For some reason, if all you saw was political news, you would think that the pharmaceutical industry was made up of inhuman robots who only care about vacuuming up gold ducats wherever they find them.  The rhetoric – even coming from some supposedly responsible presidential campaigns – is so overheated and so does not square with my personal experience, that I felt like surely someone would set the record straight.  However, I have yet to see anything that really does the job, so until the definitive rebuttal comes along, here is my two cents.

First of all, I can confirm that real, live human beings work for the pharmaceutical companies.  They employ thousands of research scientists, doctors, administrators and other real human beings with mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and children.  If you visit the campus of GlaxoSmithKline in Raleigh-Durham or go to Johnson & Johnson or Merck in New Jersey, or Abbott in Illinois, and actually talk to some of these people, you realize that they care passionately about curing disease and making people’s lives better.  The companies in this industry invest billions – with a B – in trying to find cures or alleviate suffering caused by cancer, rheumatism, arthritis, asthma, HIV/AIDS, influenza, depression, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, tetanus, high cholesterol, tuberculosis, leukemia, kidney failure, malaria, river blindness, Alzheimers, and countless others. 

Merck single-handedly wiped out river blindness in an entire country.  It’s also invested over $10 million in Ethics Resource Centers around the planet. 

Pfizer gave over $60 million in cash and product in response to the tsunami. 

If just four pharmaceutical companies: Pfizer, Merck, GSK, and Abbott, were a country – they’d rank as one of the top 20 foreign aid donors in the world. 

Most industries develop corporate citizenship programs in countries only AFTER they have a viable economic presence in a country; the pharmaceutical industry is different – they provide goods and services in the neediest of countries, even though it severely costs them in a variety of ways.

I could go on and on, and I’m by no means an expert in everything they do.  But let me just conclude this post with one final thought.  Think about what the world would be like without the pharmaceutical industry: No Advil, no aspirin, no prescription drugs, no HIV/AIDS research, no Lipitor, no Prozac, no Advair for asthmatics, no antibiotics…think about it, and I hope we can get more balance when it comes to looking at the pharmaceutical industry.