by Cheryl Rofer
Just a quick thought that came to me while I listened to a news story on China’s tainted heparin the other night.
This is the way our economy has been set up to work. The free-enterprise fundamentalists tell us that manufacturing companies must move out of the United States because within the United States there is too much regulation. So heparin manufacturing moves to China, where regulation is not so strict.
Without regulation, heparin can be made more cheaply in China. Without regulation, heparin made in China can have oversulfated chondroitin sulfate added to it. Some people to whom that contaminated heparin was given had allergic reactions to the contaminant and died.
Nobody seems yet to have investigated whether the oversulfated chondroitin sulfate was added deliberately, as melamine was to protein meal, to increase profits. This contaminant looks like heparin to the tests, just as melamine looks like protein to tests for nitrogen content. I suspect that this contaminant is an undesired side product from production of chondroitin sulfate joint remedy – the kind that you see advertised on television and available in health food stores, or perhaps it is the same and much less expensive than heparin.
I haven’t seen whether the investigations have determined whether its addition was inadvertent or deliberate; indications so far suggest the latter. Then the questions will be who did it and who profited the most.
The theory of the free markets, long ago discredited in other countries, is that the consequences of such actions will deter manufacturers from adulterating their products. China is now in the process of reproducing those results. It was the same sort of adulteration for profit in the United States that provoked the development of the Food and Drug Administration.
What occurred to me as I watched that news story is that the free-market fundamentalists have managed to produce at least two kinds of damage with this “it’s good for profits” offshoring: jobs are destroyed in America as well as the assurance of safety that regulations give us. And we might add the destruction of trust in our pharmaceutical companies.
Could the pharmaceutical companies have done research and development to find a cheaper way to manufacture heparin? Perhaps, but much of the research and development apparatus in the United States was destroyed in the seventies and eighties, partly by tax policies, partly by the drive for quarterly profits, and, I suspect, the assumption that someone else, maybe the government and universities, could be suckered into providing innovation.
Offshoring jobs was the easy way to go and resulted in the best quarterly balance sheets. We’ve got to change that as the primary marker of doing business.
Update (12/20/08): Looks like Chinese car parts are a problem, too.