Tag Archives: humanity

If a pharma company had discovered alcohol

Imagine if alcohol had been discovered by a pharmaceutical company.

This is what I imagine.

A chemical called ethanol was discovered by scientists at a leading, global, pharmaceutical company.

It seems to be very effective at reducing anxiety and aiding sleep. In trials nothing turns up to prevent it going to market.

Only when it has been on the market for a while do they discover that at high doses it has a very different effect. It makes people incoherent, tense and aggressive. Worse than that it irritates the stomach, causes dehydration and leads to severe headache.

Subsequently it is discovered that in overdose it can be fatal and long term use causes brain, skin and liver damage.

The nail in the coffin is when they discover it is also highly addictive.

The pharmaceutical company withdraws the drug from the market but the damage is done. Hundreds of thousands of people sue the company and the costs become so enormous the company has no choice but to close.

It goes down as the most dangerous drug ever licensed by the pharmaceutical industry. The result is all future trials are faced with new regulation to prevent the same mistake ever happening again.

Could this have ever happened? I think it could.

The trouble with capitalism

Capitalism rewards those that don’t really deserve reward. It allows the power hungry, the megalomaniacs, the overcompetitive, the uncaring and the psychopaths to the top, to succeed and to be rewarded.
You can argue that it works, that it delivers an overall better standard of living for the populace, that it is the best system we have tried, that the market is better than the state, that competition and survival drive efficiency and countless other economic cases.
But its fundamental problem is that it rewards the wrong people, the wrong behaviours and the wrong worldview. It rejoices in inequality, in status and in a belief that unfairness is part of the human condition.
It borrows this from our tribal past, from the idiocy of religion and from a moral laziness that is no longer challenged in mainstream discourse.
Maybe it’s time to think again.