Wellness drugs or zombie drugs - lots of choice available

Global pharmaceutical companies have self-centred men and women eating out of their palms, so to say. Over the past few decades not only are new drugs being concocted, even imaginary ailments are being covered by the media - as part of marketing strategies of the companies! One of these, candidly confessed by the chief executive of Hoffman-La Roche way back in the 1970s, was to make medicines for people who don't need them! Roche, it may be mentioned, is the manufacturer of Tamiflu, the much sought-after drug during every bout of Swine-flu. Roche's logic behind inventing drugs for those who don't need them is that the good-life-livers don't blow their fuse easily. Thus they help rake in windfall profits, and also provide a very secure market for long-term drug researchers. All this in the name of 'helping' perfectly healthy human beings! Researchers, having ties with companies that sponsor targeted seminars and meetings, have reportedly been found nicely collaborating. The BBC World Service Radio a few years ago said some researchers were caught defining a dubious disorder, which they called FSD or Female Sexual Dysfunction, to fit a designer drug that was already in the pipeline! According to the British Medical Journal, the so-called researchers have been carrying on with this exercise for many years, focusing on susceptible, affluent women, and brainwashing them into thinking their lives would be in vain if the equivalent of the male anti-impotence drug, Viagra, were not within their reach! Of course the pharmaceutical companies involved denied they had invented FSD to create a market for Viagra-type drugs for women. But the author of the BMJ article, which exposed the financial links of the researchers to the drug industry, found their outrageous claims - that 43 per cent of women aged 18 to 59 had FSD - to be proof enough of complicity in constructing an unconscionably misleading and potentially dangerous scenario. Given the drug industry's obsession with sexual function, or otherwise, one would be led to believe that human beings have not evolved much since their lives in the wild as the kith and kin of primates. Not that humans do not have their ups and downs with respect to sexual performance. But critics surely have a valid point when they say that female sexual problems were being wrongly 'medicalised' and the number of women not functioning at par was being blown out of all proportion purely from the profiteering motive. Drug makers certainly consider gullible consumers fair prey, and there are ample instances of even natural human feelings and failings being presented as diseases requiring their brand of medicine. These are in the category of lifestyle drugs which include pills for altering moods, reducing stress, increasing thrills, enhancing performance and what not - raking in huge profits, thanks to the marketing strategies of the pharmaceutical conglomerates and the ever-obliging 'want-makers' - the ad agencies and their accomplices in the form of commercial TV. The drug industry today is said to be one of the most profitable and fastest growing sectors of the world economy. In the 1990s just ten of the top pharmaceutical companies controlled some forty per cent of the patented drug market throughout the globe! The power of the drug industry is such that it can invent and re-invent as many 'medical problems' as it chooses. Even now it is reportedly using neuroscience to promote various HPE (Human Performance Enhancement) drugs - for example, to reduce boredom and anxiety, increase memory and vigilance and even induce aggression in otherwise peaceable people. Given such potential, one might well ask, are these legally operating pharmaceutical companies doing anything different from the manufacturers of illicit drugs like methamphetamines, yaba, ecstasy and other deadly mind-altering substances that are destroying abusers and their families everywhere including Bangladesh?