Pharma Fraud

WP:

Two teams of researchers with access to thousands of documents gathered in lawsuits over the painkiller Vioxx allege that Merck & Co. waged a campaign of deception to promote its drug, moving slowly to warn of possible hazards while dressing up in-house research as the work of independent academic researchers.

The reports in tomorrow's Journal of the American Medical Association in effect charge one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies with various forms of scientific fraud.

If access to one company's documents on one drug yielded this result, we can be pretty sure there are many more like it, with far more damaging consequences. The [fictional] movie The Constant Gardener was all about this kind of fraud perpetrated on the 3rd world, effectively causing mass murder. Opening more files to public and scientific scrutiny would be in order.

Then maybe we should consider restructuring the pharmaceutical industry, with the R&D burden being funded by the government, the marketing costs eliminated, and the market prices slashed.