The shocking truth behind drug company profits

The UK's Independent has a shocking article on how the drug company's manipulate the system to produce overpriced drugs and prevent poor countries from benefiting from advances in medications. Key points:

• Only 14% of Drug companies budgets is spent on research
• Most of the work carried out by scientists is done in government-funded university labs (paid for by your taxes)
• Drug company's spend more to develop "me too" drugs that are essentially the same as their existing patents rather than develop new drugs
• The drug companies spent more than $3bn on lobbyists and political "contributions" over the past decade in the US alone
• Virtually nothing is spent on diseases, like malaria, because the victims are poor, so there's hardly any profit

All of this is not new. John le Carré wrote a magnificent book "The Constant Gardener" about the international drug companies - it's well worth the read.