8 Examples to Show How Big Pharma Cares More about Profits than People

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Paul A. Philips, Guest

Waking Times

From time to time, the alternative health media publishes an article serving as a scathing exposé, revealing some of Big Pharma’s dirty tricks used to maintain or increase its profit margin. Quite simply, each and every exposé shows capitalism at its ugliest. As a consequence, patients affected may end up broke, permanently sick, sicker, or even dead. How low will Big Pharma stoop in its lust for profits?

-As an insight, and with a view towards protecting yourself, not becoming a victim of corporate greed, here are 8 examples to show how Big Pharma cares more about profits than people.

1. Protecting self-interests

Irrespective of high efficacy, the selling of cheap, natural, non-toxic alternative remedies are regarded by Big Pharma as a threat to their profit margins. With help from the authoritative muscle of the FDA and the DEA, Big Pharma makes sure that a number of these alternative remedies are criminalized to protect their self-interests.

For instance, take the recent case of kratom, a non-addictive plant that has helped many addicts wean off their opioid drug addiction. In spite of this and the burgeoning Big Pharma opioid painkiller drug addiction epidemic, there has been an out-and-out attempt to criminalize kratom.

How low can it get? Not satisfied with making obscene profits on an addictive drug, Big Pharma also tries to prevent addicts from weaning off their addiction by making this natural remedy illegal and thus unavailable.

Further, kratom has also been given an unsubstantiated and inaccurately bad press through the FDA issuing false warnings. These false warnings need to be rescinded.

2. Pushing addiction

Not just opioids, there have been other cases of pushing addiction for bigger profits. Sometimes in the most dastardly ways:

Mylan Pharmaceuticals had secured the patency to their product EpiPen, an anti-allergy pen-type dispenser. They then started giving it away for free at schools. Dependency on this treatment grew at the schools because of its addictive nature. In the meantime, through successful lobbying, Mylan managed to get the “EpiPen Law” introduced (aka the “Emergency Epinephrine Act”), enabling the company to make these epinephrine dispensers permanently available at schools.

As more and more became addictive in the schools, the company then went from giving the treatment away for free to hiking the price up to hundreds and hundreds of dollars.