So taxpayers are subsidizing Big Pharma's TV advertising

[jberryhill]

61. "I come from an era"

I'm not sure when you were young, but I'm closer to 60 than 50, so I'm not sure where all that is coming from.

Bayer, Sandoz, Merck, Wyeth, Upjohn, Abbot, Lilly, Glaxo, Smith Kline and a host of others since merged (including several of these), were always extremely profitable companies. I have utterly no idea where you could have gotten the impression that they were ever anything but highly profitable. While there has always been government-funded research, these companies have always had large research departments and made enormous profits on the exclusive rights obtained on their patented medications.

This tale you are spinning, on some odd notion that I'm a youngster, is simply not true. They have had aggressive marketing programs for a very long time, and certainly going back to the 1950's.

HUGELY profitable drugs were exclusively marketed by pharma companies during any time you have credibly been alive.

Thalidomide is one of the greatest examples of pharma greed over safety - and that was in the 1960's - by its exclusive US marketer, Smith Kline.

And who can forget the only drug ever advertised by the Rolling Stones - "Mother's Little Helper":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meprobamate

In May 1950, after moving to Carter Products in New Jersey, Berger and a chemist, Bernard John Ludwig, synthesized a chemically related tranquilizing compound, meprobamate, that was able to overcome these three drawbacks.[3] Wallace Laboratories, a subsidiary of Carter Products, bought the license and named their new product "Miltown" after the borough of Milltown, New Jersey. Launched in 1955, it rapidly became the first blockbuster psychotropic drug in American history, becoming popular in Hollywood and gaining notoriety for its seemingly miraculous effects.

You must not have grown up in this country, because pharma companies touting regular new "wonder drugs" (Haldol being another good example) have been a regular feature of the US medical industry since well before WWII.

So, I'm not sure about what "era" you come from. But in my era, G.D. Searle made a mint in the 1960's by introducing this:



It was hugely profitable.