Who is Big Pharma? Naming Names: The Big Drug Companies That You Trust With Every Pill You Take

Miami Beach is an international community: we're much more sophisticated and cosmopolitan than other metropolitan areas around the country. Still, many of us are naive regarding who is responsible for the drugs we take, or give to our kids.

And those over the counter medications as well as the prescription drugs are made by huge, for-profit corporations that more and more often are brought into courtrooms to defend against accusations that they have put profits before people.

In fact (as we wrote about last week), in a scary amount of instances that has almost become a pattern, the evildoing of these big companies has been revealed not by government inspection but by internal whistleblowing by brave employees who risked their careers (and maybe more) by blowing the whistle on bad and often illegal activities by big drug manufacturers.

Why would these companies knowingly sell bad drugs to people? Money, apparently. The amount of money these companies bring in each year is astronomical. Consider the list shown below - and this is just for the top 12 (there are many more big, big, big drug manufacturers that aren't included in this list).

Generic Drug Case Pending Before the US Supreme Court

For example, just this week the United States Supreme Court ordered the U.S. Solicitor General to provide the High Court with President Obama's opinion on whether the Supreme Court should consider the appeal of generic drug manufacturers Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., UDL Laboratories, and other petitioning companies who are urging that the lawsuits filed against them for mislabelling their products are preempted by federal law. (The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has already ruled against them, and allowed state litigation to proceed.)

The Top 12 Drug Manufacturers and Their Annual 2009 Revenue - Millions of Dollars Made Each Year

Here are the 12 biggest pharmaceutical companies in terms of money they made (reference: their 2009 annual reports).

1. Johnson & Johnson ($60,000,000+ revenue in 2009)
2. Pfizer ($50,000,000+ revenue)
3. Roche ($47,000,000+ revenue)
4. GlaxoSmithKline ($45,000,000+ revenue)
5. Novartis ($44,000,000+ revenue)
6. Sanofi-Aventis ($42,000,000+ revenue)
7. Astra-Zeneca ($32,000,000+ revenue)
8. Abbott Laboratories ($30,000,000+ revenue)
9. Merck & Co. ($27,000,000+ revenue)
10. Bayer Health Co. ($22,000,000+ revenue)
11. Eli Lilly ($21,000,000+ revenue)
12. Bristol Meyers Squibb ($18,000,000+ revenue)

The point? Here in Miami Beach - as well as the rest of the State of Florida and across the country, it's time we stopped blindly trusting the drugs we take and give to our loved ones as being effective and accurate. They are a product sold off a shelf just like any other product, and more and more often we're seeing lawsuits advancing factual claims that these products are defective and dangerous.

If you or a loved one is suspicious that a drug or over the counter medication isn't quite right, trust your gut. Call a doctor. And, if you've been harmed in some way, call a lawyer.

By Bryant Esquenazi on November 2, 2010 11:35 AM