Did you know that
Once booming companies are now seeking mergers commensurate with the Wall Street aphorism that in boom times companies spin off and in bust times they merge.
I thought it was the opposite.
Did you know that
The fact is the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were a cash cow to Big Pharma with one in six troops on its drugs. A veritable pharma battlefield was created with troops marching on SSRIs, benzos like Xanax, anti-seizure drugs, anti-psychotics, pain pills and sleeping pills and receiving more of the same for PTSD. Prescriptions for Seroquel (an anti-psychotic which also has a black box warning) went up 700 percent and the SSRI antidepressant Paxil was the drug of choice during the Iraq war.
The military press itself reported on the overmedication and likelihood it was correlated with suicide. Military Times observed that the graphs of increased suicides in the military and increased drug prescriptions would fit exactly over each other. No wars before the Iraq and Afghanistan wars lost more troops to suicide than to combat--probably because the wars occurred before SSRIs.
It is often said that the presiding precept in medicine should be "first do no harm." The warning certainly applies to Pharma as it unethically tries to navigate its lean times.
So now Big Pharma has to create more medical crises.
3 Sneaky, Dangerous New Ways Pharma Is Churning Profits
For many years, consumer drug advertising made Big Pharma Fortune 500's "most profitable industry. But now, the profit party is largely over, with blockbusters like Prozac, Lipitor, Viagra, Zyprexa, Symbicort and Nexium off patent and nothing much in the pipelines.
I had noticed a lull on drug ads (especially on ABC TV) , but have recently seen an uptic.
Makes me wonder if it is correlating with the recent sending of 600 troops to Iraq, but I'm probably way ahead of others on this pondering.
Happy 4th!