Left Field by Patricia Nell Warren

The other day, a friend of mine thwacked her copy of the Los Angeles Times  down in front of me. “Look at that story!” she fumed. It was a special report on how drug makers kept diet and cold remedies containing PPA (phenylpropanolamine) on the shelves after an industry-funded study linked the ingredient to hemorrhagic stroke in women. The Times focused on a young L.A. woman who allegedly suffered a disabling stroke after using a remedy containing PPA.

My friend growled, “I wonder if the drug companies realize how angry a lot of us are getting over this kind of thing.”

More and more Americans have strong feelings about the seeming callousness of some drug companies over health risks and high prices of their products. In the AIDS world, outrage over prices has been building for years. In February it finally boiled over with a nationwide physicians’ boycott of Abbott products, after Abbott hiked the price of Norvir by 400 percent, to $8.57 a day. Norvir is often used in “cocktail” combinations of drugs. 

The 200 prominent doctors in the boycott are worried that Abbott’s higher price will inspire price hikes by other companies. The boycott was first sparked by five Texas AIDS doctors. The boycott group will prescribe Abbott products only if it’s in the best interest of patients. Other than that, they’ll avoid many Abbott products, not just AIDS drugs. They’ll resign from Abbott boards, refuse to see Abbott sales reps, and won’t participate in Abbott-sponsored studies. Meanwhile, prosecutors in Illinois and New York started investigating whether the Abbott price hike violated antitrust law. 

A doctor’s boycott is an idea whose time has come. Indeed it’s overdue. In recent years the growing coziness between Big Pharma and some AIDS doctors—the doctors’ reliance on free drug samples and other financially attractive perks—has been part of the reason why some doctors kept silent as corporate abuses grew.

Boycotts are nothing new on the American scene; often they’ve sparked some drastic change. In the 1960s, when black people boycotted the segregated bus system in Montgomery, Alabama, they rang in a historic court decision on desegregation. In the sixties and seventies, the United Farmworkers’ union sparked a boycott of California grapes that finally led to improvements in the shabby working conditions faced by many farmworkers. Many Americans gave up tuna, one of their favorite foods, till food companies agreed to start using “dolphin-safe” methods of fishing. Today the Chicago Sun-Times estimates that twenty percent of Americans take part in some kind of boycott.

But that was then…this is now. Do boycotts really work today? The long-drawn-out Nestlé boycott, launched in the 1970s, has yet to succeed. Nestlé still makes a fortune marketing infant formula into Third World countries, and their marketing still evades the fact that many women in those countries have to use unsafe water to mix the formula.

Do corporations today even care if they get boycotted? Recently The Guardian in England offered some sobering statistics. “Consumer boycotts cost big brands [2.6 billion pounds] a year. On the face of it, this statistic…looks like a triumph for quiet activism. [But 2.6 billion pounds]…is not a number that in itself will frighten big business. Retail sales—defined by the Office for National Statistics as stuff you take away in shopping bags—were [230 billion pounds] last year. [So] that [2.6 billion pounds] works out at a mere 4 [pence] for every [ten pounds] spent by British households.” Translated into dollars, this means that boycotts cost corporations just a few cents on the dollar. Boycotts also don’t get the media attention they used to. The HIV doctors’ boycott was kept off the top of the news by everything from the Iraq war to Janet’s nipple. 

Some big issues first raised in the sixties are still out there on the battlefield. One of them is the question of how much criminal and civil responsibility for people’s lives should be borne by big business, whether in personal health or on the environmental front. And this question comes at a time when many people are burned out on fighting, dizzied and overwhelmed by so many crises in the news. So far, for example, American consumers have bitched about the high price of gas, but they haven’t done anything about it. There are powerful people in office who believe that patients and healthcare practitioners should just shut up and do their job, which is to consume health products without question. Indeed, the atmosphere of protectionism around big business is so chokingly thick that I wouldn’t be surprised if advocating a boycott might be made illegal pretty soon—in the interests of “national security,” of course.

I hope the doctors’ boycott succeeds. I hope it leads to other needed successful boycotts. Because “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” should include the principle that an individual’s life is worth more than a few dollars of corporate profit.

Patricia Nell Warren, author of fiction bestsellers like The Front Runner, also writes provocative commentary. Her writings are archived at www.patricianellwarren.com. Reach her by e-mail at patriciawarren@aol.com.

Copyright © 2004 by Patricia Nell Warren.  All rights reserved