On Thursday, the 39 drug companies suing the South African government dropped their lawsuit. Typically, they're spinning it as a humanitarian gesture, but it really is the only way to extricate themselves from the public relations nightmare their coldblooded effort had become. You can see why they've never tried to develop a truth pill.

From AIDS activists who started protesting two years ago to Nelson Mandela, who this week called the lawsuit a "gross error ... that is completely wrong and must be condemned," the public outcry had reached a crescendo the industry could no longer afford to ignore.

This, after all, is the same industry that last year spent $1.7 billion on TV ads promoting its products and painting itself as a paragon of virtue and compassion.

Ironically, it was not long after I had seen for the umpteenth time Pfizer's heartstring-tugging TV spot proclaiming "Life is our life's work" that I heard the drug companies -- including Warner-Lambert, which merged with Pfizer last summer -- were waving the bloodstained white flag in Pretoria.

That it took the world turning on them -- and three long years of thousands of people dying -- to get them to drop their suit proves that the industry's collective slogan should be "Profit is our life's work."

And lucrative work it is. Last year, according to Fortune magazine, the pharmaceutical industry was the most profitable in America by far. This profitability, however, came with a human price tag.

In a series of investigative reports that just earned him a Pulitzer Prize, the Los Angeles Times' David Willman exposed the risks taken with the public's health by drug companies in their frenetic drive for ever-higher profits. He uncovered documents that reveal how Warner-Lambert, which produced the now-banned diabetes drug Rezulin, willfully ignored evidence of the drug's life-threatening liver toxicity, and even managed to get senior Food and Drug Administration officials to disregard the warnings of their own medical experts.

This collusion between the pharmaceutical industry, the FDA and the Congressional Oversight Committee -- which more often resembles the Congressional Turn-a-Blind-Eye Committee -- is becoming deadly. Literally. Nine drugs have been pulled off the market for safety reasons in the past four years after causing more than a thousand deaths and countless serious injuries.

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