At last, a Brexit dividend – shame it’s for the pedlars of fake medicine (Feb2019) Elizabeth Pisani

[ladycatlover]

Criminals now make more money from these counterfeits than they do from illegal drugs such as heroin and cocaine
Tue 19 Feb 2019 12.53 GMTFirst published on Tue 19 Feb 2019 10.00 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/19/brexit-fake-medicines-counterfeit-drugs?

The World Health Organization reported earlier this month that fake leukaemia medicine, packaged for the UK market to look like the genuine drug Iclusig, was circulating in Europe and the Americas. The short answer to why anyone would do something as morally awful as this, is of course: to make money. The fake leukaemia drug, containing mostly paracetamol, is being sold for $13,500 a pack – $450 a pill – in the US, or £5,000 a pack in the UK. There is now a far larger market for legal medicines than there is for illegal drugs, such as heroin or cocaine, and there’s a much smaller chance of getting caught. The (genuine) pills are for seriously sick people, so if a patient doesn’t blossom back to health after taking (fake) treatments, doctors generally blame the tumour, not the pill.

 

[JaimeS]

Hideous. There is true evil in the world.

 

[Webdog]

Depressing article. I'm reminded of this quote about science and the environment.

“I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy…and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation—and we scientists don’t know how to do that.”

https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=15-P13-00007&segmentID=6