Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14829

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Publication type: news

Weissman R.
Le Carre 'sickened' by crimes of unbridled capitalism/drug cos.
The Vancouver Sun 2000 Dec 16
http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/ip-health/2000-December/000702.html

Full text:

John le Carre’s latest novel, The Constant Gardener, begins with
the murder of Tessa Quayle, the wife of a British diplomat in
Nairobi, who fell foul of a pharmaceutical giant. She was about to
expose the cynical use of Africans as guinea pigs. She died.

Here, in an interview with The Spectator offered to The Vancouver
Sun, the author explains why he is enraged at the behaviour of
multinational drugs companies, and why, as he puts in the novel’s
postscript, “by comparison with the reality, my novel was as tame as
a holiday postcard.”

By John le Carre

Undated – From my very first book to this one, my central characters – whether we’re talking about George Smiley or Justin Quayle in The
Constant Gardener – have been forced to ask themselves what they
owe to Caesar and what they owe to their consciences. Or so it seems to
me now, with the bland assurance of hindsight. In The Constant Gardener
the search for a solution reaches its summation. I seem to have written’
what the Germans would call a Bildungsroman – a novel of searching
and growing up. And the recipient of that education, and ultimately its
victim, is Justin Quayle, where in some earlier books it might have been
George Smiley. Times have changed since the Cold War but not half as much as we
might like to think. The Cold War provided the perfect excuse for Western
governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of
freedom, to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants,
and,
by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the
emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy. Which is
why many influential people in the United States, and in Russia too,
would like nothing better than to put the clock back. Bush versus Putin?
They’d love it. So would Wall Street. No more damned ecologists to worry
about: this is war. Arid no more arms control. Let’s go for it. And while
they did this – whether in South-east Asia, Central and South America,
or Africa – a ludicrous notion took root that we are saddled with to this
day. It is a notion beloved of conservatives and, in my country, New
Labour alike. It makes Siamese twins of Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher,
Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and that rich liberal Oil Boy
supposedly converted to conservation, Al Gore. It holds to its bosom the
conviction that, whatever profit-driven corporations do in the short term,
they are ultimately motivated by ethical concerns, and their influence
upon the world is therefore beneficial – and so God help us all. In the name of this deluded theory, we look on, apparently helpless,
while rainforests are wrecked to the tune of millions of square miles every
year, native agricultural communities are systematically deprived of their
livelihoods, uprooted and made homeless, protesters are hanged and
shot, the loveliest corners of the globe are invaded and desecrated, and
tropical paradises are turned into rotting wastelands with sprawling,
disease-ridden mega-cities at their centre. And of all these crimes of unbridled capitalism – some of them, like
the present oil war in central Sudan, bordering on genocide – it seemed
to me, as I began to cast round for a story to illustrate the argument, that
the pharmaceutical industry offered me the most eloquent example. I
might have gone for the scandal of spiked tobacco, deliberately designed
by Western manufacturers to cause addiction – and cancer – in
communities already plagued with AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and pover-
ty on a scale few of us can imagine. I might have gone for the oil
companies and the impunity with which Shell for instance triggered a vast
human disaster in Nigeria, displacing tribes, polluting their land and
causing an uprising that led to kangaroo courts and the shameful torture
and execution of very brave men. But the pharmaceutical world, once I entered it, got me by the throat
and wouldn’t let me go. It had everything: the hopes and dreams we have
of it; its vast, partly realized potential for good, and its pitch-dark
underside, sustained by corporate cant, hypocrisy, corruption and greed.
And it is not only the obvious sins that the pharma giants have to answer
for: the dumping of inappropriate or out-of-date medicines on people they
reckon won’t know the difference; the arbitrary overpricing of their
products, underpinned by the draconian exercise of patent rights. It is not
the deliberate widening of a drug’s specifications at whatever cost to the
patient in order to broaden its sales base – so that, for instance, a drug
that in Britain or the U.S. would be prescribed only for extreme cancer
pain is represented to Africans as a simple headache cure. It is not even
the suppression of contra-indications and side-effects, and the repeated
campaigns, supported by the U.S. government, to halt the manufacture of
generic drugs by countries that can’t afford inflated Western prices. When
the Thais wanted to manufacture their own generic drugs, for instance,
the U.S. state department threatened to impose sanctions on the import
of Thai timber. No, it’s bigger even than all that – and, in the long run, worse. The
pharmas, whether they know it or not, are engaged in the systematic
corruption of the medical profession, country by country. Do we ever think to ask our GP, when he or she prescribes a drug for
us, whether he or she is being paid by the drug company to prescribe it?
Of course we don’t. It’s our child. Our wife. It’s our heart or kidney or
prostate. And, thank God, most doctors have refused the bait. But others
have not, with the consequence, in the worst cases, that their medical
opinions are owned not by their patients but by their sponsors. Do we ever ask our governments to tell us what cash payments and
benefits in kind are on offer to our doctors from the pharmaceutical
companies – the “seminars” and “training courses” in sunny holiday
resorts, with free travel for yourself and your partner, and accommodation
thrown in? Do we ever ask our corner-street pharmacist when he hands us the
latest new-blue, all-conquering headache cure, why it costs six times as
much as a bottle of Aspirin, and what exactly it does that Aspirin can’t do?
Mostly we are simply too diffident, too scared, too lazy, too polite. Do we ever ask ourselves just why the pharmas have taken to direct
advertising, to us the public, over the heads of the medical profession? Do we ever stop to wonder what happens to supposedly impartial
academic medical research when giant pharmaceutical companies
donate whole biotech buildings and endow professorships at the
universities and teaching hospitals where their products are tested and
developed? There has been a steady trickle of alarming cases in recent years
where inconvenient scientific findings have been suppressed or rewritten,
and those responsible for them hounded off their campuses with their
professional and personal reputations systematically trashed by the
machinations of public-relations agencies in the pay of the pharmas. In
the Constant Gardener I made an amalgam of these unfortunate cases
and called them Lara. She is a chemical research scientist in Canada – hounded by the pharma giant that hired her, and by the academic
colleagues whose livelihoods, like hers, depend on its favour. Multiply those concerns by tens and you begin to understand the
corrupting power of pharmaceutical companies when they operate in
emerging countries and can delegate huge slush funds to local “man-
agers” who know how to get a drug accepted by local officials and
ministers. Doubtless there are companies with clean records. There are
even a few genuine heroes among them. But they are not my subject. My
subject – and the subject of The Constant Gardener – is the dilemma of
decent people struggling against the ever-swelling tide of heedless cor-
porate greed, and our own complacency in letting the corporations get
away with it – even, at government level, helping them to do so in the
joint names of profit and full employment. Perhaps we do indeed need a great new movement, an international,
humanitarian movement of decent men and women, that is not doctrinal,
not political, not polemical, but gathers up the best in all of us: a Seattle
demo without the broken glass. The mainstream media, I decided as I went on my journey, have failed
us completely, here and in the United States. The subject is just too
damned uncomfortable to handle; too complicated, often deliberately, too
scientific for the layman. Many hacks who should know better have been
lunched, holidayed and bamboozled into silence. Fake nostrums are
taken as gospel. For every new drug that reaches the market, the
spinners assure us, $600 to $800 million have been spent in research
and development. Yet the companies’ accounts, where they are visible,
rarely support these claims. And many compounds are acquired by
pharmaceutical companies after they have been partly developed at
taxpayers’ expense. When we read that pharma giants have donated their products to the
Third World, we think: so that’s all right then. But it isn’t. For one
thing, the
Third World doesn’t want to live on free handouts, and least of all of drugs
that have been superseded in the West. For another, we’re not talking
philanthropy but profit, business expediency and market protection. When a U.S. corporation donates medicines to the Third World, it gets
a tax break, rids itself of the cost of warehousing old stock, and saves
itself destruction costs. It also gets to look like a saint. Above all – witness the “philanthropically donated” triple-therapy
AIDS cocktail that has yet, in reality, to be donated – their charity heads
off the local manufacture of generic drugs than which, in the eyes of the
donors, there is no greater evil. To call it enlightened altruism is to do
the
pharmas a favour.

