… to highly specialized writing — writing that has one, and only one, quite narrow, interest. This sort of writing is the very definition of monoculture. It is the essence of one dimensionality, the pure beating heart of the provincial.
This writing is But is it Good for the Jews? writing.
And you gotta love it. Who wouldn’t want the thick, murky world distilled to one obsession? Everything in the vast globe understood in terms of one mania?
Here’s a good example of the form. A Forbes writer takes on the epidemic of mental illness and psychotropic drug taking in the United States today. But exclusively from the point of view of people who invest their money in pharma stocks.
Let’s take a look.
He begins with the nightmare story of Rebecca Riley, a four-year-old killed with prescription drugs by her parents and the doctor who just kept throwing drugs at the family (her parents’ other two children were similarly medicated). The parents were both found guilty of murder. This murder, which riveted national attention to the depraved overprescription of powerful drugs in America, “may one day prove very important to investors in pharmaceutical stocks,” warns the Forbes columnist.
“[P]harmaceutical marketing executives are evidently undeterred by the law,” he goes on to note (they routinely market drugs for off-label use and routinely have to settle federal charges in the hundreds of millions of dollars — just the price of doing business for them). If they keep this up for much longer, and if nasty stories like the Riley thing keep making headlines, you might see a total ban on off-label use, and that would “cut into a major growth area for pharmaceutical companies.”
And what a growth area! “[T]he increase in diagnoses [of mental illness in America] is a boon to pharmaceutical manufacturers. The new generation of psychoactives has displaced cholesterol-reducing medications as the biggest-selling class of drugs in the U.S.” Think of the investment possibilities here! Figure you can convince say twenty percent of the population that they and their children need lifelong powerful psychoactive drugs to function! I mean, there’s no physical basis for the diagnosis, so you can go to town! It’s a can’t lose proposition.
Unless! Unless party poopers like Marcia Angell keep making noise:
Dr. Angell links the astonishing rise in diagnoses of certain mental disorders to the huge financial stakes of physicians, pharmaceutical companies and SSI recipients.
Keep talking about this, the writer warns, and there could be a “public opinion backlash” that might affect your profit margin.
But — probably not. The writer concludes on a reassuring note. We’ll probably see increases in dependency on psychotropic drugs throughout the population, thank goodness.
July 1st, 2011 at 4:48AM
Amoral is the term that seems to fit here… somehow apt for Forbes and Wall Street types. But hey, it’s a living. LOL.
July 1st, 2011 at 7:01AM
amazing how a country with so little respect for, understanding of, science worships technology as the cure-all for social woes, that shady Heidegger fellow was on to something there
July 1st, 2011 at 8:06AM
Here’s a case of marketing pretending to be science:
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/06/30/an_unethical_clinical_trial.php
Note that Lowe often defends the pharmaceutical industry– however, this case was ‘way over the line.
July 1st, 2011 at 9:05AM
MattF: Thanks for that link.
July 1st, 2011 at 1:20PM
It’s an experimercial.
July 3rd, 2011 at 11:44PM
There’s a slight rub for the pharma industry here. The government subsidizes a lot of these very profitable atypical antipsychotics. (I’ve read somewhere that 30% of Seroquel sales are paid for by the US Government through Medicaid as well as the prison system.) However, we’re rapidly running out of money for the most basic things. I remain optimistic that pharma will be seeing their gravy train breaking down.