We’re back from a brief holiday hiatus, just in time for some heartening news to kick off 2009: As of Jan. 1, the Big Pharma companies have all agreed to stop producing and issuing the gobs of free loot—everything from pens to mugs to flashlights to T-shirts—they’ve been passing out to doctors for years.
Critics poo poo the measure as little more than lip service, a PR move that doesn’t address the far bigger issue: that the drug industry and medicine are hopelessly financially intertwined. (Want proof? Exhibits A, B, and C.) Doctors, meanwhile, brush off the idea that logo-ed pens and Post-Its could alter their prescribing habits.
Still, there’s plenty to be said for the influence of everyday objects, not to mention the power of advertising. Surround yourself with enough Burger King merchandise, and you’d be amazed at how often you start craving Whoppers. Wouldn’t the same principle apply when it comes to physicians and drugs?
(Full disclosure: RB is the child of two doctors, and our childhood desk was filled to overflowing with pens, paperweights, magnets, notepads, and countless other booty emblazoned with words like Diflucan, Avandia, and Provigil. We never went to med school, but we’d probably prescribe Lipitor simply because of their awesome mousepads.)
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Welcome to today’s heaping dose of cynicism, to start off the weekend right: Scandal has hit none other than the Nobel Prize, after it was revealed that a member of the Nobel selection committee also sat on the board of AstraZeneca, a pharmaceuticals juggernaut that will benefit from this year’s award for medicine.
The 2008 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine went to three people this year, Luc Montagnier and his (ahem, female) partner Françoise Barre-Sinoussi for discovering HIV, and Harald zur Hausen for his work on the human papilloma virus (HPV) and its link to cervical cancer.
Wouldn’t you know it, AstraZeneca just happens to have a big fat stake in two lucrative HPV vaccines.
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In case you haven’t picked up a newspaper in the past few days—or if you have, but the number of huge scandals has grown too big to digest in one sitting—a certain elite hedge fund manager by the name of Bernie Madoff has been accused of running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded hordes of the world’s most elite investors out of a possible $50 billion. The level and depth of fraud, as well as the amount of money involved, could make this the single biggest scandal in financial history.
So what path of psychology could possess someone to steal so much, so blithely and brazenly, for so long? How can white-collar criminals, who typically lack the sociopathic personality that accompanies more violent crimes, lie so much and so well to the point where reality (and astronomical sums of money) are lost?
Lauren Cox at ABC News spoke to one such (reformed) white-collar criminal to find out. Barry Minkow, who spent seven years in federal prison for a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme (which, by comparison, looks like pennies next to Madoff), had the following insight about the psychology that lies behind this level of ongoing criminal activity:
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