Kickass and big pharma

Kickass, the doorstop dog, discovered that the keeper was damn mad about something and was planning to “sue the bastards.” His emotional upset seemed to be tied to his watching TV, particularly the drug commercials, and at one point he—the keeper got up out of his recliner to call a lawyer but he could not find his phone.  He has been on the drug company kick since Perdue Pharm agreed to pay $180 million settlement to Oklahoma rather than defend itself against charges of promoting addiction in order to sell more opioids.  Imagine that!  a drug company paying that much money to avoid further identification with a marketing policy so unimaginably abhorrent!  Other drug companies are also being similarly targeted.  The TV drug commercials are not exercises of free speech; they are examples of corporate greed manipulating a vulnerable public that is either in pain or concerned about dying.  The TV ad cost is, of course, paid by US drug consumers who pay ten times as much as people in other countries for the same drug.  What the hell kind of representative government makes it illegal for the government to negotiate drug prices for millions in official drug purchases?  The answer, obviously, is the kind that gets hundreds of millions in campaign funds from big pharma, and allows several thousand pharmaceutical lobbyists to infect the Capital like so many cockroaches.  The keeper would mute the drug commercials but he cannot find the remote.

(See billstokesauthor.com for more Kickass and news of the novel MARGARET’S WAR.)