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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
 Posted - 01/04/2004 : 00:11:47
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Often, when action by the Food and Drug Administration, or the Federal Trade Commission, negatively effects sales of "natural" products - like vitamins, minerals, or herbs - one can find proponents of such products claiming that the FDA (or FTC) is feeling pressure from the pharmaceutical corporations to put an end to the "competition." The claim is that the big drug companies cannot make money on a product without a patent, and since you can't patent herbs or supplements, these pharmaceutical giants throw their weight around to get them banned, in order to sell the public their drugs.
For example, the owner of a store called "All Pro Nutrition LLC" is quoted in this story about the banning of ephedra as saying,quote:
They (pharmaceutical companies) are losing a little piece of the pie. If they can't patent it, they can't make money...
Let's try to put this myth to bed. The economics of the situation are fairly simple. Any public company's primary motivation, in a captialist society, is to make money for itself and its shareholders. Most drug comapnies are no different, in this respect, from any other type of corporation. (While a lot of people expect pharmaceutical giants to be altruistic and give their products away, that is a subject for a different thread.) Companies which regularly lose money eventually go out of business.
Drug companies are not, by any means, forced to manufacture only prescription drugs. There doesn't seem to be any law which says that Lilly (for example) is prohibited from also making and selling detergent ("Make sure your whites are Lilly white!" come to mind as a slogan, but I digress). So, they could be making automobile tires, or shower curtains, or jumper cables, but why would they? What they've got is the technical experise and machinery for making pills. They've got the legal and regulatory knowledge for selling products which are aimed at being ingested by consumers.
Thus, it seems only natural that a pharmaceutical company would see the growing customer base for vitamin, mineral and herbal supplements, and say to itself, "Those people don't want our expensive prescription drugs, and we've got all this know-how for selling them pills. Let's crush some herbs, stuff 'em into capsules, and increase our market." They've done that, and they also sell other non-patentable products.
Take GlaxoSmithKline, for example. Their prescription medications include Augmentin, Avandia, Dexedrine, Flonase, Imitrex, Paxil, Tagamet, Valtrex and Wellbutrin. However, their non-prescription trademarks include Abtei ("the market-leading range of vitamins, minerals and herbal supplements in Germany"), Alluna (herbal sleep aid), Eno (a product invented in the 1850's and therefore well beyond patent), Horlicks ("The Great Family Nourisher"), Lucozade ("one of the world's best-known energy drinks"), Os-Cal (calcium supplements), and Scott's Emulsion (cod-liver oil).
Wyeth makes a large line of prescription drugs, including Effexor and Premarin, but also sells Advil, Centrum vitamins, Chap Stick, Preparation H and Robitussin, to name just a few.
Besides its aspirin, Alka-Seltzer, and One-a-Day vitamins, Bayer also makes and sells a variety of pharmaceuticals.
Abbott Laboratories makes a http://abbott.com/corporate/
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- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
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