Laissez faire: alive and well in Britain today

Last week the British Medical Journal published findings from an investigation of how the two important anti-cancer drugs, Avastin and Lucentis, were being tested. Turns out that Novartis, whose parent company is the Swiss giant Roche, did everything they could legally do to avoid the cheaper drug (Lucentis) from being favoured over its more expensive, but probably no more effective chemical cousin. A number of dirty tricks were revealed by the BMJ, including warping research findings and even offering incentives to the researchers to make sure the results came out the way they wanted them to.


This  means the NHS will have to foot the bill for the more expensive drug- in other words you and I are paying for the corrupt practices of the profit hungry drug company Roche, already one of the biggest and most powerful multinationals in the world. I suppose they didn't achieve that status by being nice; no, they got that big by behaving little better than the Chicago Mob in the days of prohibition. And yet the way the legislation is set up at present means there is very little the government can do about it. You haven't heard much discussion about this during the election campaign, have you? Come to think of it, we haven't much discussion about any real, cutting edge issues, which in the good old days of campaigning did actually happen sometimes. The three weeks coming up to an election used to mark a surge of real political debate, and not the turgid, tedious crap we have had to sit through thus far. No wonder more people than ever are saying "a plague on all your houses" and refusing to have anything to do with it. I can't say I blame them...