The NHS has become a tool of the pharmaceuticals - creating a market is what modern drug research is all about. What better way to increase profits than to corner a market where no individual has to pay but The Government (i.e the taxpayer) has to keep digging deeper to support a National Sickness Service.

Many people still believe that medicine (and hence the NHS) is a noble pursuit, dedicated to curing humankind’s ills. But the reality is that ‘cure’ is passé. According to expert ‘We sometimes joke that when you’re doing a clinical trial, there are two possible disasters. The first disaster is if you kill people. The second disaster is if you cure them. The truly good drugs are the ones you can use chronically for a long, long time.’

Over the past decade we’ve seen the pharmacologizing of everyday life sometimes slyly, sometimes overtly, reshaping the normal ups and downs of everyday life and turning them into market opportunities.

The safer, less costly and more healthy ways of treating ordinary ailments are ignored or marginalized when pharmaceutical manufacturers start to colonize an area of human health. In order to build demand for their products and services they will sponsor awareness-raising campaigns to make common conditions look as severe and widespread as possible.

No longer do we seek to understand whole persons in their social contexts – rather we are there to realign our patients’ neurotransmitters.’

When the World Health Organization hold meetings Big Pharma makes sure their interests are well represented. The results are recommendations not based on the best evidence, but based on the best support for pharmaceutical treatments.

Patient groups or medical foundations – so-called ‘third-party’ organizations – are funded to participate in these campaigns, silently orchestrated by drug company marketing departments and their PR houses e.g the Herceptin pressure groups (see The Guardian articles) or the dodgy ‘Sense about Science’ run by Taverne and co.

Are we now seeing the pre-launch marketing strategy for the disease of ‘gambling’ which will include company-funded education of doctors and consumers long before a drug is launched? The job of the PR company, is to ‘beat the drum’, to use newspapers, conferences and journals to get doctors and consumers buzzing about a new ‘problem’ e.g gambling coming down the pipe and the need for more funding (sic ‘profits’) to be pumped into the social purse to meet this demand. (As Big Pharma also probably controls the assets of most of the gambling industry they can create profits from both ends!

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