Sambal

Here’s the deal: $600k/yr, nice office, nice title, responsibilities on paper but not in practice, no employees to supervise, no boss to report to, nothing to do but hold press conferences lambasting your employer and whine to the media about your internet connection. Job security? Sounds near absolute — good thing too, given the likelihood of difficulties finding another job. (”Sure, I’m a whackjob, and sued the heck out of my two previous employers, but hey, I won. You like to hire winners, don’t you?”) The NY Times has the story.

Update: Here’s the link to the Amazon book review mentioned in the article: scroll down to the first reader review. Also check out the discussion on Derek Lowe’s Pipeline — I’d have to say that Lowe and Rost agree more than they disagree. Also interesting is the “other reviews” section for Peter Rost on Amazon: a couple of books about drugs, a book about taxes and the superrich, and a book extolling the selfless virtue of whistleblowers and their lawyers. Hm!

Even more: check out his Senate testimony. I’m almost convinced, but still maintain my fret that US reimportation of Canadian drugs would just lead to higher prices for Canadians. Of course, the whole economic advantage of reimportation has by now probably been destroyed by the collapse of the US dollar. Before the wars, a USD bought 1.65 Canadian sheckels, now you get one and a quarter, and lots of people think it’s going lower. If China and Japan get worried about the giant USD reserves they’re building up, and slow their purchases or even start to sell, there’s not really a lot of brakes on the fall. With the euro as a potential competing reserve currency, there’s no guarantee that the peoples of the world have to accept, as a permanent state of affairs, USD getting crammed down their throats in terms of a current account deficit. To get back to pharmaceuticals, this could even shift the balance of the US consumer as the sole source of profits for funding of R&D. Also see this.

So what does the collective wisdom of Slashdot have to say about environmental charges and hardware reuse?

Very very long, and hard to explain, but very funny. Just go read it.

I know, I know: France and the Netherlands saying no, Deep Throat coming out of the closet, he-said-she-said about the Koran in the toilet, and here I am talking about accounting. Arthur Andersen, after many long years, has finally been acquitted. Am I the only one to remember this and care?

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Slate has a piece on the misunderstood business of pharmaceutical sales and promotion. It’s actually not all bad. There are a few howlers, of course. It’s scrip, not “script”, naproxen, not “naproxyn”, pharma marketing expenses are wildly overstated because free samples are booked at full retail price, not the pennies-per-pill cost to the company, and the COX-2 story is far more complicated than the MSM even seems to hint at. Still, it does a good job at discussing what pharmaceutical reps do, and more importantly, how their outcomes get measured. Database fans will note that the essential operation is a join, carried out on data acquired at great cost from disparate sources, none of which in itself seems to be particularly questionable, but the combination of which is highly useful. Intelligence gathering at its finest, and it tells you what tactics work on which doctors.

In other drug sales news, I learned today that Lipitor, the world’s #1 drug, and the only blockbuster turning in more than $10B/yr in sales, is not in fact the world’s best selling medicine. Erythropoeitin, mostly used to combat anemia after chemo, got almost $12B in 2004 sales total divided over all the companies which sell it. Biotech has normally been thought of as the poor stepsister to pharma, and overall it still is, but things are coming along. I remember when a mere billion dollars of sales counted as a blockbuster, but I don’t think that’s true anymore.