By Amanda Painter
Today I bounced from an interview on Democracy Now! with British novelist David Cornwell (who writes under the pen name John le Carré) to CNN.com to see what the news was offering. Perhaps it’s little surprise that Big Pharma and the creation and branding of diseases (and their profitable medications) received mention in both.
In The Constant Gardener, in particular, it was quite extraordinary to go to Basel, to get among the young pharmaceutical executives in a private way, promise them that I would never tell—divulge their names, and listen to them pouring out their rage against the work they were doing, at the people who were making them do it. But they were still taking the penny, and they were still doing what they were doing. They were still contributing to the invention of diseases. They were fiddling with compounds, turn them into new patents, when they actually had no greater effect than the previous patent. They were joining the lie that every new compound put on the market cost six or eight hundred million dollars, which is pretty good nonsense when you think that many of the main health life-saving drugs that go on the market have been developed, for instance, in your own federal laboratories and then sold by some strange method to the pharmaceutical company, so they didn’t do the hard work themselves very often.
I was particularly struck by Cornwell’s mention of the rage of those he interviewed, and his later mention of what ‘corporate power’ means to him in the context of globalization in general, not just in the pharmaceutical industry: “So, ask me what corporate power means to me, it means the ability of the individual to sacrifice his own instincts, his own decent instincts, in the name of the corporation, that people will do things to—on behalf of the corporation, to a group of people, which they would never do to their next-door neighbor, so that all the decent humanity seems to be set aside the moment they walk through the corporate doors.”