The Constant Gardener and Your Friends in the Pharmaceutical Industry
We went to see
The Constant Gardener with Colliculus's folks yesterday. Now, I'm up close and personal with the evils of the pharmaceutical industry every single day. (Yes, even weekends. Another story. Grr.) I'm not some blind defender of theirs. But I would like to speak up and explain why the storyline in that movie would not happen. Don't worry, I won't give anything away that you couldn't tell already. And it was a good movie, so you should go and see it.
1. Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in sweeping deaths from their clinical trials under the rug by doing their studies in poor, corrupt Third World countries. When their drugs kill people in clinical trials, it doesn't do them any good to just hide the data and then market the drug anyway. Even if nobody cares about poor Africans, when they market the drug, Americans and Europeans will die and then their relatives will sue them into bankruptcy and beyond. Look at Vioxx. Look at Tysabri, an MS drug which has only killed three or four people but it was more obvious than Vioxx what the problem was so that manufacturer got slammed a lot faster.
2. It's pretty hard to hide your clinical trials data in the first place, if you ever want to get approval. Most countries, including the U.S., require you to report data on everyone who has ever taken your study drug. Sure, maybe you could bribe officials in Kenya or wherever. But in order to be taken seriously, you have to do studies in many countries, with a lot of academic medical centers that have international standing and can't risk getting caught fudging the data. Nobody's going to approve your drug if you did all your trials in some kind of sketchy-ass open marketplace using paper cards and a giant mob of poor people. You also don't get to do all of your studies on people who have HIV.
Most of the other bad things they said or implied about drug companies are at least possible. They're definitely in bed with all kinds of politicians, all over the world. But I heard someone say as he was leaving the theater, "As if I wasn't depressed enough about what corporations get away with," and that's not really warranted. This isn't new territory. But maybe he was on a first date and needed something to say, or something.
That said, run out and see it . . .
The Constant Gardener!
