[Cyrus]

[ QUOTE ]
The American consumer ... is paying the tab for R&D whilst Europe and Canada set price controls on drugs. Private European drug companies certainly exist but they're not investing billions to develop new treatments because of demand at home, but the gold mine across the Atlantic. The day that US medicine goes completely socialized will be a day for the sick to truly weep.

[/ QUOTE ]

You are ignoring the factor of greed, here. I submit that the human race is consuming far more drugs than are actually needed, as a whole, and I mean far, far more!

I further submit that this excess is more pronounced in the United States than in the other industrialised democracies.

If pharmaceutical companies have a market to plunder, in Europe or America, they will go right ahead and do it. Why are you surprised or upset that the European pharmas are getting rich by giving the American consumers the fix they crave? If the drug habit was more pronounced in Europe than in America, the argument against "greedy Americans riding off the bak of Europeans" would be equally meaningless.

The problem is too much drug use.

Pharmas create demand, control R&D, promote incessantly higher drug use, corrupt MDs into promoting drug use (sometimes to the detriment of the patient's health), maintain expansive, possessive and aggressive networks of salesmen & distributors -- and they over-price like street drug dealers.

...Those guys are a cinch to take over the heroin, crack and cocaine trade when it will be legalised! They wrote the book.