Le Carre Sickened by Crimes of Pharma

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Le Carre Sickened by Crimes of Pharma

Mon, 5 Sep 2005 11:21:45 +0100

 

Le Carre " sickened " by crimes of unbridled capitalism/drug cos.

 

http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/ip-health/2000-December/000702.html

 

 

 

The Vancouver Sun December 16, 2000

 

Le Carre " sickened " by crimes of

unbridled capitalism 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. "

 

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