Antidepressant drug sales plummet as patents expire and patients flee to safer alternatives

Tuesday, April 03, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: antidepressants, drug sales, alternatives

(NaturalNews) The market for antidepressant drugs is quickly drying up as patents on long-time blockbusters like Lexapro, owned by Forest Laboratories, and Seroquel, owned by AstraZeneca, continue to expire. And because they are unable to develop new multi-billion-dollar blockbuster drugs to take their places, many drug manufacturers are ditching the antidepressant business altogether, especially as studies continue to emerge showing that antidepressants are largely useless and cause more harm than good.

A recent Reuters report appears to bemoan the fact that development of a new antidepressant drug ceased after it was discovered that the drug was ineffective. Highlighting an overall trend of failure in this area of drug development within the drug industry, the report actually positions drug companies as victims that will stand to lose billions of dollars in profits as a result of their collective failure to come up with new drug options.

According to projections compiled by Thomson Reuters Pharma, worldwide sales of antidepressant drugs are expected to drop by more than half in the next four years. While antidepressant drugs raked in $15 billion in 2003, they are expected to fetch less then $6 billion by 2016 -- and there is no indication that this downward trend will slow any time soon.

Drug-makers also appear to be abandoning research and development of new antidepressants because an increasing number of patients are waking up to the ugly truth about their deadly side effects, and ditching them for safer alternatives. One such reminder of this disturbing truth came in the form of a 2010 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which found that antidepressants are basically useless for the vast majority of people who take them (https://www.naturalnews.com/028498_antidepressants_clinical_trials.html).

Antidepressants are also exceedingly dangerous, as they can lead to suicidal or homicidal tendencies in some patients. A study conducted by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), for instance, revealed last year that its own antidepressant drug Paxil actually make patients worse off mentally, as they are more prone while taking the drug to attempt taking their own lives or the lives of others (http://www.naturalnews.com).

So rather than feel sorry for the drug industry which will have to "suffer" by taking in a few less billion dollars every year, the mainstream media and the public should be chiding Big Pharma for peddling these dangerous drugs in the first place, all the while having exploited the public all these years by charging obscene prices for them.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.reuters.com

http://www.utsandiego.com

http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com

http://www.investorplace.com