UHS Doctor Discloses Drug Price Inequities

A Harvard physician has written a guide to prescription drugs which, for the first time, will enable doctors and patients to compare prices of similar drugs manufactured by different companies.

In a speech on het Senate floor Tuesday, Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisc.) said The Handbook of Prescription Drugs by Dr. Richard Burack "provides the public with what we've been needing" to crackdown on suspected over-pricing by drug companies. He compared the Handbook to Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed saying, "It tells a story that may even bemore important and I suspect it will have similar impact."

Buracek is a clinical associate in Medicine. He has a private practice as well as being a member of the University Health Services assigned to the Business School. He spent five years teaching pharmacology at the Med School.

Buracek's book, published by Random House and released this week, includes extensive tables of the prices of chemically equivalent drugs. The tables point out enormous differences in price between brand name and generic drugs. Dexedrine, for example, is Smith Kline and French's brand name for the generic drug dextroamphetamine sulfate.

Smith Kline & French has a patent on dexedrine which ran out after 17 years. Now, as Burack lists them, 16 companies make the generic product, 12 of them for $2.00 or less wholesale per 1000 5 mg. tablets. But dexedrine itself, which is chemically the same thing, sells for $22.60.

Burack claims in his book that doctors prescribe brand drugs like dexedrine because of advertising pressure from large pharmaceutical concerns like Smith Kline and French which places ads in medical journals and sends agents around to talk to physicians about its products.

The drug industry, he says, spends $600 million annually on advertising -- four times what it spends on research. And laws in 39 states make it mandatory for a pharmacist to sell a patient the brand name if his doctor orders it on a prescription. If he writes a generic name, however, the pharmacist may do as he pleases.

One pharmacist in the Square said yes-