The Biggest Big Pharma Conspiracy?

It is notable in the West that a great deal of money is spent on expensive medical and pharmaceutical treatment right up to the end of life, often when it is strictly pointless. Relatives will expect, demand this or even litigate if it is refused. As a result the legal world may be set up as if the dying have a *right* to more and more useless treatment. The medical world will speak as if there is always another fix and health obsessives will behave as if more and more fitness can stave off mortality interminably. Doctors will sign off the drugs for fear of litigation and, of course, Big Pharma will be delighted to go along with us as the money this generates is precisely what its business machine is geared up for. Even in cases of pain (the opioids scandal) and depression (the over-prescription of SSSIs) we *demand* technological ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’ just as we demand consumer solutions to the biggest problem of all - mortality.

But, in all of this, is it a comforting question of perp and victim where we have the high moral ground of victim or are we, rather, talking about a collusion or a conspiracy in wilfully blinking at a mortality we no longer know how to deal with however much it costs us. And won’t all the Pharma execs and their families be blinking just the same and taking the pointless drugs when their turn comes so that they are conspirators on both sides of the fence, also lacking the ability to cope with the ‘problems’? Is this phenomenon entirely driven by the rapacious venality of demons or is that just a simplification that makes the complicated moral ground here easier to navigate?