Pharmaceuticals and Profits

France is the world’s fifth-largest consumer of pharmaceuticals. The average French citizen has 47 medicine packs or prescription in their medical cabinet every year. The cost of those medicines is around 532 euros per person, which equates to 12 percent of the French Gross Domestic Product.

Two eminent French medical experts say half of the drugs sold in France are either useless or bad for patients’ health that they blame for up to 20,000 deaths annually. Even and Debre decided to conduct the study in the wake of the scandal, which haunted France's second largest pharmaceutical, Servier. The company falsified documents to get Mediator pill marketed as a diabetic drug although they were aware of its appetite-suppressant qualities. The drug was pulled off the shelves in 2009 by French health authorities amid concerns that it had fatal side-effects.

 They blame pressure from the pharmaceutical industry on government and doctors for forcing ineffective drugs on the market.

Professor Even accused the industry of having a get-rich-quick attitude to making medicines and said it was interested in chasing only easy profits. "They haven't discovered very much new for the last 30 years, but have multiplied production, using tricks and lies. Sadly, none of them is interested in making drugs for rare conditions or, say, for an infectious disease in countries with no money, because it's not a big market. Nor are they interested in developing drugs for conditions like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease because it too difficult and there's not money to be made quickly. It has become interested only in the immediate, in short term gains. On Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry is third after petrol and banking, and each year it increases by 20%. It's more profitable than mining for diamonds." 

Even told the Guardian that "The pharmaceutical industry is the most lucrative, the most cynical and the least ethical of all the industries. It is like an octopus with tentacles that has infiltrated all the decision making bodies, world health organisations, governments, parliaments, high administrations in health and hospitals and the medical profession.It has done this with the connivance, and occasionally the corruption of the medical profession. I am not just talking about medicines but the whole of medicine. It is the pharmaceutical industry that now outlines the entire medical landscape in our country."