by Phyllis Vine

A couple of days ago, I reported how pharma influence grows based on an Associated Press story from data collected by Open Secret. Now The Olympian reports that several efforts requiring greater transparency for pharma have been consistently blocked in the Washington legislature. And it looks as if efforts to keep physician prescribing patterns private is also in doubt. Drug companies, with the help of the American Medical Association, have been accumulating this information for marketing purposes.

Doctors, patients, and the Washington AMA are trying to halt the gathering of this information, but they have a formidable foe. Already a bill in the state legislature was defeated that sponsored a “drug professional education program aimed at telling doctors which medications have proved to be effective.”

Any brakes on pharma?
On the one end, it looks as if the FDA’s crippled resources and lack of vigilance has led to foreign manufacturing factories free of oversight. Once medicine reaches the shelves, a failure in post-marketing monitoring has delayed evaluating complaints. Now the Supreme Court has given immunity to manufacturers of devices and implants, and is hearing a case that could extend similar immunity to drug companies.

Part of the case rests on the question of whether the FDA is capable of certifying the process by which medication reaches consumers it is supposed to be protecting. Recent congressional hearings about difficulties at the FDA, several conspicuous examples of drug companies withholding information about side effects, and a GAO report outlining in great detail problems at the agency, make us wonder what is to be gained from granting immunity to pharmaceutical companies.