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Consumer spending on drugs and medication have increased by a whopping 2,306 percent in Canada over the past 33 years – yet there exists little evidence to show that this has improved health and longevity. In fact, such spending is grossly misguided and has worked to serve the pharmaceutical industry more than the health of citizens. So says Dr. Jean-Claude St-Onge, a CEGEP professor who is the author of two books on the abuses of the industry.
“The equation that more drugs equals better health and longevity does not hold water,” Dr. St-Onge said at a recent Citizens in Action Montreal conference. “You pop a lot [of pills], and you pay a lot.”
Speaking to a crowd of students and concerned citizens at Concordia University, St-Onge elaborated on the findings described in his works The Other side of the Pill: The Hidden Face of the Pharmaceutical Industry, and the more recent follow-up in French, Les derives de l’industrie de la sante, released just over a year ago.
Pushing the frontiers
Having become the most profitable industry in the 1990s, pharmaceuticals have in fact worked to redefine “the frontiers separating health and sickness” to suit their purposes, St-Onge asserted, “such that normal events of life have become new sicknesses or illnesses. Rare conditions are transformed literally into epidemics and we easily jump from what is a difficulty, to a dysfunction, to an illness or a sickness.
“There are conditions that are a part of the human condition that have become medicalized.” These include drugs created to combat depression and social anxiety. “Shyness has been redefined as social anxiety disorder,” St-Onge elaborated. “And now it’s considered a mental illness.”
The drugs industry has created products for these newly-defined illnesses that have sold very successfully in recent years. “In Canada, for instance, between ’98 and 2002, the consumption of ant-depressants amongst 6 to 12 year-olds has gone up 142 percent,” said St-Onge, citing figures from medical research studies.
Suppression of results is typical of the industry, he asserted: “In fact almost half of studies in clinical trials are suppressed by the industry.” Social anxiety disorder, so defined by the Glaxo-Smith-Kline (GSK) Inc., he reported, can now be combated with that pharmaceutical company’s very own creation, Paxil. Even though the drug is routinely prescribed by doctors and sells well, the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) has not found proof of its effectiveness in clinical trials to be convincing. Moreover, Paxil studies by GSK were “suppressed” by the company, St-Onge explained: “The CMAJ got its hands on the study. And there were internal documents by GSK saying to personnel to never publish those studies, because it’s only going to undermine Paxil.”
Mass consumption
Some 43 percent of drugs sold in the world are consumed in the United States, St-Onge stated. Despite this, compared to other countries, health indicators in the U.S. are hardly any better than other Western countries. “In spite of the fact that the U.S. consumes more than twice as many drugs as Great Britain, longevity is longer in Great Britain and mortality is lower,” explained St-Onge.
In the province of Quebec, some $5.5 billion are spent yearly on medication and drugs. Much of this is unnecessary, the professor asserted, countering that the costs of poverty to the healthcare system are greater. “Poor people in Quebec and Canada have 31 percent more hospitalization, 47 percent more low-weight babies and so on,” he cited. “What’s really costing us is poverty.”
St-Onge, a former professor of Philosophy at Université de Montreal who now teaches at CEGEP Lionel-Groulx in Ste-Therese, concluded that only informed consumers themselves can counter the excessive use of pharmaceutical drugs. “It’s our money, it’s our bodies. It will start with us,” he said. “It’s not the government itself that is going to put on the pressure. It is we that are going to force the government to put pressure on the industry.”