Reblogged from mercola.com:
I’ve
highlighted the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is responsible for nearly
20 percent of
corporate
crime in a number of previous articles.
Here,
I want to draw your attention to an excellent article
1, 2 on the institutional corruption of pharmaceuticals,
published in the
Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics. It’s well worth
reading in its entirety if you have an interest in this topic.
This
term, “institutional corruption,” does not refer to any violation of existing
rules or laws. Rather it refers to “a certain kind of influence, within an
economy of influence, that has a certain effect,” as explained the Cambridge
lecture above. As presented in the video, an activity is considered
institutional corruption if it:
- Weakens
the effectiveness of an institution, and/or
- Weakens
public trust in that institution
The
lecture series was sponsored by the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics
at Harvard, which also published the featured article on this topic, written by
Donald W. Light, Joel Lexchin, and Jonathan J. Darrow. They write
:3
“Institutional
corruption is a normative concept of growing importance that embodies the
systemic dependencies and informal practices that distort an institution’s
societal mission.
An
extensive range of studies and lawsuits already documents strategies by which
pharmaceutical companies hide, ignore, or misrepresent evidence about new drugs;
distort the medical literature; and misrepresent products to prescribing
physicians.
We
focus on the consequences for patients: millions of adverse reactions. After
defining institutional corruption, we focus on evidence that it lies behind the
epidemic of harms and the paucity of benefits...
If
“corruption” is defined as an impairment of integrity or moral principle, then
institutional corruption is an institution’s deviation from a baseline of
integrity.”
Lack
of integrity is indeed different from outright violation of law, which is a
punishable crime. Avoidance of “moral principle,” while not illegal per se, is
still a very serious concern—if nothing else for the very real harm it produces.
This is true in most situations, but it’s particularly heinous when it is the
modus operandi of those who wield the greatest power over your health
care.
The Three Levels of Institutional
Corruption
The
authors assert that, within the pharmaceutical industry, institutional
corruption occurs at three different levels:
- Lobbying
efforts and political contributions. This way, the pharmaceutical
industry has influenced the US Congress to enact legislation that has severely
undermined the stated mission and function of the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA).
- Through
the application of industry pressure, “Congress has underfunded FDA
enforcement capacities since 1906, and turning to industry-paid “user fees”
since 1992 has biased funding to limit the FDA’s ability to protect the public
from serious adverse reactions to drugs that have few offsetting advantages,”
according to the authors.
- Commercializing
the role of doctors, undermining their position as “independent,
trusted advisers to patients.”
As
stated in the featured article, the health care system is founded on the moral
principle that a doctor, first, will
do no harm. The principle of not
harming the patient is explicit in the Hippocratic Oath,
4 one of the oldest binding documents in history. Under
that moral edict, the duty of any health care worker is, first and foremost, to
treat illness using the best medical knowledge and science available, and to
carefully assess the risks of harm.
“The
institutional corruption of health care consists of deviations from these
principles,” the featured article
states.
