Getting thru the thick heads of the left on pharma: a proposal

All you former pharma people out there, do you find it extraordinarily depressing that so many opinion makers on the left have a completely fucked up notion of pharma research?  Are you tired of them making suggestions regarding pharma that are only going to make the problem worse?  Are you sick of being lumped in with the stupid marketing executives and finance industry analysts and consultants when you had no power over what those guys (and it’s almost always guys) did?  Are you enraged that some twit at Harvard is making pronouncements about industrial research, revealing her shocking lack of knowledge and experience, and passing herself off as an authority and obscuring her institution’s potential conflict of interest?

Have you had it with bloggers on the left who refuse to engage with you, seek you out and ask you for your perspective, snub you and tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about after 20 years of experience?  Are you despairing that the besieged industrial pharmaceutical researcher has become as improbably and maliciously fantastical to the left as the black helicopters of the UN have to the right?

Are you proud of what you did in the lab and distressed over how your industry has been destroyed?  Do you want to set the record straight?

Good.  So do I.

I think we need to do a blogtalkradio show explaining what’s really going on in pharma.  Maybe we can explain how the drug discovery process works and how it all went horribly wrong, where we are now and what we see as the future of pharmaceutical medicine in the future.

Reading this shit makes people’s eyes glaze over apparently and they’ve been conditioned to a.) see pharma as more evil than Satan and b.) fail to distinguish between the business and science parts of the industry and c.) do not realize what they’re getting into going forward or that they might be inadvertently playing into the hands of the finance guys.

We could use this opportunity to explain why “me too” drugs get developed, that the pharmas aren’t sitting on a cure for cancer (because that makes no damn sense and we will explain why), that research really is more expensive than drinking gold and why generics are going to get more expensive for everyone.

If you are interested, indicate in the poll below whether you think this would be worthwhile.  We can’t rely on the left to buy a clue.  God knows, I’ve tried and they’re as thick as  right wing creationists when it comes to pharma.  For some really asinine reason, they think we are pro-industry shills.  Yeah, you can stop laughing now.

I’d like to interview some people whose opinions I respect on the subject, like Derek Lowe of In the Pipeline.  I suspect that Lowe and I are very different politically but we’re very simpatico when it comes to our perception on how the industry has been run.  Maybe there are others out there?  Zombie Symmetry?  Anthony Nicholls?  I don’t know who would be willing to step up and tell it like it is.  This wouldn’t have to be a rant against the industry because WE know that the industry consists of TWO separate entities right now and back when it worked reasonably well, the finance part was not in charge.

Or maybe people could call in.  You wouldn’t have to identify yourself.  You could just indicate whether you are/were industry or academic, chemistry or biology, lead ID/Optimization or development.  That should do it.

Are you interested?