Double-Think: The Pharmaceutical Industry

It is perhaps human nature to avoid facts that upset our picture of reality? We tend to find ourselves happiest when we feel in control; at our most contented when we can assure ourselves that nothing much can go wrong - we might slip off track a little, deviate from a progressive path - but so long as we, as a society, are heading for the sun-lit uplands - we're okay. This is our preferred state. 

The power of Double-Think is that even when all the evidence that surrounds you suggests disharmony, corruption, degradation and conspiracy - we'd still prefer to ignore it, or better still, attempt full-blooded to convince ourselves and others around us that it is not happening. But why?

Individuals at both ends of the spectrum: whether you are up to your eyeballs in debt and stress and family commitments - or - have the easy life, submerged in wealth, possessor of the dream job or luxuriating in the equanimity of a pleasant retirement - have little incentive for recognising and admitting disturbing facts about the development of civilisation. It adds yet more worry to the first lot and upsets the apple cart of the second.

To properly accept disconcerting truths is to apply a duty to oneself - hardly an attractive proposition! A duty to rectify if possible or extricate yourself if necessary. Most Russians are fully aware of the corruption at the heart of the Kremlin, but would rather not know about it. They free themselves from a duty by accepting it as the way in which their society is run; they ignore it, but they are aware of what they are ignoring, so paradoxically, do not ignore it at all! Brits, on the other hand, tend to either pretend it doesn't exist or argue against it's existence. 

Let us consider the pharmaceutical industry. It's a rapidly growing market. It is tarted up to represent great progress in the molecular understanding of chemistry and biology and has given us all the potential to live longer and healthier lives. Hurrah!

There can be little doubt that pharmacological intervention has improved the lot of human beings - eased pain, killed infections, treated diabetes etc. But it is a business. It is making huge profits as a business and we humans are it's market. The technology and intelligence upon which the breakthroughs in medicines are made exist outside our of the common sense scale of reality - i.e. it requires specialised skills to experiment, formulate and understand the nature of drugs, which means that we, as their consumers, basically go on trust. 

So where is the incentive to cure humans? To make us healthy? This would mean the end of business, the end of profits. They must avoid this at all costs. Pharmaceutical companies do not what a healthy society, they want a medicated society.

I don't believe this to be a contentious assertion. Shareholders agreements in the west are clear; the direction of the company must seek to "maximise" profits for the shareholders. This is pretty unambiguous. The maximisation of profits cannot be achieved without the continuation - the proliferation in fact, of a medicated society. It is an ominous spectre.

We're all on something: statins, anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, wolfrine, barbiturates, opiates, something to dampen down ADHD, OCD....

These ailments only exist insofar as we exhibit a collection of symptoms. Individuals do not become infected with depression or OCD, it is not in them. Our society changes faster than our bodies and minds and innate reasoning mechanisms can adapt to - and this has undoubtably produced some psychological reactions. When we are convinced that we have all these things, literally, we'll be on medication from birth until death, feeding the industry.

It doesn't even need to be planned, as such. It will be the result of the inherent commitment to maximising profits. It will drive, inexorably onwards, with nothing to stop it, as we all convince ourselves that the pharmaceutical companies are right, doing us a favour, and that we are lucky to have all the medicines. Progression will follow the money and the money will be made out of our increased consumption.

But the risks, at the individual scale, your life, my life - of not trusting the medicines, are too great. Emotions take over. "Save him!" We will try anything for a loved one. We know that most medicines work. At least some. Who of us thinks of the paradox of the industry, the macroscopic dangers, the evident destination as a whole, when we are dealing with our relationship with accepted medicines. We just trust. Look how many of us are saved? We've all been nursed back to health at some point.

It doesn't even come into our minds! We're not worrying about the possible manipulation of the industry; we're not thinking about how on one side of government policy we are encouraged to eat junk, then buy vitamin tablets; or how they infect modern popular culture with continuous references to sex, for younger and younger children, which leads the majority of them to readily available porn, then give the teenager an anti-depressant and mood-stabiliser combination to "cure" their strange moods. We don't consider any of that. 

We just want to save ourselves or our loved ones.

This is the trust that feeds the industry and tempts the dragon. Profits, profits, profits. It will not cease. What reason would suggest anything but maximising profits? Slow, gradual movement - more illnesses, more drugs, nothing too sharp and detectable. What else being aimed for? Human love? Kindness? Out of conscience?

Even if we let ourselves go starry-eyed and imagine that most of the individuals involved in pharmaceuticals do have consciences and best intentions - it is still profits that drive the collective. How many times do we hear of children dying of an illness, even though a medicine has already been developed, because they haven't "agreed on a price yet". 

Good intentions are very subjective, people disagree, but no one can disagree about whether one number is higher than the other. That is cold, hard fact. "Maximisation of profits" is clear cut and comprehensible whereas "running things for the greater good of mankind", for instance, can and will be disagreed upon. Thus we have the nature of the collective - it's motif, it you please - must be maximisation of profits. 

It is similar to the medical ethic of prolonging life: even if the five years you are given are wretched and the six months without the treatment may have been far more rewarding, the qualification of "rewarding" is ambiguous, whereas length of life is objective and can be agreed upon as a collective ethos - so medicine invariably chooses quantity over quality - just as policy decisions in pharmaceutical boardrooms will revolve around quantity of their profit instead of the moral quality of their service. 

It's A Roffey