GREED WAVES: IN DRUG WE TRUST

Source: WTF Lung Cancer.

By Gundhramns Hammer
November 13, 2013
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“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
Hippocrates of Cos (ca. 460 BC – ca. 370 BC)

There is a saying that says “No pain, no gain”. And this applies perfectly well to the pharmaceutical companies around the world. So, if there were no people with pain, there would be no gain. 

But the sad truth is that there are a lot a people with all sorts of pain all over the planet. Humans are not the only ones in pain but also nonhumans, for these end up with no home in man´s quest for no pain.

Nonhumans have their habitats destroyed, blown away by big corporations grasping and stealing the natural resources needed to satisfy the squandering demands of consumers and in the end there are only a few who do indeed have gains. Economical gains, that is.   

Remember, the more money you make, the more you spend, the more things you acquire, which means that you eventually put pressure directly or indirectly somewhere on the environment.

In other words, the more money you have, the bigger the slice of the biospheric cake you gobble up, for luxury is antibiospherical.

And the more you eat out of this cake, the less the future generations will have. We all live on borrowed natural resources which belong not only to those humans in the future but also to all of earthlings.

This in turn means you generate more trash, you use more contaminating stuff, etc., etc. (Table 1),  and in the end we all end up fucked up with a polluted environment.


Table 1. Generators and types of solid waste. Source: Hoornweg & Bhada-Tata (2012).

By the same token, if you get sick due to your overgobbling up or for any reason which is beyond your control, it means that you will go to the hospital and you will need pharma and medical products, which also means more hospital waste (Fig. 1) which eventually finds its way to the sewage system and/or the garbage dump.
 

Figure 1. Hospital waste. Photo credit: Kate Worley. Source: MWM.

So if we want to talk seriously about “sustainability”, we had better stay healthy by eating healthy whenever and wherever that is possible, for sadly finding sound and whole food has become an adventure in itself nowadays. Good fuel means our fragile bodies will last longer as well.

And at the same time, if we stay healthy and change our fucking squandering habits and keep it to the basics, the environment will become healthier and all of us will gain, the true gain.

However, nothing is perfect. Life means wearing out, entropy. We all affront hardships in our lives sooner or later. Things cannot go fine and smoothly forever, as we would like. 

Our bodies are marvels of design but if abused they will get ill. And one of the first signs something is wrong with our bodies shows at the exit highway (colon, Video 1) and/or the tailpipe (ass, Video 2) . So when sickness strikes we go to the hospital to be repaired since in drug we trust. 

                                   Video 1. Colon cancer surgery.

                                        Video 2. Anal cancer.

Sometimes the physicians fix us by simply cutting, extirpating and stitching or stapling; or with the latest drugs in the market or the newest biotechnology tricks (e.g., stem cell therapy). Thank God for that! But they may unfix us as well.

Medical doctors are no gods. A few are excellent, some are good, some are mediocre and others are damn bad, being more on the Frankenstein or Jack the Ripper side.  

So, if med doctors don´t tell you to use the right fuel (most don´t because they have never taken a nutrition course), they don´t put the spark plug in the right place or don´t use the right spark plug, the whole damn thing may backfire. 

If the bugs or disease haven´t chewed you up too much and you get to the med centre on time, they may hit the nail on its head, cure you, perhaps tell you see you next time and then you send home with a smile on your face. 

You are once again lucky the date of all the dates that come to us with no date to put an end to all of our dates has been only delayed a few more years.

But if you have been eating greasy pork chops, juicy sausages, fried eggs from concentration camps, plump turkey or chicken drumsticks, mercury-filled and radioactive fish fillets (remember Fukushima?), exotic meat burgers (dog, joey, cat, monkey, lion, camel, etc.), fat hamburgers (Fig. 2), heavily marbled ham, human chupacabragenic veal, meat (beef, lamb, horse, etc., Video 3) injected with additives and chemicals to look good or last a thousand years in the freezer, anything containing chemicals you cannot even pronounce or read, and waited too long to go the human repair shop, there isn´t much the doctors can do for you. You´d better get ready to say farewell to your folks and tell your family call the funeral home.

Figure 2. Who is eating whom in the long run? Source: Google Images.

                            

                                      Video 3. Earthlings.


However, repair spark plugs don´t fall out of the thin air. They are made at special shops called pharma corporations. Hospitals do go hand in hand with pharmaceutical companies. They have an intimate relationship. Theirs is a tight Dr. Hyde and Mr. Jekyll marriage.
 

In drug we trust: The top drug companies

Sickness is big business. According to Mullins (1988), in terms of revenues, the top 18 largest drug firms were ranked in 1987 as follows (Table 2):

Table 2. Top 18 largest drug firms for 1987. Data from Mullins (1988).

