Talking Health: Pharmanomics, With Nick Dearden

In this talk, in association with Nottingham Global Justice,  journalist Nick Dearden digs down into the way we produce our medicines and finds that Big Pharma is failing us.

Big Pharma is more interested in profit than health.  Behind the scientific breakthroughs, major companies find  ways of gouging billions from governments in the West while abandoning the Global South. But this is only the latest episode in a long history of financialising medicine – from Purdue’s rapacious marketing of highly addictive OxyContin through Martin Shkreli’s hiking the price of a lifesaving drug to South Africans needlessly deprived of HIV/AIDS medication.

Since the 1990s, Big Pharma has gone out of its way to protect its property through the patent system. As a result, the business has focused not on researching new medicines but on building monopolies. This system has helped restructure our economy away from invention and production in order to benefit financial markets.

Nick Dearden describes the problem and the alternatives.

Nick Dearden is the director of Global Justice Now. He has been a campaigner against corporate globalisation and for global economic justice for over 20 years, including with War on Want, Amnesty International and Jubilee Debt Campaign.  He regularly contributes political analysis to publications including The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Open Democracy, Red Pepper and Soundings journal.

Tickets are £4.00, £3.00 for members of Nottingham Global Justice