Drug firms have too much clout, says expert

DRUG companies have too much influence over the medicines used in this country, a UCC sociologist claimed yesterday.

Orla O’Donnell blamed the State for the dominance the pharmaceutical industry has enjoyed here over the past nine years.

“The system has created a partnership that gives the pharmaceutical industry this influence,” Ms O’Donnell said yesterday.

The Irish Medicines Board (IMB) is financed by the pharmaceutical industry and its first chairman was a chief executive of the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association, Ms O’Donovan told a conference on the Politics of Drugs Regulation in UCC.

Up to 1995, the Minister for Health had responsibility for licensing drugs and the National Drugs Advisory Board made recommendations on drug safety and what drugs should be licensed.

“This Board was financed by the State, its members were mainly clinicians or civil servants, but it was extremely under-funded and this caused huge backlogs in the numbers of drugs it recommended for licensing,” Ms O’Donovan said.

When the Irish Medicines Board took over the licensing of drugs in 1995, it had great success in clearing the backlog of drugs that needed to be licensed.

“But only six of their 100 staff have responsibility for pharmacovigilance - checking reported drugs that have had an adverse reaction,” Ms O’Donnell said.

In a lecture entitled: A pathological partnership? The Irish State and the globalised pharmaceutical industry, Ms O’Donnell concluded that Government policy was to make this country attractive to the pharmaceutical industry.

“The State has failed completely to increase the number of generic drugs used here over the past 20 years,” she said.

An Irish Medicines Board spokesman could not be reached for comment on Ms O’Donnell’s claims.

Meanwhile, the conference also heard that Ireland is the biggest exporter of pharmaceuticals in the world. These exports were worth €33 billion last year - 36% of our total exports, according to UCC lecturer, Kathy Glavanis-Grantham.

Cork is one of the main centres of the pharmaceutical industry here - 19 of the 72 plants are located in Cork and the majority are American.

Cork has become the comfort zone for the industry and the relationship between the university and the business is one of mutuality, Ms Glavanis-Grantham said. “There is an unholy alliance between the universities, industry (and) the State, and the Government is the facilitator in this neo-liberal agenda,” she said.

UCC received considerable funding from the Science Foundation of Ireland last year and the college has developed a corporate ethos that sees students as clients of the pharmaceutical industry, Ms Glavanis-Grantham said.