Another (unpublished) comment I made on Bryan Young's article.

I posted the following comment to this article by Bryan Young on Huffington Post but it wasn't published (don't know why, so reproducing it here):

Do you know anything about the pharma industry? You seem to be pretty ignorant of it and have a seething hatred of it by your post which clouds any objective reasoning. It seems a pretty low blow to call pharma companies "con artists". These are companies that have brought us life saving medicines to lower cholesterol, fight depression, and battle many many other ailments.

Where do you think drugs come from? Do you think they just grow on trees and should be sold just like some commodity product? NO. It takes years of research and up to a billion dollars of costs, with many failures along the way, to come up with a single new marketable drug. And then once they come up with a new drug, they only have about 10 years to recoup the large R&D costs and make a profit before it goes generic. It is a very risky business and as a glaring example of failure, a couple of years ago Pfizer took a potential successor to Lipitor all the way to the last stage of clinical testing only to have it fail. And they spent almost a billion dollars on that failure. Here are some details:

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2006/12/03/the_torcetrapib_catastrophe.php

When you buy a drug, you aren't paying just for that drug but for all the failures that came before it too.