Culture for Dollars, Part 2: The Pharmaceutical Industry

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The drugs we take are manufactured to relieve symptoms, not cure or solve underlying causes. To increase profits, drug manufacturers engineer drugs to create habitual usage which can lead to dependency. If the true intentions of pharmaceutical companies was to help us, they would create drugs that only need be taken a few times, or even once, to cure the cause of illness. The absurdly long lists of side effects that accompany most drug commercials are also of great concern. A causal chain of side effects keeps drug users in a perpetual state of ingesting new compounds to relieve new side effects. A great example of this causal relationship can be seen with the advent of morphine as a "cure" for opium and alcohol addiction. Alcoholics and opium addicts subsequently became dependent on morphine. Heroin was then isolated from morphine, which was regarded as a "safe" cure for morphine addiction. Users then became addicted to heroin, and in response, Rx companies synthesized methadone which is still widely used today. In many cases, those taking methadone for heroin addiction become addicted to the synthetic opioid due to the physical dependency it causes. One can only assume a "cure" for methadone addiction will soon be synthesized.

This causal relationship is also related to our food industry. Unhealthy food is what is subsidized by our government because it is what creates cheap food, aka fast food, which is consumed by a majority of our country. Detrimental effects to our health as a result of highly processed food creates a need to purchase health supplements and other drugs created by pharmaceutical companies; a chain of profit is thus established. If the food that was made cheap and convenient for Americans was healthy, various health issues would be avoided altogether and buying drugs to combat the defects would no longer be relevant. Examples of these medications include cholesterol-lowering drugs such as Mevacor, Lipitor, Zocor, Pravachol, Lescol, and Crestor; all six of which are simple variations of the first drug and accomplish the same tasks. This points out another issue with Rx companies: do they create new drugs to be innovative and help the masses, or to make more money? One must question the true intentions of the pharmaceutical industry and the drugs they synthesize.

Read more:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/jul/15/the-truth-about-the-drug-companies/
http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/01/24/what-dont-we-know-about-the-pharmaceutical-industry-a-freakonomics-quorum/