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Consider the following:

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-The 10 best-selling drugs generate revenue (or cost consumers, depending on how you look at it) of over $60 Billion per year.

-Lipitor. Nexium. Zocor. Prevacid. Many others.

-Pfizer, Merck, Sanofin-Aventis, and Bristol-Myers are the four largest drug companies. They have a combined market capitalization (shares outstanding x share price; or in plain English - the amount that the market thinks they’re worth) of $455 Billion.

-They spend billions on R&D to create new drugs for old diseases, discover new diseases, and create drugs for those new diseases.

-They spend billions more on lobbyists.

-And they definitely spend billions on advertising in the form of TV commercials and drug reps schmoozing your family doctor so that everyone knows just how badly they need Pro-Ex-Vasa-Zo-Whatever.

-Drugs to put us to sleep, drugs to keep us awake, drugs to treat the recently-discovered malady of Restless Leg Syndrome.

The Cap’n had RLS and EBP

-Yes, you read that correctly - 3 Million years of human existence, and we’re just now getting around to discovering and treating Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS if you choose to attempt to lend it additional credibility by turning it into an acronym; RFS his ownself suffers from EBP, or excessive booger production).

-But be careful if you take these drugs, because if you have (1) high blood pressure, (2) low blood pressure, (3) normal blood pressure, or (4) any of a number of other characteristics; it could result in (a) nausea, (b) vomiting, (c) stroke, (d) seizure, (e) heart attack, (f) memory loss, or (g) erections lasting longer than 4 hours.

-Simple blood tests can determine if you have liver disease. For erections lasting than longer than four hours, consult a physician.

-And just in case you met all of the requirements, have a time machine on standby just in case you took Bextra, Accutane, Celebrex, Vioxx, or any other drugs that were recalled by the FDA for causes of death, blindness, etc.
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By now you’re probably thinking my name is Tom, I have a wife named Katie, I like to dance around my house wearing only underwear and sunglasses, I’m a big fan of L. Ron Hubbard, and I think all drugs are evil.

Only one of those is true (I’m a boxers man, no briefs), and as far as I’m concerned, medication is a personal choice.

My point is this - I think you would be hard-pressed to find any drug discovered in the last 25 years, during the modern era of gigantic drug companies, that had anywhere near the positive effect on the world as the polio vaccine.

Polio crippled and killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people… many of them children. When asked if he planned to profit from it or patent it, Jonas Salk had the famous quote:

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“Who owns my polio vaccine? The people! Could you patent the sun?”
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I wonder what would happen today.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Quotes, Heroes/Geniuses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.