The pharmaceutical industry, like any other business, is charged with protecting its interests, frequently at the peril of both members and customers alike. It’s no secret that once big business like this reaches a certain size, the influence can be quite far-reaching, oftentimes with negative effects. Unfortunately, corruption can be found throughout the long arms of individual pharmaceutical companies and extending to the industry as a whole, influencing doctors and at the highest levels, government agencies and other policy-makers as well.
In recent years, the problem appears to be largely two-fold, affecting not only the international political climate, but also contributing to the dark world of addiction.
Changing a Political Landscape
In a recent report entitled Corruption in the Pharmaceutical Sector compiled by the watchdog group Transparency International, big pharma’s financial muscle allowed it to spend millions every year on political lobbying: “Pharmaceutical companies can unduly influence national political systems through their large spending power. They often fund candidates that support their position on key issues.”
Although some industry associations, such as the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) have previously insisted they are “educating” not advocating, the aforementioned report insisted that “Such funding can shape policy debates to favor a pharmaceutical company’s profit maximization and negatively impact public health objectives” (The Independent).
It’s not just about individual politicians, however. Various laws and regulatory control have been circumvented, and the pharmaceutical industry has been accused many times over. Bribery and corruption, the study says, also allow some companies to get around manufacturing regulations. For example, one study found that 94 percent of industry-funded clinical trials of antidepressants was written up to suggest positive results, but when the US Food and Drug Administration re-examined the same studies, it found only 51 percent had genuinely positive outcomes.
Additionally, in countries lacking good governance, bribery and corruption could also be used to get around medicine manufacturing standards, according to The Independent.
Much of the problem is the huge power of the pharmaceutical industry in a world where the global spend on medicines is expected to grow to $1.3 trillion by 2018.
The Addiction Affect
Proof of corruption may also show in the form of a massive increase in patient dependence and addiction upon certain medications like opioids including the powerful drug OxyContin, which in recent years have skyrocketed. Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC, and his colleague Dr. Debra Houry wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine in April of this year that they “know of no other medication routinely used for a nonfatal condition that kills patients so frequently.”
Since 1999, three years after OxyContin was unveiled by Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the rate of drug overdoses in the U.S. has quadrupled, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Nearly half a million people have died, a number driven mainly by prescription opioid overdoses. In 2014 alone, more people died in the U.S. from drug overdoses than in any year on record at the agency, and at least half of those deaths were caused by prescription opioids (Harvard Business Review).
But why? The answer is rather simple: the amount of prescription opioids sold by pharmaceutical companies has quadrupled, despite no proliferation in the amount of reported pain. Could doctors be prescribing these painkillers in excess and are pharmaceutical sales reps enjoying the benefits of exceeding their sales targets?
Sales positions can be incentivized by activities like calls on doctors and meeting regional sales targets. These incentives, when combined with the strategy of developing and maximizing the rapid and widespread use of OxyContin, an old drug with a new longer-acting dose, helped catalyze a massive uptick in doctors prescribing the drug as well as others with pain-alleviating effects.
The opioid epidemic is an extreme example of how development and marketing incentives drove sales, but ultimately raised the risk of potential addiction, overdose and death. “Successful” from a financial standpoint was not necessarily aligned with public health, to say the least, according to the Harvard Business Review.
The opioid story might have been different if bonuses incentivized value instead of volume and sales reps looking for pharmaceutical sales jobs will have the increased burden of proving this in the coming years.
Going Forward
As stated in the Harvard Business Review, the tragedy from the overall success of OxyContin — and other prescription opioids that followed — highlights the fact that pharmaceutical companies will need to change in order to rebuild their trust with society. Aligning pay to a larger public health goal might just deliver that, or at least be a good first step. Pharmaceutical sales reps that are cognizant of this fact should search for pharmaceutical sales jobs with companies that are actively seeking to change the current landscape of corruption that is afflicting the pharmaceutical industry.
