As a person with a chronic illness, I have a love/hate relationship with the pharmacoindustrial complex. On the one hand, I love the products they've developed to make my life better. Significantly better. I love that they're working on more products to sell me to make my life better still. The problem is, they're businesses that exist to make a buck (well, bazillions of bucks), and sometimes this leads them to be evil. Case in point, from the WaPo:
Some at the FDA, as well as leaders in the generic drug industry, complain that 'citizen petitions' -- requests for agency action that any individual, group or company can file -- are being misused by brand-name drugmakers to stave off generic competition.
The simple act of filing a petition, they say, triggers another round of time-consuming and often redundant reviews of the generics by the FDA, which can take months or years. In the process, consumers continue to pay millions of dollars more for the brand-name drugs. Link.
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