Big Tobacco racketeering ruling mirrors future Big Pharma prosecutions (opinion)

It has taken decades for this legal chess match to play out against Big Tobacco, and yet what we're witnessing today may foreshadow a nearly identical situation currently brewing: Big Pharma and its own racketeering behavior.

Consider the similarities between Big Tobacco and Big Pharma:

• Both are led by powerful corporations with heavy influence in Washington.
• Both sell products that were heavily pushed by doctors (yes, doctors once pushed cigarettes in TV and magazine advertisements).
• The products of both companies injure and kill huge numbers of people.
• The manufacturers of both products routinely deny their products cause any kind of harm.
• Both have been caught burying clinical trials, bribing doctors and distorting science to fit their marketing agendas.
• Both routinely engaged in anti-competitive practices designed to unfairly eliminate competing products imported from other countries.
• Both rely heavily on consumer advertising (cigarettes used to be advertised on television) to brainwash people into thinking their products are good for them.
• Both industries lack ethics or any real sense of value for human life, choosing to exploit lives in order to generate corporate profits.
• Both have been caught trying to intimidate and censor their own scientists who dared to go public with the truth about their products.
• Both engaged in deceptive advertising and marketing tactics.
• Both targeted young children in order to create a new generation of repeat customers.

In time, Big Pharma executives will be charged with serious crimes and prosecuted by the Dept. of Justice, much like Big Tobacco today. States will sue to recover billions of dollars in health care costs caused by dangerous pharmaceuticals. Doctors will someday shun promoting pharmaceuticals just as they now shun cigarettes, and just like Big Tobacco, Big Pharma will look to foreign markets to push their drugs as the U.S. market dries up.

From one generation to the next, the years may change, but the scams of powerful corporations don't. It's always the same scam: Pushing dangerous products onto people who don't need them, promoted through false advertising and the corruption of gullible scientists and federal regulators. Big Pharma is the evil twin brother of Big Tobacco, and someday taking drugs for things like high cholesterol or "social anxiety disorder" will seem just as stupid as smoking cigarettes.

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