________________

Book revisits Canadian pharmaceutical scandal

A character in John Le Carre’s new novel is remarkably similar to a
real whistle-blower. The plot in John Le Carre’s new novel The Constant Gardener is
based on a Canadian pharmaceutical scandal. One of the characters in The Constant Gardener is remarkably similar
to Dr. Nancy Olivieri, a Canadian hematologist and whistle-blower of a
drug controversy. Like Olivieri, Le Carre’s creation Lara Emrick conducted clinical trials
for a new wonder-drug. In the fictional version, Emrick was testing a new tuberculosis drug
called Dypraxa, which she later discovers has lethal side-effects. She blows the whistle on her bosses and suffers professional and
personal consequence. “She lives only with the monstrosity of her case and its hopeless
insolubility,” Le Carre writes. Olivieri, a medical doctor at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, faced
a similar fate after she was hired by the Canadian pharmaceutical
company Apotex in 1993 to conduct trials for a new drug for patients with
the inherited blood disorder thalassemia. Olivieri was found by an independent review to have placed herself in
a conflict of interest when she signed a restrictive contract with Apotex
but nevertheless reported her findings. Emrick was prevented from exposing negative findings because she,
too, signed a “wretched contract.” “I trusted them. I was a fool,” the character says. Both Olivieri and Emrick received anonymous and threatening letters
after they blew the whistle and in real life and in fiction, the writer was
exposed using DNA testing of saliva on the envelope or stamp. In describing the tribulations of Emrick, Le Carre, wrote at the end of
the book, he drew on several cases: “Particularly in the North American continent where highly qualified
medical researchers have dared to disagree with their pharmaceutical
paymasters and suffered vilification and persecution for their pains.” He added: “.nobody in this story, and no outfit or corporation, thank
God, is based upon any actual person or outfit in the real world.”