Unhealthy Pharmaceutical Regulation: Innovation, Politics and Promissory Science [Paperback]

This is the first book to examine how effectively American and supranational EU governments have regulated innovative pharmaceuticals during the last 30 years regarding public health. It explains why pharmaceutical regulation has been misdirected by commercial interests and misconceived ideologies.1. Putting Pharmaceutical Regulation to the Test: A Social Science for Public Health 2. The Political Economy of 'Innovative' Drug Regulation in the Neo-Liberal Era 3. Designs on Diabetes Drugs 4. Desperate Regulation for Desperate Cancer Patients 5. The Making of a Harmful 'Therapeutic Breakthrough' 6. The Regulatory Science and Politics of Risk Management 7. Conclusions and Policy Implications

Precisely 50 years have passed since the first truly modern system of medicines regulation came into operation in The Netherlands. That is a good reason to take stock of what drug regulation has achieved in half a century, and where it has perhaps failed to serve society optimally. Courtney Davis and John Abraham have now done precisely that, in a thoughtful and independent study of developments on both sides of the Atlantic. Their findings make clear the extent to which empty rhetoric from every direction (emanating most loudly from industry's puppet organizations and from neo-liberal politicians or think tanks) has been allowed to dominate the debate. This book is so solidly documented that it does not make for easy reading, but that reading will be rewarded. If in the coming years society is to rethink these matters, to identify truly valid interests in the pharmaceutical field, and to strike a fair balance betweenthem, with the genuine needs of the individual consumer and patient ever in the foreground,

this is the way to do it. - Graham Dukes, External Professor of Drug Policy Studies, University of Oslo, Norway

Davis and Abraham provide new insights into how the neo-liberal regime that has developed since the 1980s has profoundly l#"