Prof. Carlo reveals multi-national drug racket

An eminent medical personality has disclosed details of widespread fraud and malpractice which he believes has turned medicine from a vocation to a business or trade and now a racket.

Professor Carlo Fonseka former Dean of the Medical Faculty made the disclosures at a Senaka Bibile memorial talk at the BMICH on Friday in the presence of Health Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva and hundreds of others including leading medical personalities.

The source of his disclosures was a book titled, the truth about drug companies, how they deceive the people and what to do about it.” The widely read book was written by Dr. Marcia Angell, editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. According to the author, the medicinal drug industry operated by huge transnational corporations has become the biggest profit-making industry in the world today.

In the Fortune 500 list of the biggest profit-making companies, the top ten transnational drug companies known as the big pharma rank the highest. According to investigations the ten big pharma companies made a profit of about 36 billion US dollars a year while the other 490 companies in the Fortune 500 list made a total profit of about 34 billion US dollars. Reading from the book Professor Fonseka said the claim that most of the drug company profits were channeled for research and development was a fallacy. Investigations have shown that most of the 36 million US dollar profit went for marketing and promotion. Professor Fonseka said transnational drug companies promoted their highly expensive drugs under various brand names through politicians, health officials, university professionals like pharmacology experts and now mainly through doctors.

Investigations have shown that samples and souvenirs, huge sponsorships and multi million dollar scholarships for doctors and their family members were the main areas where the drug companies channelled the huge profits they made from unsuspecting patients.

Professor Fonseka had the audience roaring when he quipped that like in the famous Gypsy song this medical racket took place in America and not in Sri Lanka.

He said that no one could say that the allegations of a huge medical racket were largely concoctions of Sama Samaja party members, because the allegations were made by an eminent American medical personality. After giving more details of the truth about drug companies and how they defrauded the people, Professor Fonseka in the third part of the speech spoke of what we needed to do to curb and check this medical racket.

He told the minister and the audience that the answer was the implementation of Senaka Bibile’s essential medical concept which was hailed by the World Health Organisation and is now being effectively implemented in more than 100 countries, but not in Sri Lanka.

The Bibile principles include the import, sale and prescription of drugs under their low cost generic names. If this policy is implemented in Sri Lanka, the country would need to import only about 400 varieties of drugs instead of the world record number of 8,000 now registered for import, prescription and sale. Through this, quality drugs could be made available to all people at affordable prices while the country could save billions in foreign exchange annually by stopping the import of non essential drugs under highly expensive brand names.