The Daily Show Takes on The Pharmaceutical Industry

This comedic exposé from The Daily Show’s Michael Che focuses on America’s most profitable “Drug Cartel”: The Pharmaceutical Industry. The most disturbing factoid in it for me, was that Pfizer actually peddled oxycontin as a “non-addictive” alternative to pain killers when it was released. Of course The Daily Show satires are meant to make us laugh, but it seems unreal to me that this issue isn’t being discussed more. The number of accidental overdoses from prescription narcotic painkillers has now surpassed that of heroin, up from 3,000 deaths in 1999 to 12,000 in 2011, reports U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But I guess the new American dream is having enough money to pay politicians to look the other way.