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Why can't you just go to a doctor or hospital and pay them a couple grand per pill and use that? Nobody has to know where you got it from...
by aianus 11y ago
Why can't you just go to a doctor or hospital and pay them a couple grand per pill and use that? Nobody has to know where you got it from...
- skj 11y agoBecause then you don't have an audit trail to use in your study documentation.
- aianus 11y agoI meant the manufacturer doesn't have to know (so they can't take revenge on the doctor/hospital). You can still have a hush-hush audit trail. Why is the original drug required anyways? Can't you prove it's the same without it? The details are all there in the public patent.
- rdtsc 11y agoJust a guess, I imagine they'd have to go through the whole new drug approval cycle as opposed to the show its bioactivity similar to existing one.
- skj 11y agoI'm pretty sure that "hush hush" audit trails for drug manufacturers are strictly illegal, would be found out, would bankrupt the company, etc.
- daxelrod 11y agoYou'd need a prescription to get it. And I don't believe it's legal for a person with the prescription to sell or give prescribed medicine to other other people.
- aianus 11y agoHire a researcher with toxoplasmosis ;)
- anigbrowl 11y agoEasier said than done, as toxoplasmosis promotes risky behavior of the sort that tends to be incompatible with a research career. Of course the real problem here is the subversion of the controlled-distribution mechanism to serve a private rather than a public end, a tragedy of the regulatory commons if you like. The basic idea here is good; you don't want drugs like thalidomide being freely prescribed because if they find their way to a pregnant woman consumption is likely to result in horrific birth deformities. This is an abstraction to many Americans because the FDA restricted Thalidomide early, but growing up in Europe I became aware of it from quite a young age because there was a small-but-distinct demographic cohort of people with characteristic deformities. But what's happening here is the drug manufacturer falsely claiming that there's a serious public health risk in order to get into the controlled-distribution system, and then using that to prevent any potential competitors from entering the market. I imagine that if the FDA had declined to make any of these drugs controlled-distribution then the strategic response would have been to hire a PR firm to plant stories about how the FDA doesn't care about medical vulnerabilities.