Pharma's Pulp-fiction Profit Plot, part one It should be no secret to anyone with a pulse that we're being marketed to anytime we watch a program on TV or sit down in a movie theater. And I'm not just talking about the commercials, either. It's called "product placement," and it's becoming the lucrative rage for companies that make all kinds of products - from cars to clothes to cell phones to alcoholic beverages (but especially soft drinks and junk foods). Remember E.T and his Reese's Pieces? That was an early gem of product placement that made millions for Hershey, and all but launched a product that to this day competes squarely with perennial favorite M&Ms. Yes, over the last 20 years, TV and movie studios have started to realize that instead of hiding brand names and logos to avoid having to pay licensing fees for the privilege of using name-brand products in their shows, they can instead collect huge fees for featuring said products in their scripts - thereby offsetting the cost of special effects or marquis actors' bloated salaries. What this means is that increasingly, what you're watching on the tube or the silver screen has been written not to promote a story or an idea (or even to entertain), but to promote your interest in a particular brand of shoes, a certain flavor of diet soda, or cars made by this or that manufacturer. Our entertainment, instead of merely being interrupted by ever-increasing numbers of commercials, has BECOME a commercial. What's this have to do with your health? In a stunning quantum leap in the evolution of the lamentable entertainment-as-marketing trend of the last 2 decades, I've just discovered from some of the more obscure media sources (though mentions of the story have made the Washington Post, New York Daily News, and others) a story about an alleged attempt by a major pharmaceuticals-industry advocacy group to commission the WRITING OF A NOVEL to promote the interests of the American drug business. According to several sources, a "lower level" employee of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) authorized an outside consultant (notice how everything's handled at arm's length-you'll see why shortly) to pay a pair of first-time novelists to write a mainstream fiction book about a massive terrorist attack on the U.S... Using PRESCRIPTION DRUGS as the weapon of choice. Keep reading, it gets better... **************************************************** Why would the drug biz want a novel written that portrays their own product as a weapon of mass destruction? Money, of course. According to the latest estimates, Americans are buying around $800,000,000 a year worth of our prescription drugs from neighboring Canada. Needless to say, this is a major thorn in the side of Big Pharma in the U.S. In fact, they've long waged an all-out (but so far a losing, thankfully) war to have the practice banned at the federal level, citing "safety concerns," instead of their real motivation, profit. So now they're trying a different tack: To scare us into turning our backs on imported drugs by infiltrating our entertainment. The novel I mentioned above that one of their advocacy groups commissioned sounds like it was cooked up in a PR meeting at Pfizer or Schering-Plough. According to an NPR interview with one of the novel's two authors, the main plot points issued to them by the group were these: - Fanatical Muslim terrorists launch a terrorist attack against the United States.
- Their mechanism of terror: Tainted CANADIAN prescription drugs.
- Thousands of Americans die as a result of the medications.
What about the nerve of that plan: To use the fiction book market to ratchet up America's most gut-wrenching fear - death at the hands of Islamic terrorists - to force us to keep paying full price for their poisons? Incredible, isn't it? But what's even more unreal than this pulp-fiction plot they tried to spin into profits is the real-life plot they're now embroiled in - and which may come back to deal them a major comeuppance. All the dirty details in the next Daily Dose... Reporting the facts of fiction, William Campbell Douglass II, MD | 