Ranking	Company	Location	Revenues US$billions
1	Merck	USA	4.2
2	Glaxo Holdings	UK	3.4
3	Hoffman LaRoche	Switzerland	3.1
4	Smith Kline Beckman	USA	2.8
5	Ciba-Geigy	Switzerland	2.7
6	Pfizer	USA	2.5
7	Hoechst A. G.	Germany	2.5
8	American Home Products	USA	2.4
9	Lilly	USA	2.3
10	Upjohn	USA	2.0
11	Squibb	USA	2.0
12	Johnson & Johnson	USA	1.9
13	Sandoz	Switzerland	1.8
14	Bristol Myers	USA	1.6
15	Beecham Group	UK	1.4
16	Bayer A. G.	Germany	1.4
17	Syntex	USA	1.1
18	Warner Lambert	USA	1.1

We can see that Merck (USA) toppled all the the big pharma companies in 1987, with a whopping US$4.2 billion (Table 2). This is a lot of bread.

However, 25 years later things have changed. There has been some shuffling of the big pharma forces around the globe. 

Why? For one thing, there has been more environmental deterioration, more contamination (air, water, soil), more junk food is consumed, etc., and as a result there are far more people sicker, bursting with cancer and full of all kinds of strange syndromes. 

As far as junk food is concerned, you don´t have to be an expert in epidemiology or statistics to see this. 

You don´t have to torture dogs, rabbits, rats and mice in the laboratory to realise that if you eat junk food your intestinal microbiota is fucked up which means your health is also fucked up and in the end you are totaled and junked. As simple as that.

So, if you eat expertedly and beautifully packed ET food, this shit will shit on you sooner or later. Your neighbour, who is also in the waiting room if life, once you are gone, he will say that you had a heart attack and croaked.


In 2012, Johnson & Johnson (USA) became number one in the block and Merck occupied a lower rank, number 5th (Table 3), with US$47.27 billion.

Table 3. Top 50 big pharmaceutical companies for 2012. Source: Current Partnering (2013).

Ranking	Company	Location	Revenues  2012 sales, US$billions	Revenues  2012 R&D spend, US$billions
1	Johnson & Johnson	USA	67.22	7.66
2	Pfizer	USA	58.99	7.87
3	Novartis	Switzerland	57.56	9.33
4	Sanofi	France	47.41	6.49
5	Merck & Co	USA	47.27	8.17
6	GlaxoSmithKline	UK	42.98	6.45
7	Abbott	USA	39.87	4.33
8	Roche	Switzerland	38.53	10.44
9	Bayer	Germany	38.23	3.03
10	AstraZeneca	UK	27.93	4.45
11	Eli Lilly	USA	22.60	5.27
12	Teva	Israel	20.32	1.36
13	Boehringer Ingelheim	Germany	19.30	3.66
14	Bristol-Myers Squibb	USA	17.62	3.90
15	Amgen	USA	17.27	3.38
16	Takeda	Japan	15.50	3.1
17	Merck KGaA	Germany	14.72	1.99
18	Baxter	USA	14.19	1.15
19	Astellas	Japan	11.66	2.20
20	Daiichi Sankyo	Japan	11.02	2.28
21	Gilead Sciences	USA	9.70	1.76
22	Novo Nordisk	Denmark	8.85	1.59
23	Otsuka	Japan	8.38	1.87
24	Mylan	USA	6.79	0.4
25	Eisai	Japan	6.48	1.25
26	Actavis	USA	5.91	0.4
27	Allergan	USA	5.80	0.99
28	Biogen Idec	USA	5.51	1.33
29	Celgene	USA	5.50	1.72
30	Servier	France	5.14	1.28
31	Shire	Ireland	4.68	0.96
32	Forest	USA	4.56	0.79
33	UCB view	Belgium	4.53	1.16
34	CSL	Australia	4.39	3.76
35	Menarini	Italy	4.21	0.22
36	Mitsubishi Tanabe	Japan	4.19	0.85
37	Hospira	USA	4.09	0.30
38	Kyowa Hakko Kirin	Japan	4.02	0.71
39	Valeant	Canada	3.54	0.7
40	Dainippon Sumitomo	Japan	3.47	0.59
41	Fresenius	Germany	3.44	0.27
42	Endo	USA	3.02	0.22
43	Shionogi	Japan	2.82	0.64
44	Purdue	USA	2.67	0.43
45	Lundbeck	Denmark	2.64	0.50
46	Warner Chilcott	Ireland	2.54	0.10
47	Grifols	Spain	2.33	0.13
48	Stada	Germany	2.24	0.07
49	Galderma	Switzerland	2.12	0.4
50	Ranbaxy	India	2.04	0.11

It is obvious that in drug we trust.

Whoever these big pharma´s shareholders are, year after year they surely get more money in their pockets to spend on whims and screw up more the Biosphere.

And the whole damn thing starts all over again. Humans are fucktards. 

Greed waves

From the above humongous figures, we can see that the name of the game is gain. Money is the only thing that matters. Anything else can go to hell. Nothing more can be added.


References

Hoornweg D. & Bhada-Tata P. (2012). What a Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management. The World Bank, Urban Development Series, Washington, DC, USA. 98 p.

Huffnagle G. B. & Noverr M. C. (Eds.) (2008). GI Microbiota and Regulation of the Immune System. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology Volume 635. Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, New York, NY, USA. 149 p. 

Mullins E. (1988). Murder by Injection: The Story of the Medical Conspiracy Against America. The National Council for Medical Research. Staunton, VA, USA. 204 p.

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