Il venditore di medicine

Big Pharma scams have spread around the globe to infect virtually all societies. This film, set in Italy, offers a glimpse into the life of a pharma firm representative who is pressured into maximizing profits for his company by persuading doctors to write as many prescriptions as possible for the company´s drugs. At some point in the future, should the species survive, people will look back in shame and disbelief at how everyday life was so thoroughly and aggressively medicalized during the heyday of Big Pharma.

The story is well presented and acted but more didactic than entertaining. Definitely worth watching for those who have no idea how we came to inhabit a world in which everyone and his mother is taking very expensive prescription drugs, many of which are no more effective than placebos. Ironically, some of the pills being prescribed actually end up ruining people´s lives, either by killing them directly or producing dire side effects.

Like the denizens of the film´s fictional world, we, too, inhabit a world in which unemployed people volunteer to serve as guinea pigs so that they can pay their rent and sometimes end up dead as a result. A world where the suppression of moral conscience on the part of the drug pushers themselves is only a pill and a gulp of water away. What start as minor, seemingly insignificant transgressions grow bigger and bigger until at last the agent becomes morally despicable. This film well illustrates how corruption begins small but then spreads, seeping into all aspects of one´s life as the distinction between truths and lies loses any meaning and everyone becomes the mere means to one´s ends.