Monthly Archives: April 2010

The world’s most expensive drugs

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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When people talk about expensive drugs, they usually are referring to drugs like Lipitor for high cholesterol ($1,500 a year), Zyprexa for schizophrenia ($7,000 a year) or Avastin for cancer ($50,000 a year). But none of these medicines come close to making Forbes magazine’s exclusive survey of the most expensive medicines on the planet.  The nine drugs on the Forbes list all cost more than $200,000 a year for the average patient who takes them – mostly prescribed to treat rare genetic diseases, afflicting fewer than 10,000 patients, for which there are few if any other treatments.

So drug companies can charge pretty much whatever they want. Selling drugs for rare diseases has become immensely profitable. There are so few patients that companies don’t have to invest as heavily in marketing. And the medicines usually get paid for by insurers or government health care plans.   Continue reading →

Why are you still buying bottled water?

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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A few years ago, the hit musical play called Urinetown opened at our local Belfry Theatre in Victoria.  In this unusual creation of playwrights Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann, the world is turned upside down when the water supply completely runs out. With the pervasive theme of water on the minds of all Belfry staff, General Manager Mary Desprez decided to “do something truly radical”. Mary told the trade journal Equity Quarterly in its Fall 2008 issue that, because of growing public awareness that bottled water costs up to 1,900 times more than tap water and uses up to 2,000 times more energy to produce and deliver, she decided to put a water fountain in the theatre lobby.

“We stopped selling plastic bottles of water!“  Continue reading →

The disturbing story behind Pfizer’s $2.3 billion drug marketing fines

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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It paid nearly $1.2 billion in criminal fines for the way it pushed Bextra – the largest fine the U.S. government has ever collected from a drug company. It paid a billion dollars more to settle a batch of civil suits –  although it denied wrongdoing – on allegations that it illegally promoted 12 other drugs. In all, Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug company, lost the equivalent of three months’ profit.

The story began in 2001, when Pfizer’s painkilling drug Bextra was about to hit the market. The drug was part of a revolutionary class of painkillers known as Cox-2 inhibitors that were supposed to be safer than generic drugs, but at 20 times the price of ibuprofen.

Pfizer and its marketing partner, Pharmacia, planned to sell Bextra as a treatment for acute pain, the kind you have after surgery. But in November 2001, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Bextra was not safe for patients at high risk of heart attacks and strokes.

The FDA approved Bextra only for arthritis and menstrual cramps. It rejected the drug in higher doses for acute, surgical pain.  Continue reading →

Lessons from Toyota for the Pope

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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As a recovering catholic myself, I thought Michael Valpy’s column in The Globe and Mail this month should be required reading for the old guy in Rome who is running the world’s most out-of-touch religion. For his illuminating piece on ‘The Troubled Church: Catholics At Crossroads’, Valpy interviewed Gene Grabowski, a leading U.S. expert on consumer product recalls, in a  feature called Sex Abuse: Defences Unacceptable, Solutions Elusive.

This seemingly unlikely linkage – product recall plus catholicism - makes sense. Grabowski is a superstar in the world of public relations (he was named PR Week’s 2007 ‘Crisis Manager of the Year’ for his work on U.S. national recalls of pet food, spinach and 45,000 Chinese toy imports).

And issues management and crisis communication are part of an increasingly important focus in the field of public relations – whether you are in the business of marketing cars or marketing something called faith.  Continue reading →