Pharmaceutical research and development and the patent system.

The pharmaceutical industry routinely exaggerates its expenditures on research and development, but it does spend billions annually. But not all R&D is equally important. The patent-based system provides incentives to invest heavily in marketing and marketing-related measures masquerading as research. Innovators are rewarded with a marketing monopoly, and this drives what kind of research they do and what practices they follow to profit from their products. It is a system that creates incentives for marketing more than for research, which inevitably drives the marketing mission to corrupt the R&D process.