What is the Purpose of INSIDE PHARMA?
Answer: Learning and education for those who never want to be hoodwinked by Big Pharma ever again
What is the Purpose of INSIDE PHARMA?
This may seem like an odd question to start with, but it’s important, to me at least.
When I began this newsletter you are subscribed to, one key objective was to teach the general public the twisted modus operandi inside the pharmaceutical industry.
That was not my purpose however.
The purpose was and still is, to make sure the general public will never again be hoodwinked through lack of critical questioning, based on learning and education.
The myth that is penicillin has never been busted in schools and colleges or any other seat of learning. The nonsense idea that drugs get to market ‘accidently’, based on serendipity, allowed the Pfizer fraud Albert Bourla to claim his injections took a matter of months to develop, manufacture and distribute.
As Transcriber B elegantly terms it—they get to market on a magic carpet!
The magic carpet theory must be debunked. Subscribers can find the whole story here:
Returning to the modus operandi
As well as the penicillin story, systems of education must teach a counter narrative to the current modus operandi within the pharmaceutical industry. In 2015, I gave it a funny name and wrote an easy-to-read book describing it all. The title was:
Find It, File It, Flog It: Pharma’s Crippling Addiction and How to Cure It:
The image represents two scientists contemplating life with sun and sangria once that liquid in the flask becomes a blockbuster drug. They have no idea of the mountain that must be climbed to turn the liquid into a marketed product. After all, they are only research scientists who have never been outside a laboratory!
This is the review the book received from Kirkus Reviews, Amazons recommended reviewer:
Find It, File It, Flog It
PHARMA'S CRIPPLING ADDICTION AND HOW TO CURE IT
by Hedley Rees ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 3, 2015
A thoroughly researched and considered industry critique that includes substantive, visionary ideas for rehabilitation.
A searing indictment of “Big Pharma” offers specific recommendations for change.
British pharmaceutical industry consultant Rees (Supply Chain Management in the Drug Industry, 2011) takes aim at the fundamental manner in which drug companies do business in a book that calls for nothing less than a massive overhaul. Tracing big pharma’s emphasis on blockbuster drugs to an early 1980s marketing war between two stomach-ulcer drug brands, the author demonstrates that patents have continued to drive drug companies’ business strategies today.
Their approach, Rees writes, has “involved finding a promising patented compound (Find It), placing it into a development pipeline intended for regulatory approval to market (File It), and then marketing the approved product with the utmost verve and vigor (Flog It).”
The book delves into exactly how pharmaceutical companies operate (it is quite similar in Europe and the United States), exploring the inner workings of the industry via text and diagrams. One of the more remarkable aspects exposed is the fact that big pharma companies “have little or nothing to do with operations in the distribution network”; in fact, only three distributors in the United States control about 80 percent of the market. This, according to the author, is typical of big pharma: “Today, hardly anything hasn’t been outsourced to some extent.”
Of larger consequence is the fact that the failure rate in drug development remains so high: “For every 250 compounds that enter the development pipeline, 249 fail to reach their destinations.” Unfortunately, the solution to this pervasive malaise is “to adopt a totally different approach toward product development,” Rees writes. This is perhaps where the greatest strength of this deft volume emerges.
In addition to his own suggestions for change (including recommending that regulators require “companies to obtain licenses to develop drugs beyond the prototype phase” and “postmortems on all failed drugs to establish what went wrong”), the author makes extensive use of interviews he conducted with numerous professionals, offering their input as expert witness statements. This technique immediately legitimizes the author’s perspective and makes the book far more powerful than if it were written in his voice alone. This is not an empty diatribe—it is a necessary wake-up call for an industry apparently blinded by profit.
A thoroughly researched and considered industry critique that includes substantive, visionary ideas for rehabilitation.
A Little Present for Paid Subscribers
Much as I really appreciate free and paid subscribers, I would not be doing any of this work without paying subscribers. The cost is the lowest Substack allows you to go, which is $5 per month/$40 a year. In the early days, given the importance, I tried going lower and they said no. I understand many cannot afford even $5, but I hope to be sending enough free posts to keep them sufficiently updated.
The core of 120 subscribers that reward me is what keeps me going in a number of important ways, as mentioned previously. As my reward to you, you will find below a PDF file compiled and uploaded by Amazon Create Space (now KDP), which is the book manuscript.