Word: burack
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...Richard Burack--the Harvard physician who exposed the drug pricing hoax--is no Ralph Nader. Despite the comparison Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D.-Wisc.) made on the Senate floor two weeks ago, Burack is not a full-fledged muckraker--not yet. He does not want to do battle with the big drug companies; his book does not directly blast them for reaping exorbitant profits on brand name drugs. And Burack tries to be as calm and full of understatement as his book. "My business is education," he says. "I have nothing against these firms; they are trying to make a profit...
...there are signs that now--just three weeks after The Handbook of Prescription Drugs went on sale--Burack is getting impatient with his role as the tolerant doctor. In a rare moment of confidentiality during an interview last week, he leaned over and said, "You know, between you and me, it's silly to pussyfoot around here. I think it's time to clean this thing up right...
...Burack won't have to feel impatient much longer. A Senate investigation into drug pricing will begin next week and Gov. John A. Volpe has already called for one in Masachusetts. And some thing may come out of these hearings, something more productive than the Kefauver investigations on monopoly drug pricing, because now for the first time, everyone will know that brand name drugs cost two to twenty times as much as their generic equivalent. Burack's book will at last let the public in on what pharmacists and many physicians have known for years...
...interview Burack says very little that isn't in the Handbook. And he doesn't have to. "It's all in the book," he says, waving around the little blue paperback like a fundamentalist minister displaying his Bible. The bulk of the book is an 85-page series of lists of basic prescription drugs--what they do and how much they cost--with comparative prices of brand name drugs and their generic equivalents...
...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...