Like most folks, you dutifully rub shampoo into your hair
daily or a few times each week. After it strips out your hair’s natural
moisture and liveliness, you apply a conditioner to get that moisture
and liveliness back.
Much about modern life seems to follow this general pattern.
Mounting
evidence suggests multinational companies negligently sell products to
the public that are leading drivers of public health issues, while at
the same time another division presents the “remedy” for that same harm.
A panacea for their own poison, as it were. In this way, they profit
twice: once when they supply the cause of our ailments, and again when
we come to them for the cure.
It is clear that all is
not well in Big Pharma these days. Americans have yet to coalesce around
a plan to impose transparency and integrity on health care and
pharmaceutical companies. Meanwhile, mounting evidence suggests the
industry persists in the peddling hundreds of products each year with
dubious claims and even more dubious real-world effects — all while
maintaining stupefyingly high profit margins.
Sick and Getting Sicker
The
real topics today are corporate consolidation and corruption. There may
be no better example of this problem than Johnson & Johnson, a
corporation made up of more than 250 subsidiaries. You may recall that
the pharma giant’s talc-based baby powder is now inextricably linked to
incidences of ovarian cancer. Websites that concern themselves with
preventing this type of cancer specifically recommend omitting talcum powders from your daily constitutionals.
Fortunately
for Johnson & Johnson’s bottom line, at least one company from its
panoply of subsidiaries — Janssen Pharmaceuticals — charitably offers
chemotherapy drugs for ovarian cancer patients for a mere $2,758 per dose. You can recognize it by the marketing-friendly name “Doxil.”
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