The Greening of Pharmaceutical Engineering, Volume 1, Practice, Analysis, and Methodology

Preface

In the double-barreled sense of the ancient Chinese proverb about "living in interesting times", the epoch we moderns inhabit is "interesting" indeed. Everything jumps out in the form of contradiction upon contradiction.

We are witness to unprecedented progress in technological development. Meanwhile, no less a personage than Nobel Chemistry Laureate Robert Curl can suppress mentioning that our era is a 'technological disaster' pregnant with as-yet-unknown portents.

Acutely attuned to signs of open savagery and other lesser levels of indifference and lack of empathy, we proudly assert our embrace of modern-day Enlightenment on an ever-more-encompassing scale. That said, whence the dissonant drumbeat emanating simultaneously from some of the most ardent supporters of modern European capitalism? Pope Francis insists with the greatest indignation that unfair economic structures today are devastating entire continents (like South America, his home continent), compounding huge inequalities within and between countries. As His Holiness himself acknowledged, these inequalitie themselves constitute acts of the most unbridled terrorism, threatening all while apparently not actually aimed at or singling out any one country or people over others.

Those ruling us from on high deceive others, if not themselves, that we have reached the pinnacle of human equality and democratic values. Meanwhile, cognitive dissonance is fuelled by such Nobel Peace laureates as U.S. President Obama and the Egyptian politician Mohamed el-Baradei accepting without elaboration that such rights in practice belong only to a small group. This is no longer in the realm of Noam Chomsky's "manufactured consent". This is deliberately-fostered disinformation trundled out in a form created and purveyed in Hollywood movies populated by some of the most accomplished actors of our time such as Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the eternally victimized Josie Wales in Cool Hand Luke being casually yet viciously brutalized by the Sherriff, his tormentor, who "explains" to the audience that "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

The realities rendered utterly incoherent by such twisting and reversal of roles include the news of the July 2013 military coup led by General Sisi, the US War College graduate and treacherous Defence Minister in the cabinet of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. President Morsi stands indicted before the entire world, and sentenced to be hanged as the first ever democratically elected president of Egypt. The US celebration of this latest outrage is foisted on the world in an utterly disinformed and disinforming headline: "Kerry Lauds Egypt Military for 'Restoring Democracy'".

We continuously hear about the threats to human existence that loom, while the effort to find serious possible solutions is accompanied by extremely toxic slogans developed over the last 20 years such as: 'save the planet and decrease population', and 'save the planet and plant trees', etc. While the intention may seem pro-Humanity, the complete absence of anything scientific in the foundations of these propositions . . that reduce the serious search for a truly balanced application of actual natural law to nothing but sloganeering.

Meanwhile, the sphere of human-set judicial law, outside the realm of formal science, is attacked via the same disinforming methodology. Thus, for example, revising our laws, claiming we are reaching pinnacle of justice, only to read (with a gasp) in the Washington Post that "US Court System Criminally Unjust".1

• We brag about how we have so many breakthrough technologies in medical science, resulting in record breaking profit for every new medicine, yet we discover there is no cure to a single medicine. We brag about saving children at birth and prolonging life expectancy only to discover record breaking rate of abortion and suicide (1.5 million per year in USA alone).

When it comes to the driver of modern civilization, viz, Economics, we have confronted or sided with either of two arguments that seem to have derived opposite conclusions from the same initial premises. On the one hand, Karl Marx - whose productive period extends from the 1840s to the 1880s - believed capitalism was a mug's game that must reach a day of reckoning between the wage-enslaved workforce and the owner-employers who hoarded to themselves all the value added by the workers' collective labor even as the average rate of profit continued to fall. On the other hand, Simon Kuznets in the middle of the 20th century, leader of an entire line of Nobel-Prize economists, made the case for inequality gaps growing smaller as we become more sophisticated as a human race, siding essentially with the Grand Equilibrator, extremely successful stock-market pirate, and policy god of post-World War Two Western welfare economics John Lord Maynard Keynes. As the Keynesian consensus broke down at the US-led World Bank in the 1970s, between these poles the ultimate rebalancing role would be played by Prof. Joseph Stiglitz - the profiteer-turned-'prophet', Nobel laureate economist and World Bank employee who rose to broader public fame castigating the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for offering 'remedies' that made things worse in the so-called developing economies of the Third World/Global South. Amid a steady and massive output of all manner of prescriptive policy studies and experiments, the true expertise of the Stiglitz camp and its following seemed to be the turning of slowdowns into recessions and recessions into depression.

Today, there is no consensus as to who is the Prophet and who the Profiteer. Nevertheless there are these facts to that tell us whatever we need to hear about the state of the world today.

• Data from tax returns show that the top one percent of households in the United States received 8.9 percent of all pre-tax income in 1976. In 2012, the top one percent share had more than doubled to 22.46 percent.
• The total inflation-adjusted net worth of the Forbes 400, an annual listing of America's richest individuals, rose from $507 billion in 1995 to $1.62 trillion in 2007, before increasing again to $2 trillion in 2012.
• Estimates from the Credit Suisse Research Institute, released in October 2010, show that the richest 0.5 percent of global adults hold well over a third of the world's wealth.
• Approximately one third of annual deaths in the United States, epidemiological researchers believe, can be credited to the nation's excessive inequality.
• Approximately one third of annual deaths in the United States, epidemiological researchers believe, can be credited to the nation's excessive inequality.
• In USA, non-white families make in average 65% of the white families (as reported in 2010). In the mean time, white families claim about six times the net worth of non-white families, a gap that has changed little over the past generation.
• In terms of global disparity, world's wealth owned by the richest 1% increased from 44% in 2009, slated to be over 50% of the world's wealth by 2016.

What exactly is the mechanism that has made it possible for the capitalist world to create such an imbalance? It is increasingly clear that the machineries of war, coupled with 'health care,' have become fuel for the ultimate train wreck that has become the economy. Even in the United States, the question being asked is: have escalating health care costs contributed to the huge economic gap between America's rich and the rest?

This matter is considered debatable. However, what is not debatable is the fact that, from 1999 to 2009, rising health care spending-both on premiums and out-of-pocket costs-totally erased wage gains for a typical family. By 2012, more than one in four families experienced financial burdens of medical care. In 2013, per capita national health expenditure was $9255 (17.4% of GDP). In the meantime, families with incomes at or below 250% of the federal poverty level (FPL) were more likely to experience financial burdens of medical care than families with incomes above 250% of the FPL. Families with children aged 17 years and under were more likely than families without children to experience financial burdens of medical care.

This makes the most promising section of the society the most vulnerable and the worst victim of profiteering of the pharmaceutical industry. Not surprisingly, the rates of childhood asthma, overweight/obesity, learning disability, ADHD, food allergies, seizures, autism, and overall chronic illnesses all skyrocketed as well.

In the meantime, the cost of pharmaceutical stocks have been on fire for years now. Some of the biggest income-earners are generated by drugs that supposedly help manage 'incurable' conditions. With that comes the increasing numbers of profit margin, some (Pfizer) raking in as much as 43% profit. In 2014, the average return on pharmaceutical company stocks 32% in USA as the 'addiction' to pharmaceutical drugs has surpassed that of illicit drug. Today, United States represents 5% of the world's population yet consumes 50% of the worlds' prescription polls and over 80% of the world's prescription narcotics. Then there is prescription drug abuse with reported 2 million Americans that abuse prescription pills every year. There has been 80% increase in doctors prescribing illegal drugs. This is not a coincidence and this process has a new...