DRUGS: The Double Image

To the public, the U.S. drug industry would like to appear as a dedicated, white-coated scientist skillfully brewing one wonder drug after another. But Tennessee's Estes Kefauver, chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, long has had ambitions to paint a different picture —of an industry that fixes prices too high. Last week, opening an investigation of drugmakers, the Keef got in his broad strokes as soon as nervous industry witnesses settled uncomfortably in their hot seats.

Dramatically Kefauver's staff presented a chart showing that the Schering Corp. sold bottles containing 100 tablets of prednisolone, an antiarthritic drug, to druggists for $17.90, although the cost of buying the drug from another drug manufacturer and bottling it came to only $1.57. Was this markup of 1,118% fair? Kefauver asked.

Hidden Costs. Upset by the fast attack, Schering's President Francis C. Brown hotly protested that Keef's chart —and the Keef himself—were all wrong. Prednisolone, said Brown, is a Schering improvement on Merck & Co.'s basic cortisone, is marketed by Schering under the trade name Meticortelone. Schering cross-licensed other companies to make it and bought a lot of it from Upjohn Co., at $1.19 per hundred tablets. But this price, argued Brown, did not take into account the costs for research, administration, taxes, selling and distribution. By Schering's figuring, said Brown, the 100 tablets cost $12.30. It offered the tablets to druggists at $17.90 with a suggested consumer's price of $29.83.

If people think that wonder drugs, such as prednisolone, which enables bedridden arthritics to walk, cost too much, said Brown haughtily, the problem is "inadequate income rather than excessive prices." In reply, the subcommittee staff brought out that Schering bought some hormone tablets at 12¢ per 60 from a French manufacturer, wholesaled them as "Progynon" for $8.40 with a consumer price of $14—a 7,079% markup.

In choosing Schering as his initial target, Senator Kefauver picked a good example of the high-profit potential of the drug industry. Set up in Bloomfield, N.J., in 1935 by Germans to make sex hormones, Schering had only $3,000,000 in annual sales when the Government confiscated the company in 1942, and put Francis Brown, then a young Government attorney, in charge. The Government sold the company for $29 million in 1952, and within five years its yearly net exceeded that. But success was not guaranteed. A year after the stock went on the market at $17.50, it dropped to $11 before the company developed a cortisone-type drug. Then it found two, prednisolone and prednisone. Today, counting splits, the stock is selling at $153.

Three Prices. The subcommittee needled the industry again when it produced Seymour N. Blackman, executive secretary of Premo Pharmaceutical Laboratories of South Hackensack, NJ. Blackman estimated that the U.S. public could save $750 million a year if physicians would use scientific instead of brand names in prescriptions. This year Premo sold the Government prednisone tablets at $20.01 per thousand, while Merck & Co. offered to supply them to the Government at $63.70 per thousand and sold them to druggists at $179, for a retail price of $298.