Drug giants scent gold in those transgender teens
by Jules Gomes:
I began peddling drugs at the age of 17. I wasn’t pushing two-bit dinky drugs like cannabis or heroin. I was into the big league. I worked for the pharmaceutical industry. After attending early-morning lectures at the University of Bombay on Wittgenstein’s aesthetics, Shakespeare’s sonnets and James Joyce’s Ulysses (you need LSD to comprehend Joyce), I’d dart off to Mumbai’s Dawa Bazaar (Medicine Market) in Princess Street and fill my bags with an assortment of drugs for my pharmacy in Mumbai’s suburbs.
It was ‘open all hours’ and I was Granville to Mr Arkwright. We even had a correspondingly proportioned Nurse Gladys Emmanuel in the wings. My moment of epiphany arrived when I saw our poorest customers popping in three times a week to buy the cough syrup Benadryl. In one go, they’d down the bottle. Benadryl contained chloroform. It was far cheaper than booze. You could get inebriated on a small bottle and attain nirvana for a couple of days.
It was like the plot of a John Grisham novel. Big Pharma lubricated the palms of the Food and Drug Administration to license thousands of needless new drug formulations, gave sweeties to doctors to prescribe the drugs and gave pharmacists incentives to push the pills and potions. When customers came in and stated their illness, Mr Arkwright told me that I was to sell them the brand that gave us the most commission.
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