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From Socialist Worker, No. 109, 15 February 1969, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
WHAT DO YOU THINK of when you see the word ‘drugs’?
Dimly-lit dens full of pot-smoking students? Shifty-eyed men in dirty brown macs and pale-blue shirts pushing pills in coffee bars?
Or millions of pounds in profits bursting the wallets of Glaxo shareholders? Or the millions more wasted on advertising laxatives and indigestion remedies?
In 1964, the year the the Labour government came to power, total sales of Beechams – makers of the famous powders – were £61.09 million. By 1968 they had rocketed to £115.5m.
Profits in 1964 were £9,289,000. In 1968 they were £20,600,000.
In 1968 Boots profits were £16,813,382, an increase of 13 per cent on the previous year.
In 1961, the Ministry of Health spent £7m on tetracycline (an antibiotic) at a cost of £60 per 1,000 tablets from Pfizer, an American firm. In the same year DDSA Pharmaceuticals began marketing tetracycline at a mere £6 10s. per 1,000.
If this selling price represented a profitable deal to DDSA it is not unreasonable, to suggest that of the 1961 figure of £7m, more than £5m represented clear surplus profit to Pfizer and the other American companies marketing tetracycline here.
‘As in other industries, our driving force is profits’, said John T. Connor, the president of an American drug firm. He was later made Secretary of Commerce by President Johnson.
It would take two rail-road mail cars, 110 large mail trucks and 800 postmen to deliver the daily load of drug circulars and parcels to doctors if they were mailed to a single city in America. If they were dumped in a pile and burned the blaze would be seen for 50 miles.
Taking the entire US drug industry into account, it is estimated that advertising expenses were running at around $750m in 1958. The total amount available for all the medical schools in the United States in 1957 for their educational programmes was only $200m.
The amount of money spent on boosting sales by high-powered advertising techniques in Britain is also colossal – £6m in the first six months of 1964. £726,000 was spent in three months advertising painkillers and laxatives on television and in the press.
When a member of the Committee of Public Accounts urged that the Ministry of Health should put pressure on the drugs industry to reduce advertising costs, Sir Bruce Fraser for the Ministry said that this was not the Ministry’s function – ‘I cannot see them taking it on.’
This is only to be expected. The government isn’t bothered by the vast profits raked in by the drug firms. Its only concern is to run the capitalist economy efficiently and to settle the balance of payments problem.
That’s why prescription charges were reintroduced last year as a gesture to restore confidence in the international fraternity of bankers.
In fact, the balance of payments problem could have been helped to the tune of £25m or so by nationalising the drug industry, for that is the sum returned in profits by foreign-owned drugs firms.
Smiling Jim Callaghan’s proposed legislation to curtail illicit trafficking in drugs – and to increase the penalties for offences concerning drug-taking – is entirely irrelevant to the needs of the present pill-swallowing society.
As a writer in the book The World in 1984 says:
The possibility of a solution to the problem under class society is remote. Only a thoroughgoing smashing of present class society and the establishment of a new socialist society, in which health will be regarded as a right and not a privilege, will provide the real solution.
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Last updated on 30 October 2020