Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare is a book by Peter C. Gøtzsche with forewords by Richard Smith and Drummond Rennie. It was published by Taylor & Francis in 2013.
The book says that activities by major pharmaceutical companies include corruption, fraud, bribery, and omission of data to market their products. While all drugs have side effects not all have benefits, the influx of money by pharma undercuts regulation, education, and scientific integrity. Gøtzsche makes proposals on how to improve the situation.
Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime - WikipediaVideo transcript:
my name is Peter G I'm a director of the Nordic Cochran Center in Copenhagen and professor of research design and Analysis at the University of konen two years ago I found out that our prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer our drugs kill around 200,000 people in America every year and half of these people die while they do what their doctors told them so they die because of the side effects the other half die because of errors and it's often the doctors that make the errors because any drug may come with 20 30 or 40 warnings contraindications precautions and so on no doctor in the world knows about all this so they give patients drugs that they should not have given them that interact dangerously with other drugs or food items or so on and then the patients die that's the other half so uh the other thing I found out two years ago was that um uh much of what the drug industry does fulfills the criteria for organized crime in US law and they behave in many ways like the mafia does they corrupt everyone they can corrupt they have bought every type of person even including Ministers of Health in some countries so there is a huge amount of corruption in in my country for example Denmark we are regarded as having very little corruption but yet we have thousands of doctors on industry payroll although we are just 20,000 doctors so this is an effective kind of corruption the drug industry buys the professors first then Chiefs of Department then other Chief Physicians and so on they don't buy Junior doctors so when several thousands are an industry payroll it's really really bad and that's why I wrote my um book deadly medicines and organized crime how big Pharma has corrupted health care I hope to convince patients not to take so many drugs because so many die from the drugs they take in my country people take so many drugs that every single citizen can be in treatment with one and a half drugs from they are born till they die this is incredible and drugs are not that helpful and uh they kill very many of us we know that that's why drugs are the third major killer after heart disease and cancer so what we need in the coming years is to take far fewer drugs than what we do currently if we did that and we we were careful then we could live longer and live better lives because drugs have many side effects and patients often don't realize that when they become worse that it could be a side effect of the drug which they continue taking because that's what their doctors tell them so when I was a specialist in Internal Medicine uh what I very often did was that I stopped a lot of drugs particularly in elderly people and it's it's quite revealing to see a bedridden elderly person come into your ward and when you stop the drugs I mean that person becomes many years younger and uh and uh many of these drugs affect the brain and old people tolerate that very very badly they fall and when they break a hip a quarter of them die and for example anti-depressant drugs are are used in more than 10% of our elderly and um they seem to kill 3% of them every year I mean uh if 100 old people take an anti-depressant for one year uh 3% of them will die because they fall and break their hip this is a huge death rate so a lot of other drugs and anti-depressants also make people fall and kill them uh and and they may affect your cognition your memory and all these things and then they interact in ways that we know almost nothing about uh very many elderly they they take more than five drugs a day and we actually don't know how these drugs interact with each other what we do know is that all drugs have many effects in the body and some of them interact also in their metabolism so that you can get a too high concentration of a drug if you take other drugs simultaneously so we make a lot of harms that we don't even recognize I have a pretty colorful collection of things people have called me during all these years and sometimes journalists have asked me why do you always look up controversy and my reply is I don't controversy looks me up because it's not popular to tell the truth in healthcare you will get a lot of enemies because a lot of people make money on false premises doctors and Industry alike and our drug regulators and our politicians they are on board on this wagon so uh very few people are independent of money in healthcare and uh and and of course I have uh attacked a lot of holy cows during my career and people have screamed loudly uh in a French Journal I was called a statistical mbist because I showed with Statistics that mamography screening didn't work and things like that um and I was even accused of scientific misconduct by the Association of the Danish pharmaceutical industry which was completely ludicrous it was harassment from beginning to end they came with vague arguments that we cannot recognize the conclusions in your study and they could have come up with numbers and said these numbers are wrong they didn't do anything it was only harassment it lasted 18 months months I think the whole thing and then when we were acquitted I made sure that this nasty Behavior was described in the British Medical Journal um so after that they haven't come so much after me the Danish drug industry and when my book about organized crime came out they just lied about it as they always do that my examples were old they went back 90 years and so on but you know where I demonstrate that what the 10 biggest companies do is organized crime uh these examples they were from within the last 10 to 15 years that's not old examples and the crimes have increased because when Crime Pays you will have more crime that's how capitalism works