| | | Modern pharma saves lives How much you make dealing for modern pharma? I'd bet your dream is a stable of Hollywood celebrities lined up at your door.
• Drug overdose is the leading cause of accidental death in the US, with 55,403 lethal drug overdoses in 2015. Opioid addiction is driving this epidemic, with 20,101 overdose deaths related to prescription pain relievers, and 12,990 overdose deaths related to heroin in 2015.5
• From 1999 to 2008, overdose death rates, sales and substance use disorder treatment admissions related to prescription pain relievers increased in parallel. The overdose death rate in 2008 was nearly four times the 1999 rate; sales of prescription pain relievers in 2010 were four times those in 1999; and the substance use disorder treatment admission rate in 2009 was six times the 1999 rate.6
• In 2012, 259 million prescriptions were written for opioids, which is more than enough to
give every American adult their own bottle of pills.7
• Four in five new heroin users started out misusing prescription painkillers.8
• 94% of respondents in a 2014 survey of people in treatment for opioid addiction said they
chose to use heroin because prescription opioids were “far more expensive and harder to obtain.”9
asam.org
alternet.org
But the money spent on DTC is just one small cog in Big Pharma's well-oiled marketing machine. Companies spend billions more on getting doctors to write prescriptions for their expensive brand-name drugs or devices for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration — a controversial practice called off-label marketing.
The darker side of pharma marketing involves creating clinical trials aimed at influencing doctors and educational courses to showcase expensive drugs for non-FDA-approved uses — even when there is no scientific proof of safety or efficacy.
Big Pharma has paid billions of dollars in criminal and civil settlements over the years because of marketing fraud that cost taxpayers billions and left others with debilitating medical conditions. For example, the Department of Justice accused Johnson & Johnson of spending billions to target children and the elderly for unapproved drug uses, exposing them to serious side effects, including death.
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