Friday, January 04, 2008

Drug-research spending second to marketing: study

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

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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!