Big Pharma’s Blockbuster Wages of Sin

     A research letter published recently in The Journal of American Medicine reveals the enormous fines Big Pharma has paid from court cases indicting them for their many illegal kickback payments to psychiatrists, physicians, and patent advocates. The Yale study found that from 1999 to 2025 Big Pharma illegally paid out over $12.5 million dollars to inflence sales of their psychotropic drugs.

     Of course, they paid out a lot more “legally” to effect a similar influence. In 2024 alone they paid out $13 billion to physicians. From 2015 to 2022 they paid $100 million to psychiatrists in research money alone. That figure does not include speaking fees, consulting fees, travel, and other payments made to psychiatrists who altogether were paid $340 million by Big Pharma in just the six years from 2014 to 2020.

     Of course, all of those figures are a drop in the bucket compared to the annual revenue Big Pharma rakes in for its drug sales…an average of $2 billion per drug of the 105 drugs studied in the Yale article. Forty-nine of those drugs brought in more than $1 billion each in one year. Those most lucrative puppies are called “blockbusters” by Big Pharma.

     And how much does Big Pharma make altogether? More than $1.4 trillion in 2022. That’s the annual GDP of oil rich Saudia Arabia or of the international banking capital Switzerland. Big Pharma’s annual revenue is almost one hundred times that of all Mexican drug cartels combined from the sale of fentanyl, meth-amphetamine, cocaine, and their other equally lethal drugs.

     However, Big Pharma’s profit margin is much less than that of the Sinaloa and their cohort cartels. The sale of legal psychotropic drugs only made about 14 percent profit from 2000 to 2018. Still, that is twice what the average, legitimate Fortune 500 Company’s profit margin is.

     The wages of sin might be death, but until then Big Pharma is making a pretty good living hooking 80,000,000 American on antidepressants.