THE DRUG industry received a pasting this week — and it wasn’t entirely undeserved. MPs accused it of cultivating a reliance on medicine in the UK by over-promoting products and trying to find new markets by categorising more and more people as in need of treatment. At the same time, the real worth of drugs was left under-researched.

But it wasn’t just the companies who were to blame. Members of the parliamentary Health Committee reserved their sternest criticism for the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority, which is supposed to control the pharmaceutical industry. It failed to curb the promotion of new drugs until any adverse effects were well understood.

For you and me, there have been two results. First, many of us have been told that we are ill, when we had thought we were normal. Drug companies, for example, have been criticised for inventing a condition called hypoactive sexual desire disorder (ie, not fancying sex), solely to find a market for its libido-boosting testosterone patches. The other result is that we have been sold the idea that a drug is miraculous, only to be scared silly months later and told that it might kill us. The recent withdrawal of the anti-arthritis drug Vioxx, once hailed by doctors as safe and now linked to thousands of deaths, is a case in point.

There is another potentially disturbing example. Last August, the Government made cholesterol-busting statins available over the counter to healthy people, as part of its strategy to cut heart disease. At the time, Body&Soul pointed out that unfavourable research was being ignored.

It revealed that unpleasant side-effects such as muscle weakness were common, and some nifty statistical footwork might have been used to come up with the claim that statins reduce heart-disease risk by 25 to 30 per cent. This week, the respected Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin backed these concerns. It said that the benefits of statins were still unproven because there had been no long-term trials on the main target groups.

It’s not that statins — or other drugs — are necessarily dangerous or ineffective. But when we’re prescribed a drug, we expect to know that it is needed and that its risks have been well established. If government priorities and drug-company profits dictate otherwise, the regulatory body should be independent enough to intervene. The MPs are right to have called for a change.

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