From CTV News:
American drug companies spend almost twice as much on promoting their pills than on researching and developing new ones, finds a new Canadian study.
Marc-Andre Gagnon and Joel Lexchin of Toronto's York University found that American drug companies spent US$57.5 billion on promotional activities in 2004 (the latest year for which figures were available).
By contrast, the industry spent only $31.5 billion on industrial pharmaceutical research and development in the same year, the researchers found using a report by the National Science Foundation.
The analysis, called "The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States," is published this week in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine. ...more
The most recent censuses of the U.S. (2007) suggests America has a population of 301,000,000. If the study's $57 Billion is accurate, that suggests big pharm spends $189/american on advertising! My, my! Save the slick promo campaigns and reduce the price for this stuff, then more people could afford it!
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