Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12692

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Cassels A.
Media mum on bad news drugs
Common Ground 2008 Feb
http://commonground.ca/iss/199/cg199_cassels.shtml

Full text:

People obsessed with certain issues – the environment, poverty, healthcare, or, in my case, pharmaceutical issues – tend to think their issue is the big issue. It’s the one that’s worth society’s close attention, important enough to demand rigorous public debate and worthy of extensive media coverage, to promote the public’s understanding.
We obsessed people will always complain that our issues never seem to get the balanced and thorough reporting that they deserve. We’ll argue that reporters are ill-informed and the media outlets they work for never give them enough time to chase the story.
With the growth of media on the internet, these stories are sometimes brought to life, even as the mainstream press grows increasingly MIA – “Missing in Action” – or produces coverage that is DOA – “Dead on Arrival.”
On the drug file, those mainstream journalists will disagree with me. “We cover drugs all the time in our pages,” they’ll say, pointing to their bulging lifestyle sections, oozing stories about health, diets and drugs. True enough. But from my perspective, much of what gets reported in the drug world seems to come from the extreme ends of the spectrum – the breakthrough drug stories or the heart-stopping drug disasters – leaving the large bulge of pharmaceutical issues in the middle untouched, especially those that affect many of us in a serious, day-to-day way.
Let’s face it; about two thirds of our visits to doctors end with a prescription, making drug-taking the number one form of health care in our world. And because we swallow a ton of them, the way drugs are approved, covered, prescribed, dispensed and swallowed are all subjects worthy of intense public scrutiny and debate.
In BC, some very important drug stories recently have been reported on either marginally or not at all, even though they have the potential to hugely impact the people in this province.
In December, a shocking New England Journal study was released, stating that the majority (88 percent) of the clinical trials which showed that antidepressants don’t work, either were not published in medical journals or were presented as positive findings. Given that hundreds of thousands of people in BC take these drugs daily – a quarter of them women between the ages of 25 and 45 – why was there no coverage? And how about a recent study that found that tens of thousands of seniors with dementia in long term care in Canada are prescribed extremely expensive and very toxic atypical antipsychotic drugs (drugs like Zyprexa and Seroquel) even when Health Canada has issued stern warnings that those drugs increase the risk of death in seniors? If you don’t religiously listen to CBC radio or read the Epoch Times, you’ll have missed this story entirely.
In terms of the politics of health care, is there a good excuse for a media outlet to miss a story that could have huge reverberations in BC for decades to come? In my opinion, the winner of the “Missing in Action” prize for the least reported important story is the recent announcement of a BC pharmaceutical task force stacked with drug industry cheerleaders. This would fit the man-bites-dog category of news story and should have generated headlines across the province, demanding the ministry to justify its choice of panel members.
Did it? Not at all.
Maybe it’s not so bad that five of the seven non-government appointees to the panel are embedded in an industry whose very existence depends on – how can I say this nicely? – extracting maximum returns from taxpayer-funded drug programs. These panel members include a board member of LifeSciences BC, a lobby group for a whole whack of drug companies and Russell Williams, head of Canada’s Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies (Rx&D), the nation’s key drug lobby group, and a representative from a drug store chain. The panel’s mandate is to “provide innovative ideas for the minister’s consideration” and to “optimize the decision-making process for what drugs are covered under PharmaCare.” Whew! The future of a billion dollar drug plan handed off to pharma’s suits? Sweet.
This affair smells a bit stinky and the panel is akin to having a government-appointed committee, comprised mostly of reps from Labatt, Seagram and Absolut, advising on liquor taxes. I’m sure it is staffed with men and women of integrity who will do a good job providing the answers the minister needs.
Listening to the prescriptions offered by the captains of the drug industry might not be a bad thing, and it’s most likely to produce a pill so sour and indigestible (given the panel’s dubious composition) that the recommendations will be, like Victoria’s sewage, flushed so deep that no one will ever have to see or smell them. That is, of course, if the public ever hears of the outcome of this task force. But given our MIA media, that’s not a sure thing.
The panel’s existence was only reported in a single piece on CKNW radio and in two pieces of the feisty online media source, The Tyee (www.thetyee.ca) As far as I could tell, it didn’t see the light of day in any of the mainstream press outlets. It wasn’t a story without colour. Commentators, such as the NDP’s health critic Adrian Dix, called the composition of the board “highly debatable.” Words such as “shocking,” “unbelievable,” “disturbing,” “extraordinary” and “bizarre” were among the adjectives chosen by other critics describing the panel. I added “bewildering” to the list.
Decisions made by the panel could shape the decision-making of our provincial pharmacare programs for decades, so why wasn’t it covered in the mainstream press?
I’ve raised that question with some of the brightest and hardest working journalists in BC, knowing all the while reporters are a little defensive about the stories they didn’t cover. A variety of theories emerge, some revolving around newsroom hubris, others pointing to the lack of time and energy mainstream journos can put into a story, while others talk about the complicated nature of the story, even while admitting it’s an important one that needs to be aired.
One is left to hypothesize why the media won’t touch the story – rather than wonder why the Health Minister would stack the deck of such a task force.
We can all guess at the government’s motivation, but here’s one theory you won’t hear much about: CanWest Global Communications Corp., which owns most of the daily papers in Canada, including BC’s three main papers, the Vancouver Province, the Vancouver Sun and the Victoria Times Colonist, is currently suing the federal government over Health Canada’s laws which restrict direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. Seems that the Aspers are salivating over a big bite of the $400 million worth of estimated ad revenue they could get from the drug companies to run drug ads in their various media. Wouldn’t want to piss off a prospective client like that, would you?
CanWest Global is only one example of the problem with media concentration in Canada. It is a corporate behemoth that pumps its favoured policies (like war in Afghanistan) through its 11 daily newspapers and 16 TV stations. Could this be why important drug issues, which could affect pharma’s profits, are missing in action in media reporting in BC?
Adbusters magazine calls Vancouver “… the single-most media concentrated city in the Western world.” The Vancouver Sun used to do some very hard-hitting stories on the pharmaceutical industry, but not anymore. Perhaps their journalists are a little leery of pissing off the corporate owners and thus tend to steer clear of pharma controversies. The media Goliath, according to Adbusters, has “… such a stranglehold on the city that any reporter caught speaking out against them would have trouble finding work in Vancouver again.” Take a look at the article entitled The Death of Canadian Journalism in the Sept-Oct 2007 issue of Adbusters. It will send shivers up your spine.
While the Ministry of Health’s stacked panel raises suspicions, some would say its existence is further evidence of the expanding P-3 (Public-Private-Partnership) model of healthcare, which has already colonized the treatments of chronic diseases and private clinics here.
I don’t think we can put all the blame on the media for missing the important stories. We in the electorate have to shoulder some of the responsibility. We can sit idly by as the government, with the media’s support, shaves off more of our health care system and sells it to private industries like the pharmaceutical industry.
Me? I’m going to vote with my money and my mouth and support decent investigative journals so I can actually find out what’s going on in this province.
Speaking of P-3s, my latest book is a P-3 of a different ilk. It’s a “Pharmaceutical Poetry Primer,” entitled the ABCs of Disease Mongering (EmDash, 2008), distributed by the Literary Press Group and now available in bookstores.