Capitalising On Human Suffering
Martin Shkreli, the CEO of a large
pharmaceutical company that recently acquired the rights to a drug used
by HIV and cancer patients, has brought the shocking callousness of
unchecked capitalism into the spotlight.
Last month, Turing Pharmaceuticals
bought the rights to manufacture and sell Daraprim in the United States.
Daraprim is used to treat toxoplasmosis, a parasitic and
life-threatening disease that affects people with compromised immune
systems.
Despite being classified as an essential
medicine which should be affordable to the general population by the
World Health Organisation (1), Turning Pharmaceuticals has raised the
price of Daraprim extortionately, from $13 per 75mg pill to a massive
$750 per pill. Each 75mg pill costs only $1 to produce. It is a single
source pharmaceutical product (2), which means Turing Pharmaceuticals is
the only company in America that has the legal right to produce and
sell this potentially life-saving drug. Patients can’t take their
business elsewhere.
Let’s really put that into perspective.
For each Daraprim pill sold, Turing Pharmaceuticals will make a $749
profit. Around 2,000(3) Americans use the drug every year, with the
average treatment course lasting around three weeks, at a dosage of 75mg
per day (4). That means Turing Pharmaceuticals stand to make a profit
of $27,258,000 from Daraprim sales every year, while the average
American earns just $27,000 a year, barely enough to cover the cost of a
three-week course of treatment.
Though most Americans who require
treatment for Toxoplasmosis will be covered by their health insurance,
some won’t, and insurance companies (too motivated by profit), will be
forced to raise insurance premiums and/or make their policies stricter
so as to avoid paying out huge sums to people in genuine need.
While most people are shocked and
disgusted by Martin Shkreli’s brutal, cold, and calculated effort to
make obscene profits off the backs of other people’s misfortune, the
business of capitalising from human suffering extends far beyond this
story.
Weapons
Another example of big business
profiteering from human suffering has been brought to public attention
recently through a campaign by Amnesty International. Until their recent
advertising campaign, few people were aware that every two years a huge
defence and security equipment exhibition called the Defence Security
and Equipment International (5) is held in London Docklands.
Essentially, this is a trade show where arms dealers can display the
latest technology in weaponry to military representatives, some from
countries renowned for human rights abuses such as Saudi Arabia. Amnesty
International, who have attended the fair a number of times, have
reported that illegal torture equipment and weapons such as cluster
bombs, leg irons, and electric shock batons have been advertised at the
event (6). The trade show, which hosted 1,500 exhibitions in 2013, is
owned by Clarion Events (7), a company that organises numerous such
trade shows, and reportedly turns over £200 million (8) every year.
While arms companies profit from torture and (often illegal) wars,
Clarion Events profits from introducing the arms dealers to totalitarian
regimes at fairs like DSEI.
War
Profiteering from war might start with
arms dealers, but that is by no means where it ends. One hundred and
thirty-eight billion dollars (9) of US taxpayers’ money was spent on
securing contracts with private companies during the 2003 Iraq war, for
services such as security, feeding troops, and replacing infrastructure
that had been destroyed during the US-led coalition invasion.
Private mercenaries played a huge role
in the war in Iraq, with companies such as the infamous Blackwater
reaping large monetary rewards for providing armed “security personnel”.
In August 2008 alone, there were 7,121 armed “private security
contractors” deployed in Iraq. (10)
The American company Halliburton was the
biggest contract winner, securing $39.5 billion (11) from the US
government in exchange for their services during the invasion and
subsequent occupation. This included a $7 billion (12) deal for
rebuilding Iraq’s oil infrastructure, a contract that would have given
Iraq’s economy a huge boost had it been awarded to an Iraqi company or
the state, as opposed to a multi-billion dollar US corporation.
What is perhaps most disturbing about
these contracts, is that many of them were what is known as “cost-plus”
(13). When a company is awarded a cost-plus contract, as well as having
all their expenses covered, they are guaranteed to be paid a certain
amount on top, in order to ensure that they make a substantial profit.
Such contracts provide little incentive for these private companies to
minimise costs. In fact, the opposite is true; they provide an incentive
for contractors to spend more than necessary, as every extra dollar
spent means extra profit.
It seems war is a profitable business.
Foreign corporations literally made billions of dollars from the deaths
of 224,000 people (14), 165,000 of those being Iraqi civilians.
