Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Your money or your life!
This famous command of highwaymen throughout the English speaking world has now been adopted by certain companies in the pharmaceutical resale field.
A new trend in pharmaceutical sales has raised concerns over ethics and patient safety, as companies buy up critical cancer drugs in short supply and attempt to resell them at huge markups.Once again the private sector proves to be more effective, at making profits where none are deserved that is.
Rather than operate by the dark of night on street corners, these drug dealers work in broad daylight using fax, phone and email to deluge hospitals with offers.
Experts say the so-called “gray market” is not illegal and could even be poised to surge further after President Barack Obama issued an executive order that tried to fix the problem, but may have just opened a larger loophole.
“These are a number of very small firms that have popped up out of nowhere. Most of them are relatively new,” said Thomas Smith, director of palliative medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.
“It happens in every other market, we just don’t expect it to happen in pharmaceuticals for cancer treatment,” he told AFP.
More than half (56 percent) of the 549 hospitals surveyed by the non-profit Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) earlier this year said they received daily solicitations from gray market vendors “to purchase medications no longer available through the manufacturer or usual wholesaler.”
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