Pharmadrama

Five percent of the world’s population, the United States, consumes 50% of the world’s pharmaceuticals. This insane faith in prescription and over-the-counter remedies is compounded now that originator drugs developed at Western labs are being replaced by generics. In fact, independent pharmacies can’t afford to stock name brands because 8 in 10 prescriptions filled in the US are generic. Why?

When an originator drug comes off patent 20 years after invention, the usual suspects pounce at the chance of manufacturing it, 80-85% cheaper.

Today, 43% of generic prescription drugs are made in China and 39% in India, not quite paragons of sanitation, safety, efficiency, or transparency. Only 13% of the generics are made in the USA and 5% elsewhere.

Subterfuge and obfuscation are the pillars of a $425-billion annual sales industry in the US alone. The fact that prescription meds, generic or brand name, are dispensed in a bottle with a few warning labels and no additional information about ingredients, safety testing, or where it was compounded takes a more sinister aspect when they may originate in countries were one wouldn’t eat soup or salad.

“Facts About Generic Drugs” at the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) website defends their safery and effectiveness. But how likely is China to comply with alien FDA directives, which incidentally, allow for certain variability (up to 40%!) between originator and generic drugs. Inactive ingredients, by the way, need not be the same, so let your imagination run wild.

“Poorly Made in China” (highly recommended book by Paul Midler) reveals that in order to gobble up the global market for everything, China meets manufacturing and ingredient standards fastidiously at first, gradually lowering quality to increase profits and doing as they damn well please, as is their wont. Lying is not “lying” in China.

FDA product testing of small batches from vast quantities are inconclusive. More’s the pity when under the agency’s oversight drugs (Baycol, Vioxx, Seldane, PPA, list goes on) manufactured in cutting-edge Western labs made it to the market with tragic consequences for consumers.

Pharma companies have no scruples. They experimented on WWII prisoners just as they do today on 115.3 million sentient subjects worldwide (Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics). In US labs alone, 100,000 primates like you and me suffer invasive, repetitive tests that amount to torture. Billions of US taxpayer’s dollars fund such attrocities (White Coat Waste Movement).

Medical testing on sentient animals is unethical and unacceptable ... unless they are human volunteers paid for their dangerous services. This belief is not widespread, but it is quintesentially Western. In the Orient anything goes, which attracts contract research and drug manufacturing from the USA, Canada, and Western Europe: Lower production cost; fewer animal rights complications.

Fewer to none, because China doesn’t even have the pretense of an “Animal Welfare Act” to ignore -- like medical researchers do in the USA. Ironically, the new powerhouse of generic drugs largely relies on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), ancient quackery using body parts and fluids of thousands of animal species, and in such high demand that rhinos, tigers, pangolins and many others are being pushed to extinction.

Nothing better than Moon Bear bile illustrates the Oriental mindset. Some 12,000 bears imprisoned in filthy farms are‘milked’ twice a day through a metal tube inserted into the gall bladder. Individual bears lay prone, encased in a cage too small to stand, for 5-10 years; one survived 21 years in such hell. Meet your Chinese pharmacist.

And so, the Orient prospers at the expense of the weakening West; international pharma firms prosper at the expense of the sick and gullible; animals suffer and die by the millions in ineffective toxicology tests; and the human herd ingests ever larger quantities of increasingly affordable meds whether they need them or not.  I am concerned.