Sociological Images: Seeing Is Believing

Chart of the Week: Big Pharma Spends More on Marketing than Research Posted: 21 Feb 2015 06:30 AM PST Pharmaceutical companies say that they need long patents that keep the price of their drugs high so that they can invest in research. But that’s not actually what they’re spending most of their money on. Instead, they’re spending more — sometimes twice as much — on advertising directly to doctors and consumers. Data from the BBC, visualized by León Markovitz: “When do you cross the line from essential profits to profiteering?,” asked Dr Brian Druker, one of a group of physicians asking for price reductions. Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)