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Americans ' Views Of The Pharmaceutical Industry

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Americans’ views of the pharmaceutical industry slipped back into negative numbers in 2015. Gallup’s annual measure of 25 major U.S. business sectors revealed that the percentage of Americans with a positive view of the pharmaceutical industry dropped from 40% in 2014 to 35% in 2015. The percentage with a negative view rose from 36% to 43%. This leaves the pharmaceutical industry with a negative net positive rating of -8 in 2015 (Norman). This negative opinion of the pharmaceutical industry is due the recent increasing controversy surrounding pharmaceutical marketing, influence, and also over private companies who own the manufacturing licenses of various drugs that allow them to control drug prices and their availability on the market. …show more content…

The 5,556 percent price increase of a common anti-parasitic drug, Daraprim, used to treat patients with AIDS earned Shkreli the nickname ‘the most hated man in America (Pollack). Private pharmaceutical companies should not be able to set their own drug prices because this allows them to gain enormous profit over the health and well-beings of the humans it serves. Prescription drug prices continue to rise in the U.S., mainly driven by the introduction of specialty drugs. There are very little indications that costs will stabilize soon. The issue has moved back into the national political scene. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has announced he will introduce a bill that takes aim at these private drug companies, ‘big pharma.’ But in order to change the policies regarding the pharmaceutical industry, one must understand their history. The modern pharmaceutical industry traces its origin to two sources: apothecaries that moved into wholesale production of drugs such as morphine, quinine, and strychnine in the middle of the 19th century and dye and chemical companies that established research labs and discovered medical applications for their products starting in the 1880s (EMERGENCE).
Nevertheless, at the start of the 1930’s, most medicines were sold without a prescription and private companies were supplying these physicians with their requested

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