Mr. we look in depth at political topics and thinkers.

My name's Daniel Finn, and the features editor here at Jacobin,

and I'll be presenting the show.

When a garage punk band called The Other Half released this song in the 1960s.

They meant it as a euphemism for drug pushing.

Give me some energy.

Mr. Palmer says. After the opioid epidemic in the US, the mainstream pharmaceutical industry has acquired a reputation that's in the same ballpark as Mexican drug cartels.

From the HIV AIDS crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic,

pharmaceutical corporations have also been accused of profiteering

at the expense of countless lives.

Our guest today is Nick Dearden.

He's the director of Global Justice Now, and the author of a new book called

Farminomics, how big farmer has been normalised as a short hands. It's used very often in the media and in public discourse in the same way as big oil or big tech.

But to get down to more specific details, what particular corporate actors do you have in mind when you talk about

big pharma and how did they reach their current position of market hegemony on a global scale?

Yeah, so I mean some of the names are, well they've become more familiar as a result of the pandemic, so Pfizer and AstraZeneca are fairly much household names now and you've got a bunch of others that people have probably heard of too like G.S.K and Abfi.

They're the individual companies and this sector really kind of grew up after the Second World War and it was a time when

we have citizens were kind of developing new relationships with medicines.

There'd been massive breakthroughs, like antibiotics, steroids and tranquilizes slightly later that were kind of redefining our

relationship as citizens with medicines and on the back of this a bunch of

corporations that owned the rights to produce those medicines, consolidated

massive amounts of power. I mean, these companies had already been there before the Second World War,

...