2012-10-19

The High Price of Quinine


Note: This is a non-philosophical post, this time. If you're not interested in a rant, feel free to skip this one!

My doctor recommended that I take quinine to help with the side-effects of the cancer treatment. If I lived in Canada that would cost less than  $20  per month. But this isn't Canada. Here in the USA it costs  $160  per month.

Why? Apparently the American Food and Drug Administration got all excited because:

Up to 53 people per year die from misuse of quinine. 

So they restricted it. Now only a few drug companies can sell it in the USA. Which means that they can (and do) charge more than 8 times the price that it would be in Canada.

How nice for them! They managed to take a drug that is as old, well-known and easy to make as aspirin ... and they had it declared dangerous so they could control it.

But hey, 53 deaths per year in the USA — that's a good reason to control it, right? No.

Those 53 deaths are tragic, but in a population of 300 million it's a negligible risk. It's comparable to the number of Americans killed each year by lightning (around 30). More to the point, though:

Did you know that good old aspirin causes over 50,000 deaths per year in the USA (due to gastric bleeding)? Yeah, nearly 1000 times as many deaths, but it's not controlled like quinine.

Even the pharmaceutical companies can't figure out a way to get a near-monopoly on aspirin.

I can't afford to pay $160 per month for relief from something that isn't actually killing me. I guess I'll just have to live with the muscle cramps and diarrhea. Or move to Canada.

My doctor has, in the past, arranged for me to get certain very expensive meds free from the pharmaceutical companies. I don't want to sound completely hostile to them. The American system does have loopholes for people in dire straits. Sometimes it all works and everything's great. But not this time.

5 comments:

  1. Canada Dry, the company that makes ginger ale, also makes tonic water which contains quinine. It's in smaller amounts than the pills, but its origins are from constant drinking and sipping to stave off malaria in high-risk zones. Maybe you'll get a twofold benefit of rehydration and treatment.

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    1. Alas, the amount of quinine in tonic water is nowhere near enough to be medicinal. The original tonic water had a much higher concentration of quinine, which made its taste appalling. Thus was born the gin-and-tonic! In my opinion, gin tastes pretty bad but it did take the edge off the copious amounts of quinine in the original tonic water.

      I calculated how much modern tonic water I'd have to drink to get a therapeutic dose and I think it was something like five bottles a day. I can't even drink that much plain water (unless I've been out hiking in the sun).

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  2. You make a very basic error in comparing the 53 deaths a year from quinine with the 50000 deaths (not sure where you get that figure - a quick google came up with 40,000 deaths each year attributed to NSAIDS, a large group of drugs of which aspirin is one) from aspirin. You fail to take into account the number of users and the frequency of use. I would guess (based on nothing) that the majority of people in the USA take aspirin. Most will take it very regularly and some take small amounts daily. But using your figure, that 50000 looks like around 0.02% of the people who take it. How many people take quinine? how often? without these figures, you can't compare the numbers in any way.

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    1. Your comment is valid, though I'm hesitant to support your guess that the majority of people in the USA take aspirin.

      I dug a little deeper and it may be that my figure of 53 deaths per year was greatly over-estimated. Here's what Wikipedia says on the subject:

      “From 1969 to 1992, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) received 157 reports of health problems related to quinine use, including 23 which had resulted in death.”

      If my arithmetic is correct, that's just under one death per year. I'm pretty sure that even placebos can produce that reported rate of death.

      It'd be interesting to get better stats so we could do a proper analysis. Then, perhaps, we'd be able to assess whether or not the "danger" of quinine is actually a business strategy by the American pharmaceutical industry.

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    2. ALL I KNOW IS SINCE DRINKING 6 OZ OF DIET TONIC SCHWEPPES EVERY NITE BEFORE BED - I NO LONGER HAVE ANY CHARLIE HORSES !!! I JUST CANNOT BELIEVE THIS WORKED ON ME.

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