Incarceration
War is not the only atrocity private companies are profiting from. Private prisons are proving to be another lucrative business.
The US has 5% of the world’s population,
but more than 20% of the world’s prisoners (15). It has more prisoners
than China, Russia, and Iran. Despite decreasing crime rates, the prison
population has grown by 721% since the 1980’s, with over 500 per
100,000 people being incarcerated in 2010 (16). The adoption of
draconian “tough-on-crime” laws by the US government in the 1980s (17),
such as mandatory minimum sentencing for minor drug-related offences,
has been a large contributing factor to the dramatic increase in
incarceration rates, with the majority of inmates serving long sentences
for non-violent offences.
The private prison industry has been
reaping huge rewards from the mass incarceration of US citizens that
began in the 1980s, when the complete management of entire prisons began
to be handed over to private corporations. Corrections Corporations of
America, the biggest private corrections company in the US, was the
first private company to be awarded a contract that covered the complete
operation of an American jail in 1984. Now CCA manages more than 65
prisons across 19 states, and in 2015, the company’s revenue was more
than $1.7 billion (18).
The privatisation of prisons isn’t
limited to the United States. In 1992, under John Major’s Conservative
government, Wolds Prison was opened as the first privately managed
prison in the UK. Under the government’s Private Finance Initiative,
25-year contracts were awarded to private companies for the construction
and management of new prisons. Of 150 prisons in the UK, 14 are managed
by three private companies, G4S, Sodexo, and Serco (19), and it is
estimated that these companies make a 7% return on their investment
(20). Privatisation doesn’t seem to lead to efficiency either; in 2013,
the Ministry of Justice (21) awarded only one private prison their
highest performance rating, while two were awarded the lowest rating and
another two the second lowest rating.
These private prison corporations are
profiting from people’s suffering. Many people in prison are addicts
serving sentences for drug-related crimes, and a large number of those
incarcerated in the US have mental health problems and a history of
being abused. In 2012, there were an estimated 356,268 people (22) with
severe mental health problems locked up in US jails.
Often such problems are only exasperated
by a punitive justice system that makes criminals out of vulnerable
people. Following release and supposed rehabilitation, ex-convicts
struggle to find employment because of their criminal records. In the
US, ex –convicts lose their right to vote and are not entitled to state
benefits, housing, food stamps, or student loans. This is a recipe for
re-offending. Imprisonment not only removes vulnerable people from
society, it makes their reintegration following incarceration very
challenging.
The rise in the business of profiting
from human suffering is a reprehensible result of a society moving away
from state ownership to an increasingly privatised money making machine
that is the globalised economy. The hands of private businesses are
reaching into the darkest corners of our world, grabbing at every
possible opportunity to make a profit. But making money from disease,
war, and crime is not only immoral; basic economics shows that a growing
market is a profitable one. For every sick person, every war, and every
crime, there is money to be made, so there is a strong motive for
businesses with interests in these “industries” to want the rates of
these horrors to proliferate. We will never eradicate disease, achieve
world peace, or eliminate crime while corporations are making billions
from humanity’s biggest crises.
What can we do?
In a world where corporations are king,
we as individuals can feel powerless, believing there is nothing we can
do to prevent these opportunists from capitalising on other people’s
pain. But small actions can have a big influence. Public outrage and
media backlash forced Martin Shkreli to backtrack on his original price
hike, though he has not yet confirmed to what extent he will lower the
price of Daraprim. As for preventing big business from continuing to
profit from war and incarceration, the first step is raising public
awareness. The facts I outlined in this article are enough to make
anyone angry and indignant, but they rarely make front-page headlines.
The next step is to put pressure on our governments and on corporations
to stop the modern-day business of war and incarceration. To raise
awareness and to make a change, we cannot work alone. Like-minded people
must come together, organise, and collectivise in order to find a
solution. Change starts with the people, not a person.
Holly Walter is an
English teacher and aspiring writer with a passion for travel and
international politics. Following completion of a Bachelor’s degree in
Psychology and a Master’s degree in Evolution and Human Behaviour, Holly
moved from the UK to Japan, where she lived for a year before moving
again to the Costa Blanca, Spain. Living abroad forced her to be more
open-minded and to take a different perspective when looking at the
world; her ambition is to encourage others to do the same through her
writing. Holly’s website is
hollywalter.weebly.com, where you will also find her blog. You can also follow her on Twitter (hollywalter0420).
