According to a recent news article, Big Pharma spends almost double the amount on advertising as on research and development. Of the $235.4 billion domestic sales income in 2004, 24.4% went to promotion, and a mere 13.4% went to research and development. Nevertheless, they keep coming up with more drugs - many of which require drug detox and, in some cases even drug rehab, to quit.

How do they manage to keep new drugs coming at us like bullets from a machine gun while keeping R & D costs down? Truth be told, they usually just make minor alterations - not even improvements - in the old ones.

But why would they want to do that? It seems like such a waste of money.

According to Marcia Angell, former New England Journal of Medicine Editor-in-Chief, now Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and author of The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It, "The great majority of "new" drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market. These are called "me-too" drugs. The idea is to grab a share of an established, lucrative market by producing something very similar to a top-selling drug. For instance, we now have six statins (Mevacor, Lipitor, Zocor, Pravachol, Lescol, and the newest, Crestor) on the market to lower cholesterol, all variants of the first."

Statins - drugs commonly used to control cholesterol - aren’t among the list of drugs that require drug detox, but many other types of drugs are. Painkillers like OxyContin, morphine and methadone, for example, often require a medical drug detox for withdrawal. The same is true for many of the 176 different antidepressants, antipsychotics and antianxiety medications.

Dr. Angell also quotes Dr. Sharon Levine, associate executive director of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group: "If I'm a manufacturer and I can change one molecule and get another twenty years of patent rights, and convince physicians to prescribe and consumers to demand the next form of Prilosec, or weekly Prozac instead of daily Prozac, just as my patent expires, then why would I be spending money on a lot less certain endeavor, which is looking for brand-new drugs?"

Why, indeed? Perhaps Big Pharma is trying to keep the R & D costs down so the companies can afford to pay settlements to the families of those who have died taking their drugs. Or perhaps they’re using it to re-pay the Federal or State governments for the money spent taking care of people who landed in hospital emergency wards, morgues or in drug detox or drug rehab centers when they overdosed, became addicted, or dependent.

No doubt the ethics of Big Pharma as a whole is in question. And the American public is paying for it: Millions of ruined lives, exorbitant health care costs, well-intentioned doctors actually going out of business because of the high cost of malpractice insurance.

Drugs are ruining our lives, our health, and our health care system. To really handle the problem, we have to stop taking unnecessary drugs. We have to get those who are taking drugs that may be addictive or cause dependency into a drug detox program that can help them get off them, we need to educate others on their dangers, and find other solutions.