In the spirit of “know your enemy”, here is a great Big Pharma infographic titled: The Stats About Pharmaceutical Companies, from My[confined]Space. Americans know that we’re paying too much for our healthcare, we’re just not sure how it is happening to us. This infographic gives you a little taste of the excesses in prescription pharmaceutical business, Big Pharma, both in financial profits and massive spending on marketing. Make no mistake, cannabis or medical marijuana that you can grow in your back yard or closet, is no friend of the pharmaceutical industry.

Infographic transcript: The Stats About Pharmaceutical Companies

It probably won’t shock you to learn that Americans pay some of the highest drug and health care cost in the world. This steep prescription price tag does not always buy better or high quality drugs. Why is this? Well Big Pharma, as large pharmaceutical companies are called, have run amok in America.

The Real Cost of Drugs:

• Lipitor (20mg): markup 4,969%
• Claritin (10mg): markup 30,306%
• Prilosec (20mg): markup 69,417%
• Xanax (1mg): markup 569,958%
• Prozac (20mg): markup: 224,973%
• Zoloft (50mg): markup: 11,821%

The Top Ten Big Pharma Companies Are:

• Pfizer
• Merck
• Johnson & Johnson
• Abbot Laboratories, S.A.
• Bayer
• GSK
• Aventis
• Novartis
• AstraZeneca
• Roche

 In America, the cost of prescription drugs rises 12% every year.

• That’s about $200 billion every year.
• 3 times what drugs cost 30 years ago.

Many drugs are approved by the FDA are known as Me-Too drugs.

• These drugs are copies of successful existing drugs, with very minor alterations.
• Me-Too drugs only need to be slightly more effective than a placebo.

So why are American pharmaceuticals more expensive than other places?

• America has no caps on the price of prescriptions.
• America has 20 year patent laws.
• Until the patent ends, no generics can enter the market, which are often 80% cheaper.

 American senior citizens are perhaps the most affected by expensive drugs.

• 90% of seniors take daily prescriptions costing $1,500 per year.
• One in four seniors skips does to reduce their cost.

Studies suggest that more than 25% of doctors receive money from Big Pharma to help market their drugs.

Big Pharma collectively spends more than $20 billion a year marketing their patented drugs.

• $12 billion: Door to door marketing to doctors offices
• $3.4 billion: Sponsoring industry events, conventions and meetings
• $2.9 billion: Television advertising
• $1.6 billion: Print advertising
• $140 million: Online advertising

Despite Big Pharma’s claims, most money is spent on advertising instead of on R&D.

• In 2008, researchers found that twice as much money was spent on ads as R&D
• Big Pharma usually buys research done by universities and biotech companies instead of performing it themselves.

In the 1990s, a professor of Stanford University, Irvin Weissman, developed 2 treatments to potentially cure diabetes, along with the promising treatments for late-stage breast cancer and  Leukemia.

• Big Pharma wasn’t interested. There’s no money is curing diabetes when ongoing treatment (insulin, meters, testing strips, etc.) is so profitable.