A new study by an American sociologist reveals that 85% of new drugs released onto the market offer “few if any benefits”.

In his paper Pharmaceuticals: A Two-Tier Market for Producing ‘Lemons’ and Serious Harm, Dr Donald Light asserts that despite the lack of ineffectiveness of many new drugs their toxic side effects make them a significant cause of death in the United States.

Light said: “Sometimes drugs companies hide or downplay information about serious side effects of new drugs and overstate the drugs’ benefits. Then, they spend two to three times more on marketing than on research to persuade doctors to prescribe these new drugs. Doctors may get misleading information and then misinform patients about the risks of a new drug. It’s really a two-tier market for lemons.”

Light says the main reasons why the pharmaceutical industry produces ‘lemons’ is that they are in charge of drugs testing, they build “firewalls of legal protection” around information the harmfulness of effectiveness of new drugs, and the regulators set the bar low for drug efficacy in the first place.

Furthermore, says Light, drugs companies “swamp the regulator” with large numbers of incomplete and poorly designed trial data. “The result is that drugs get approved without anyone being able to know how effective they really are or how much serious harm they will cause.” in other words, he adds, companies “control the making of scientific knowledge and then control which findings will go to the (regulator) FDA or be published”.

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