The Constant Gardener
by
John le Carré
2001
reviewed by Mira de Vries
Fiction is not my cup of tea. I simply don’t care what a person looked
like, what he thought or felt, and whom he loved, least of all when
that person never really existed. John le Carré is no doubt an
excellent novelist, but his talents are as wasted on me as a symphony
on someone who is hard of hearing. I wouldn’t have borrowed this book
from the library had not another MeTZelf member recommended it, on
grounds that in spite of its tame name, it deals with the corrupt
practices of the pharmaceutical industry in Africa. As becomes novels,
the moral theme is but a backdrop to the plot.
A different book on this subject, which thankfully says a lot more in a
lot fewer pages, is Ivan Wolffer’s
Drops Against Poverty,
subtitled,
Organon in the Third World. Organon is a
pharmaceutical company in the south of The Netherlands. Unlike most
pharmaceutical companies, which sprang up as side-kicks to the dye
industry, Organon rose out of the efforts to make marketable products
from slaughterhouse waste. Hormones are Organon’s specialty, although
that didn’t prevent it from trying to cash in on the lucrative
antidepressant market with its Johnny-come-lately tricyclic Remeron,
audaciously marketed as “not an SSRI”. (See my report on the
Triptych convention.)
Remeron received bad press in the
Dutch Medical
Bulletin because Organon was caught misrepresenting it, hushing up
unfavorable test results. Nonetheless, it continues to be sold, so
much, even, that Organon now faces a
class-action
settlement in the USA, not for all the
harm Remeron does to people who take it, but, of all things, for
hogging the
market.
In
Drops Against Poverty, published in 1983, Wolffers describes
how Organon marketed useless and dangerous hormones in poverty-stricken
Third World countries as an antidote to malnourishment in children.
This is no fiction. Wolffers backs up his claims with photographs of
advertisements and documents. Unfortunately, Wolffers wrote this as
well as all of his best books in Dutch, a language most of the world
cannot read. So I am left returning you to Le Carré's novel.
Hiring thugs to murder opponents is going a bit far, but many of the
pharmaceutical practices Le Carré weaves into the plot do really
exist. They are not conjured up from the author’s imagination, but
whispered into his ear by friends in the know. What Organon is accused
of doing with Remeron, Le Carré has the fictional manufacturer
ThreeBees doing with the fictional drug Dypraxa (inspired by Zyprexa?)
for the treatment of tuberculosis. As this disease is making a comeback
in wealthy first-world countries, a new (the author could have added,
still patented) drug for it would be a huge money-earner. However, it
is not yet
approved for First World markets. In effect, starving people in Africa
are used as guinea pigs. They lose their eyesight and even die from
it, but the company insists it’s just a matter of adjusting the dose.
The drug’s inventors turned whistleblowers are silenced with fine print
in contracts and professional slur campaigns. No, they aren’t murdered.
That honor is reserved for the beautiful heroin.
