Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18221

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: Journal Article

We need Romanow's National Drug Agency
CMAJ 2003 Feb 4; 168:(3):249
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/168/3/249

Abstract:

[D]rugs should be approved for use and coverage … solely on the basis of their effectiveness or efficiency, not … because pharmaceutical companies have invested a lot in their development.1

Roy Romanow’s proposal to create a new National Drug Agency1 is, we hope, the last of such recommendations: the last, because we hope this one will finally stick. This idea existed embryonically in Justice Emmett Hall’s report of 1964, which proposed an expanded role for the then Drug Advisory Committee.2 A detailed “blueprint for a national pharmacovigilance system” was set out in the Gagnon report of 1992,3 and ways and means of improving drug approvals and monitoring in this country have been discussed by health ministers and federal–provincial task forces ever since.