Big pharma

I noticed the unfortunate side effects of the massive promotion of OxyContin at reference 1. While the sort of stuff you often get in very small print inside your pill boxes is to be found at reference 2.

As it happens the Murdoch press - the people who do the Sun - published a story in the TLS in December which goes over similar ground, but this time the drug in question is called Ritalin from CIBA. Similar ground in that a drug invented for perfectly respectable, even noble motives, can have unexpected side effects. Side effects which can be amplified by the commercial interests involved. A story which was ostensibly a review of a book by one Alan Schwartz about the whole sorry business.

It seems that Ritalin and its relatives became the drug of choice for a children's complaint called ADHD, a complaint which has been around for a long time. Both Rousseau and Tolstoy appear to have had it, leading to an unfortunate association between ADHD and literary creativity, just as there has long been an unfortunate association between excessive consumption of booze and creativity generally.

But what we have now is a veritable pandemic, driven by drug companies playing on the fears of parents for their children, with one in seven children in the US being diagnosed with ADHD and a good proportion of those winding up on Ritalin. The drug company help things along by paying lots of medical people to puff the drug for them on the quiet, rather in the way that lots of articles in women's magazines are actually placed there by advertisers, rather than being written, as it would seem, by more or less even handed reporters. To be fair, they do now have to own up if they do this, but it is easy to miss the small print in which the owning up is done.

The image above, turned up by google, suggests that Ritalin is also being peddled as a cure for miscellaneous depression and fatigue.

PS: I believe the US is one of the few countries in the world where drug companies are allowed to advertise directly to potential customers. Maybe we have the right idea with NICE after all, even if they do make mistakes from time to time. See reference 3. Let's hope that they are not on Hunt's hit list, along with the rest of the NHS.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/somewhat-depressing.html.

Reference 2: http://app.purduepharma.com/xmlpublishing/pi.aspx?id=o.

Reference 3: https://www.nice.org.uk/.