The New York Times today talks about Susan Finston of the Institute for Policy Innovation who is "just the sort of opinion maker coveted by the drug industry":

In an opinion article in The Financial Times on Oct. 25, she called for patent protection in poor countries for drugs and biotechnology products. In an article last month in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal, she called for efforts to block developing nations from violating patents on AIDS medicines and other drugs.

Both articles identified her as a "research associate" at the institute. Neither mentioned that, as recently as August, Ms. Finston was registered as a lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the drug industry's trade group. Nor was there mention of her work this fall in creating the American Bioindustry Alliance, a group underwritten largely by drug companies.

The institute says Ms. Finston's ties to industry should not have prevented her from writing about those issues. Nor is there a conflict, it says, in the work of Merrill Matthews Jr., who writes for major newspapers advocating policies promoted by the insurance industry even though he is a registered lobbyist for a separate group backed by it. "Lobbying is not a four-letter word," said the institute's president, Tom Giovanetti.

But organizations like the institute, which bills itself as an independent, nonprofit research group committed to a "smaller, less intrusive government," are facing new and uncomfortable scrutiny over their links to special interest groups after the disclosure this week that the Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff had paid at least two outside writers for opinion articles promoting the work of his clients.

According to Helen Disney of the Stockholm Network:

"parallel trade in medicines is in a different league to, say, parallel trade in handbags or jeans. Why? Because the opportunities for public harm are so much greater. Parallel trade is legal in Europe but, by its nature, it opens up much wider possibilities for unscrupulous individuals to insert counterfeit or substandard medicines into the legitimate distribution chain. These fakes have the potential to do great harm to the public and yet there is very low awareness of this problem among patients or indeed among many health professionals who prescribe medicines. US patients may wish for cheaper medicines but, by granting their wish, the US government could be doing more harm than good, unless it sets very strict guidelines in place - and even then, the risks of public harm will be greater then they currently seem."

But before condemming free trade in pharmaceuticals, we should look at the facts. Yes, Pfizer says free trade is dangerous. But exactly how dangerous?

Pfizer's vice president of global security, John Theriault, argues against free trade in pharmaceuticals, but when CBS News pushed him on the question of how many cases of death or serious disease had occured because of parallel trade among Europe's 457,000,000 people, he said: "there have been none known due to this practice."

That's right, for something Pfizer denounces as dangerous, a population of 457 million people can't show a single case of anyone being harmed.

Pfizer marketing vice-president Peter Rost was fired on Thursday. Rost rose to prominence as a whistleblower and his public support for free trade in pharmaceuticals. It is reported that Pfizer has given him virtually no responsibilities for the past two years. After appearing on major US television show 60 Minutes, his e-mail and cellphone stopped working, which Pfizer says was not intentional.

Rost told a Committeee of the US Senate earlier this year: “I joined this industry to save lives, not to take them. And that's the reason I've chosen to speak out.” He carefully explained to the Committee that the views expressed were his own and did not reflect those of Pfizer Inc. His subject was “Drug Importation: The Realities of Safety and Security”. At one point during his career, Rost was responsible for an entire region in Europe where he gained personal experience with parallel trade. He observed first-hand how the free market works and thinks the industry is making a huge mistake in opposing drug importation.

In fact, Rost told the committee, that there came a time when he had lots of parallel traded drugs coming into his market in Europe, and admitted, "I was not happy about this." However, in order to compete, Rost dropped his own prices, and by doing so, he said, "I doubled sales and increased my company ranking from No. 19 to No. 7 in less than two years."

Rost advised the committee that every day, "Americans die because they can’t afford lifesaving drugs, because we want to protect the profits of foreign corporations. I believe we have to speak out for the people who can’t afford drugs, in favor of free trade and against a closed market..." Blocking re-importation has a high cost, Rost warned, "Not just in money, but in American lives."