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Affecting Your Health: Renowned MD Exposes Major Drug Company Cover-up


"So staggeringly profitable is the drug industry that in 2002 the combined profits for the top 10 drug companies in the Fortune 500 were greater than those of all the other 490 companies combined."
  -- Review of landmark book by Marcia Angell, MD in Boston Globe, 10/5/04

November 6, 2005
Dear friends,

As the former editor in chief of one of the world's most prestigious medical journals, The New England Journal of Medicine, Marcia Angell, M.D. is eminently qualified to expose disturbing secrets of the highly profitable pharmaceutical industry which affect your health. The esteemed Dr. Angell has now written a revealing book titled The Truth About the Drug Companies, which clearly depicts how greed and secrecy have compromised both your health and budget, and the health and budget of our nation and world. This landmark book received the following rave reviews:

Washington Post: "Always authoritative...[this book] delivers the message—that drug-company money and power is corrupting American medicine—in a convincing, no-nonsense manner."

Boston Globe: "A sober, clear-eyed attack on the excesses of drug company power...a lucid, persuasive, and highly important book."

New York Times: "A scorching indictment of drug companies and their research and business practices...tough, persuasive and troubling."

Providing the hard evidence backed up with hundreds of excellent footnotes and empowering suggestions on what we can do, Dr. Angell's book is a must read for all who care about the future of our health. Below are a few key quotes from a summary of this eye-opening book in the New York Review of Books:

"[In 2002] the combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together. Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself."

"The great majority of 'new' drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market. These are called 'me-too' drugs. The idea is to grab a share of an established, lucrative market by producing something very similar to a top-selling drug. As Dr. Sharon Levine, associate executive director of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, put it: 'If I'm a manufacturer and I can change one molecule and get another twenty years of patent rights, and convince physicians to prescribe and consumers to demand the next form of Prilosec just as my patent expires, then why would I be spending money on a lot less certain endeavor, which is looking for brand-new drugs?'"

"Of the 78 drugs approved by the FDA in 2002, only 17 contained new active ingredients, and only seven of these were classified by the FDA as improvements over older drugs. The other 71 drugs approved that year were variations of old drugs or deemed no better than drugs already on the market. In other words, they were me-too drugs."

"The Medicare prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003, and scheduled to go into effect in 2006, promises a windfall for big pharma since it forbids the government from negotiating prices. The immediate jump in pharmaceutical stock prices after the bill passed indicated that the industry and investors were well aware of the windfall."

"Drug companies have the largest lobby in Washington, and they give copiously to political campaigns. Legislators are now so beholden to the pharmaceutical industry that it will be exceedingly difficult to break its lock on them. But the one thing legislators need more than campaign contributions is votes. That is why citizens should know what is really going on. Contrary to the industry's public relations, they don't get what they pay for. The fact is that this industry is taking us for a ride, and there will be no real reform without an aroused and determined public to make it happen."

For a concise two-page review of Dr. Angell's The Truth About the Drug Companies, see https://www.WantToKnow.info/health/health-corruption  Or explore our information-packed ten-page summary at https://www.WantToKnow.info/truthaboutdrugcompanies which includes footnotes with links. For an abundance of other reliable resources on the health cover-up, visit our Health Information Center. If the facts in these documents were reported in headline news where they belong, caring citizens would be astounded and demand to know more. This has not happened, which is why we feel compelled to provide them here.

To understand more about the impact of all this, go to https://www.WantToKnow.info  The entire website is dedicated both to providing a concise, reliable introduction to incredibly important information that is being hidden from us, and to inspiring us to work together to strengthen democracy and to build a better world. You can help to build a brighter future now by educating yourself on these vital issues, and by forwarding this message to your friends and colleagues and asking them to do the same. Thank you for caring. Together we can and will build a better world for ourselves and our children.

With best wishes,
Fred Burks for WantToKnow.info
Former language interpreter for Presidents Bush and Clinton

WantToKnow.info is a group of dedicated researchers from around the world who compile and summarize important, verifiable facts and information being hidden from the public. You can reach us by visiting https://www.WantToKnow.info/contactus.php.

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Affecting Your Health: Renowned MD Marcia Angell Exposes Major Drug Company Cover-up