It used to be used as a medicine, when medicines consisted of coal tars, snake venoms, opiates, alcohols, and all sorts of other ingredients with some very nasty results from their use.

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For instance, misoprostol, a drug used to induce labor, was approved as a Pfizer treatment for pain and inflammation, never as a medicine to be used in childbirth.

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Like medicine, drug discovery was described as something that used to be an art but now was a science, and thus amenable to industrialization, and well-positioned to reap the associated benefits: economies of scale, benefits of standardization, robust metrics, etc.

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Today, for drugs such as these that are to be used chronically, sponsors are required to show that their new medicine actually improves the long-term health of a patient.

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The drug's potential is as a medicine to decrease the risk of heart attacks, but it's going to be used for weight loss first, where considerable attention is likely to be paid to possible overuse.

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It is being billed as a "tax for Third World medicine" and the funds it will generate will ostensibly be used to help finance a new UN agency (dubbed UNITAID) being created as an international drug purchasing facility.

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