharma companies will do anything for a buck. Stories of how certain drugs have side effects worse than the ailment they are supposed to correct, or how industry giants are somehow sitting on cures just to push the alternative that surely will make more money.
Certainly the industry is shrouded in mystery, and we, its otherwise ignorant consumer, end up having no choice sometimes but to buy into it, literally and figuratively.
