It's
no secret that Pharma is trying to replace its declining pill franchise with
optional vaccines like the HPV vaccine which Texas Gov. Rick Perry tried to
mandate for adolescent girls. Vaccines are expensive, can be mass marketed to
vast swathes of the population and are usually immune to generic competition,
pun intended.
One reason for the switch away from pills is that doctors are increasingly wary of prescribing new "blockbuster" drugs after the recalls of Vioxx, Bextra, Baycol, Meridia, Trovan, Fen Phen and new warnings on asthma, epilepsy, pain, bone and hormone drugs.
And there are new wrinkles in compensation. Private and government insurers are becoming less willing to "cough up money for an expensive new drug--particularly when a cheap and reliable generic is available," the Wall Street Journal reported recently.
So it's no wonder that Pharma and its benefactors at the National Institutes of Health are mining a new revenue source: the nation's millions of alcoholics and drugs addicts who need a "vaccine."
"Sixty percent of people with a substance abuse disorder also suffer from another form of mental illness, says a recent New York Times' Science Times. (Another? ) They are "wired differently" and may have a "developmental brain disorder," says the article, next to a photo of Amy Winehouse, lest anyone miss The Point.
"We now know that addiction is a disease that affects both brain and behavior," says Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in an National Institutes of Health newsletter. "We have identified many of the biological and environmental factors and are beginning to search for the genetic variations that contribute to the development and progression of the disease."
Of course Pharma's stratagems to grow its "mentally ill" franchise are well known. People with occasional anxiety are really depressed, then bipolar, then suffering from an assortment of amorphous "spectrum" diseases and dysrythmias with no known cause, no cure, no diagnostic tests and no turnoff valve on the pharmacy spigot.
The situation is even worse for children because they're given drugs against their will by parents, teachers and doctors. Toddlers are diagnosed with ADHD, conduct disorders, depression, bipolar disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, mood disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, mixed manias, social phobia, anxiety, sleep disorders, borderline disorders, irritability, aggression, pervasive development disorders, personality disorders and (pant, pant) even schizophrenia--all of which require expensive medication cocktails.
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