Big Pharma, Cynicism, and Truth

The 3rd International Film Festival of Uganda is ongoing in Kampala right now. I was fortunate enough to see The Constant Gardener this past weekend (for free!). A good movie about a corrupt pharmaceutical company (Big Pharma) running a dangerous drug trial on coerced Africans. Fiction, right? Can we just praise and dismiss this as an emotive, skilled, but ultimately cynical act of story-telling by a liberal, bleeding heart filmaker?

I actually hate conspiracy theories, but I'll be damned if I didn't read the following in the Washington Post the very next day: Pfizer faulted over drug trials in Nigeria. Pfizer happens to be the world's largest drug company if you're keeping track of such things. And, I'll be damned if I didn't meet a bunch of representatives from a contract-research organization (CRO) yesterday searching out sites in Africa for clinical trials of new tuberculosis drugs. It is almost enough to turn a pragmatic idealist into a paranoid cynic.

Photo: Kibera, an urban slum in Nairobi, Kenya where many scenes from The Constant Gardener took place. It is home to ~1 million persons living in rather depressing conditions. Taken 2001.