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
Wolffers’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 heroine.
