Status Updates From Empire of Pain: The Secret ...

1st-Medications for schizophrenia working > magic bullet for all conditions 2nd-Corporate collusion where he gives 1/2 his stock to ex-wive in divorce settlement so he looks to have less monetary control of market (plausible deniability) & stays behind the scenes and he held a clandestine majority stake in his biggest “rival” LW Frollic where they split the pharma market where no conflict of interest occurred.

The link between power and antisemitism is striking. When he’s criticized for blindly trusting doctors at the Congressional hearing, a member’s “merchants of Venice” comment lets antisemitism overshadow the real issue. The same pattern shows up at his ad firm, employing Jews, yet using that fact to exert control by implying it’s the only place they’ll be respected.

He literally made the vocabulary of modern pharmaceuticals: terramycin (medicine of the earth), broad vs narrow-spectrum drugs (used to treat multiple vs single aliments

Physicians are gods and that makes him amongst those ranks. As a physician you feel you can only trust and listen to each other and thereby medical journals and peer endorsements are the best vehicles of sales.

WAIT so Arthur S. Sackler not only started the opioid epidemic with OxyContin but literally started the idea of drugs as marketable products and that direct sales to physicians should be the main market. This shows how American the topic of this book is, where the drug ads are mainly only found in the US.

It’s an interesting listen (I’ve gotten this one on audio), and I have just enough knowledge to not be totally lost.