This week on Twitter a clever impostor had a viral tweet while posing as Eli-Lilly:
Eli Lilly is a company that goes back to the civil war, A company that started like most with a pure intention to try and alleviate suffering but over the course of a hundred years turned into a monstrosity of fraud and unethical practices.
In the eyes of greedy blood-thirsty capitalists however the company is extremely successful. People know of the famous heartless story of Martin Shkreli who was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, what people may not realize is he a hero to capitalists and was actually allowed to leave prison under a judges allowance in order to speak at Harvard University about his success as a business man. Capitalists are nothing but sociopaths who are rewarded for a lack of empathy. But I digress…
Pharma bro, convicted felon and total Scum Bag, Martin Shkreli
The 1980s marked the beginning of the obesity crisis which has been exacerbated by the fast food and processed food culture we have enjoyed since WWII. The amount of sugar specifically is behind diabetes, obesity and a myriad of other health problems including a brain fog induced by too much sugar. Sometime in the 1980s we introduced sweeteners that were worse for our pancreas and gave us faster sugar spikes and harder sugar crashes such as the infamous high-fructose corn syrup and others. Coincidentally people began to balloon up in size, with big fat asses and gigantic folds of disgusting flaps of fat. The news began to address the obesity crisis in the 1990s without every admitting the actual source of the problem, and gave birth to a low-fat movement where the consumers were sold fat-free food to give them a warm a fuzzy feeling about the products they are consuming. When you take the fat out of food however, it becomes unpalatable, and so the geniuses in the corporate food industry decided to increase the amount of sugar in food.
When living a simple life with a modest diet is clearly at odds with the profit margins of corporate interests, then we get companies like Coca-Cola and McDonalds spending billions in lobbying to fund science that fits their narratives and block legislation that would set healthy food standards for Americans. The grift has always been a few news articles away from giving way to a new health paradigm. Through the years certain health conscious movements have come and gone but we have never seemed to address the obesity problem. Atkins diets, keto diets and others have attempted to change our habits but are actually fraudulent and playing right into the hands of said corporations. Eating an excess of food, but especially sugar, fat, and salt with special emphasis on sugar is to blame for the current degradation of the average American. Ultimately the idea that the consumer should be what dictates the market, this false narrative does not take into account the addictive nature of these products nor how pervasive and effective marketing to the subconscious is, humans aren’t mentally equipped to avoid these products. The only information we have about the safety of these products come from the companies themselves. It begs the question: What kind of total fucking moron can’t see the conflict of interest and what kind of self-deluded dip-shit can’t see the simplicity of the human brain. No, you are a savvy consumer that makes choices based on whats best for you and not what the other monkeys are consuming in the advertisements. It is what gives you a cheap, unhealthy and meaningless thrill. Americans are addicts.
Prevalence of Type 1 Diabetes Among People Aged 19 and Younger in the United States
So because of our inability the reign in and regulate these companies, people are fat, unhappy and riddled with disease and this is where pharma companies like Eli-Lilly and others come in. Eli-Lilly is one of 3 companies that control 80% of the world insulin production and have an active oligopoly. Insulin was discovered by Sir Frederick G Banting , Charles H Best and JJR Macleod at the University of Toronto in 1921 and it was later purified by James B Collip. When they discovered this life saving drug they immediately sold the patents to the University of Toronto for 1$, Banting famously said, “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.” Later that year Eli-Lilly and Company jumped on this opportunity and became the first company to mass produce the drug. Fucking capitalist swine.
As our diets over time began to be worse and worse and post war wealth we enjoyed began to decline, in an effort to make money and stimulate the economy we invented bizarre and unethical ways of making money such as the mortgage backed security, privatization of essential public services and the deregulation of nearly every industry including food and drugs. It took years for the public in the first part of the 20th century to fall for things like processed frozen foods, pre-made meals and other quick cheaper alternatives to old fashioned intimate traditions like cooking healthy meals at home. Within 50 years we abandoned everything sacred about the food we eat and opted for corporations to feed us whatever fodder they could produce cheaply. Surprise, Surprise: These companies, under the mantra of exponential growth decided that not only would we feed people the equivalent of dog shit but also lobby against the regulation of said dog shit. This is why today we have soda machines in high schools and sadly obese and unhealthy human beings throwing temper tantrums in fast-food franchises. They have us by the balls and we are not capable of saying no to the burger and soda. On average in the United States you can find two McDonalds before you can find a grocery store, and sometimes, in the case of Wal-Mart, There is a Mcdonalds right in the front before you can even make it to the produce section.
Eli Lilly is not just the hoarder of life saving insulin. They also have a pharmaceutical cornucopia of drugs with questionable purposes and a long rap sheet of criminal wrong-doing. In the case of Zyprexa, they plead guilty to fraud in hiding the dangers of the side effects and also illegal marketing practices by doing what many companies do which is going “off label” and prescribing drugs for pretty much any reason. This is common practice for pharma companies as well as kickbacks and spending more on marketing and sales techniques than actual research and development for drugs. The Pharma companies are crafting dozens of dangerous and pointless drugs from start to finish with making money in mind, and at no point has the general public seen the picture clearly enough to stop these disgusting and deceptive business practices.
Most Pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than research and development
When Eli Lilly and other companies ran out of diseases to mitigate the symptoms of they began inventing diseases and other issues to “solve”. In the case of anti-depressants we never stop to think it might be that the modern world is taking away our happiness and giving us a lack of purpose. In a capitalist hell hole the only cure for the unnatural effects of technology, is more technology in the form of mind-bending drugs. Prozac was the first of its kind and in the 1990s was also the first era where commercials for drugs like this first were normalized. “Ask your doctor” was a common marketing phrase that appeared in all advertisments, thus began the commodification of medicine. As well The link between suicide and antidepressants remains a subject of public and academic dispute.
The price of Insulin from 1991 to 2014
Eli-Lilly also had financial success with chemical cocktails such as bovine growth hormone which was touted as a way to boost milk production in dairy cows but in studies only showed little difference in output, but did increase the chances of infection, mastitis, and in some cases puss was found in the milk. In an apparent effort to revolutionize the food industry, the arrogance of humans insists that we continue to believe we can improve on nature with our short-sighted lust for profits and dividends. We have to ask ourselves at what point does the intersection of capitalism and essential products and services fail us, and when does the market economics fail the public and their safety concerns. Again, you would have to be a complete braindead sociopathic asshole to either perpetrate or go along with a system this idiotic.
A cow treated with bovine growth hormone with mastitis in extreme pain.
So now people are fat, unhealthy and unhappy because of capitalism and the profit motive spoiling everything sacred and pure. We want a change and are expecting corporations to step in and offer us solutions to the problems they created. Insulin is one of the most monopolized and incredibly crucial products which makes the stock price of Eli-Lilly a recession proof bet because people need insulin to not die. In turn, when 1 out of every 10 Americans is hooked on a drug they need for survival, they can charge anything they want and in essence have an enslaved proletariat working class. The meat, dairy and sugar industries that make us sick are subsidized while healthcare and medicine comes with the heftiest price in the developed world. Capitalism is selling you poison and price gouging you when you ask them to sell you antidote (which may or may not work).
Check out my interview with someone who understands nutrition, diets and the toxic poison most people eat.
Thanks for reading The Homeless Romantic ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.