Can money in politics kill you? Just ask one of the millions of people who took Vioxx to treat their arthritis pain, thinking it was safe, and who must now be wondering if they’ve unknowingly cut years from their lives.

Six months ago, in our book “Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? Washington on $2 Million a Day,” we wrote, in answer to the question:

“A look at what has happened at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ever since the pharmaceutical industry started pushing to loosen the agency’s process for reviewing the safety of new drugs suggests the answer is yes.”

In our chapter on drug safety, we documented how pressure throughout the 1990s from the drugmakers—powered by tens of millions in targeted campaign contributions and hundreds of lobbyists—led the FDA to approve twice as many new medications in half the time they used to take, allowing several deadly drugs onto the market where they have since been linked to the deaths of over 1,000 patients.

But the carnage caused by the arthritis drug Vioxx, which was recently withdrawn by Merck, after it was shown to cause severe cardiovascular risks, makes all these previous incidents pale in comparison.

According to David Graham, the associate director of the FDA’s office of drug safety, between 88,000 and 139,000 Americans probably experienced heart attacks or strokes after taking Vioxx, and 30 to 40 percent probably died. That’s anywhere between 26,400 and 55,600 people whose lives were prematurely ended. Even if Graham’s estimate exaggerates the drug’s deadly effects by a factor of ten, that’s still a death toll that matches or exceeds those killed on September 11, 2001.

Used by approximately 2 million people worldwide, Vioxx generated $2.5 billion a year in sales for Merck.

Though questions about Vioxx first arose in 2000, a year after it was made available in the US, little action was taken by the FDA until recently because the drug industry had so successfully shifted the agency’s priorities. Under that pressure, Monday’s New York Times reported, the FDA had “slash[ed] its laboratories and network of independent drug safety experts in favor of hiring more people to approve drugs.”

Back in 2001, Public Citizen’s Health Reform Group warned that problems with Vioxx were more prevalent than Merck admitted, and criticized the company for not doing long-term studies comparing it to older, more proven drugs. The consumer group put the drug on its “DO NOT USE” list. But the FDA only sent the company a warning letter for running ads for Vioxx that didn’t mention the fact that patients taking it had five times as many heart attacks as patients taking a different pain reliever, naproxen. Merck preferred to tout research by its own employees and paid consultants claiming that Vioxx was safe and by sponsoring talks at national medical meetings aimed at selling doctors on the drug’s value.

The Times story shows that the FDA’s failure to police Vioxx’s dangers more thoroughly was part of a larger pattern of inattention. “Dozens of former and current FDA officials, outside scientists, and advocates for patients say that the agency’s efforts to monitor the ill effects of drugs that are on the market are a shadow of what they should be,” the Times’ Gardiner Harris reported.

Since 1989, pharmaceutical makers and related health products companies have been the source of $116.3 million to federal candidates and parties, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, two-thirds to Republicans. Almost half of that money came in just two critical election cycles, 1999-2000 and 2001-2002, and was tilted even more heavily toward helping Republicans. When the dust cleared after the 2002 election, a drug lobbyist crowed in delight, “Having both houses of Congress Republican-controlled was great. Like in Monopoly, when you get to add hotels.”

A few days after the election, top drug industry executives held a “strategic planning retreat.” Among the attendees, Merck chairman Raymond Gilmartin, who has personally contributed $153,000 since 1999. The execs were no doubt talking about how to cash in on all their newly enhanced influence as Congress took up the issue of prescription drug coverage for America’s seniors.

Nowhere in the mammoth Medicare prescription drug bill that came out of Congress two years later is there any provision for increased FDA oversight of the safety of drugs once they’ve been approved for market. The bill did prevent Medicare from buying drugs in bulk, to save money, and prevents the reimportation of safe drugs from Canada. As a result, the industry stands to gain an estimated $139 billion in new profits over the next eight years.

No doubt some of that money will go to pay the plaintiffs in the coming class action suits against Merck, and other companies accused of keeping dangerous drugs on the market.

A note from our friends at the National Voting Rights Institute:
If American democracy means anything, all the votes must be fairly counted. Our friends at the National Voting Rights Institute, http://www.defendtherecount.org, are taking on that fight right now in Ohio. As you may know, thousands of Ohioans believe they were disenfranchised in this election, and the complaints about the process are startling and concerning. From shortages of poll workers and machines, to malfunctioning machines, to erroneous purges of voters from the voter rolls, to flatly inaccurate counts, Ohio's counting should be a concern for all Americans. We urge you to read more about the recount, and how you can support it, at www.DefendTheRecount.org.

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The authors of Public Campaign's OUCH! email bulletins have released a new book entitled "Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? Washington on $2 Million a Day." To read more about how big money corrupts politics, and what we can do about it, order your own copy by clicking here or ask for it at your local bookstore.

OUCH! is a regular e-mail bulletin on how private money in politics hurts average citizens, published by Public Campaign, a non-partisan, non-profit organization devoted to comprehensive campaign finance reform. Every day, we pay more as consumers and taxpayers for special interest subsidies and boondoggles because of our system of privately financed elections. It's time for a change.

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