Partially on a friend’s dare, partially in search of three science credits and partially out of raw curiosity, I have wandered into a women’s studies course this semester. A firm believer in academic freedom, I do not per se object to the political leanings of given courses or professors, and actually believe such to be the truest podium for high intellectual pursuit. But it’s difficult to sift and winnow when an overwhelmingly liberal student body gladly transforms lectures and readings meant to provoke thought into the stuff of sheer indoctrination.

In the wake of one of the most horrifying exercises in groupthink I have witnessed at the University of Wisconsin, it seems high time to clarify some frightful misconceptions about America’s pharmaceutical companies and their advertising practices.

Firstly, drug companies may be corporations, but that does not mean they are evil. CEOs undeniably take home enormous paychecks, but bread is also dispersed into the mailboxes of thousands of employees. This is the essence of a capitalist work force, and with communism having claimed an overall death toll that makes the war in Iraq look like a bar fight, it might well be time to begrudgingly acknowledge that small-government capitalism won the cold war for a reason.

More specifically, however, these companies actually work toward a common public interest: better health. By making strategic investments in the research and development (R&D) of those medications that will treat ailments currently underserved or altogether helpless, pharmaceutical companies are banking on their ability to help the population of tomorrow. Pfizer — just one such company — has produced treatments or cures for everything from erectile dysfunction (admittedly not a prime concern of UW’s women’s studies department) to depression and HIV. The company estimates each new drug to encounter a research cost of some $500 million and a development period of no less than 15 years. When drug trials prove fruitless, research companies are forced to absorb the cost. So while the second pill off an assembly line may only cost 30 cents to produce, the first normally comes at a price of a half billion dollars. And, yes, that is why your prescriptions are so expensive.

To be sure, such companies are not solely motivated by the philanthropic hearts of their board members — this is corporate America and that means that profit is almost everything. So to avoid the sort of economic losses that would serve to both put countless employees out of work and stifle the R&D process, companies must be allowed to operate in the most strategic fashion possible. If this means placing flowery advertisements on television, taking doctors to dinner, giving promotional freebies to medical support staffs or lobbying against the importation of Canadian drugs, so be it. The end result of laissez-faire treatment of drug companies is promising cures to diseases that afflict countless populations, and it would be simply immoral to stifle that market force.

Generic drugs can be awfully sexy to consumers. They take the innovations of yesterday’s labor-intensive research and package it into one neat, cheap pill. But they do nothing to work toward curing the ailment that may inflict you tomorrow and, at last check, AIDS and cancer are just two of the many devastating, uncured diseases working to render Malthus’ theory of overpopulation moot.

Canadian drugs are cheaper too. Guess where all of the money you save isn’t going. Yep, so much for the kind gentleman just diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, or the little boy just born with Tay-Sachs; Governor Doyle doesn’t care if a penny pinched equates to a life lost.

Of course, public universities and the government itself do research as well. The recent debate over stem-cell research is largely indicative of this growing national interest. But in an era where the public has overwhelmingly spoke out at the ballot boxes against the red-tape-latent bureaucracy of big government, private research must today be as supported as ever before. And even when prescriptions come from government research, the cost is just as staggeringly high, and economic responsibility dictates that it must be covered somehow.

Maybe some of my fellow women’s studies students will go on to do groundbreaking work for the government, donating their paychecks back to research funds and one day gracing the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine with their philanthropic tale of discovering a cure for Parkinson’s disease.

But for now, I’m betting on Pfizer. And so should you.

Mac VerStandig ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in rhetoric.