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Predatory Big Pharma
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Evil, Inc., Toxic, Inc., and the Mega-Corp discover the power of science to make people suffer, and more importantly, to make money. Especially in the US, this has become something of a stock aesop and acceptable target, generally chosen to show that Capitalism Is Bad. The rich, generally urban family, often but not always based on the real-life Sackler family, are portrayed as callous and amoral. Their Greed and materialism causes them to wish to make money off the most basic of human experiences: pain (generally the pain from injury). These drugs — most often opioids — flood towns, especially poor, rural towns, where people become addicted. It may be a Forced Addiction. Side Effects Include... will be name-dropped. They either overdose or die due to mismanagement. Other panics revolve around the misdiagnosis and wrongful medication of children or other vulnerable populations. This can result in a more "intellectual" justification to say No Medication for Me. As the links may illustrate, this is Truth in Television. Having first picked up traction in The '90s, the attitude has gained mainstream awareness and acceptance in The New '10s. Examples from before then will usually count as cases of an Unbuilt Trope, though the trope itself does have its roots in cases like the Bedlam House and the Morally Ambiguous Doctorate. Older examples were more likely to feature a singular bad apple who used their own drugs for a purpose like serial killing. They may withhold the cure or even provide Foul Medicines for more money, which can be one reason for a Healthcare Motivation. There has also been a shift from the specific to the general. While in the past, predatory pharmaceuticals could be dismissed as the work of a Mad Doctor or a Corrupt Corporate Executive, there is more recognition today of the extent to which this functions as Industrialized Evil. As such, it's much more likely to be a form of a Corporate Conspiracy, and to emphasize that these Drugs Are Bad because they're extremely addictive. However, the odd "evil pharmaceutical rep" stock villain does still exist. Dr. Feelgood will usually feature in either depiction. This is Truth in Television, but to avoid controversy, please, in-universe examples only. |
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The Third Man features an Unbuilt Trope example of an individual bad actor pulling a medical scam. The government bureaucracy in post-WWII Vienna is so tangled that the hospitals have given up on official channels and resort to buying much-needed medicine on the black market. The villain (Harry Lime) sold penicillin on that black market — then realized he could make more profit by watering down the penicillin, making it useless as an antibiotic. | |
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Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): It's implied that pharmaceutical companies are among the parties who hired Private Military Contractors to try and steal any Titan DNA samples that might be in the disused Monarch outpost, without regard for the civilians who sent an urgent Distress Call. Later, several pharmaceutical companies including Bio-Major (who've been subject to scrutiny from Monarch before) acquire a new fertility treatment originally developed by Alan Jonah from Ghidorah's DNA and greedily sell it to the public for the sake of short-sighted profits, which backfires horribly when the part-Ghidorah treatment causes the various women it's used on to give birth to the Zmeyevich. | |
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Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: "Manic" involves a school shooter who was under the influence of a new drug that had been wrongly prescribed as the consequence of a greedy pharmaceutical company. | |
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Kamen Rider Amazons: Downplayed. Nozama Pharmaceuticals managed to create artificial life in the form of the biological homunculi called "Amazons", made using cells that were predatory towards Human DNA. While the science team behind it was proud of their work, the firm's CEO was an Evilutionary Biologist and prematurely released the 1000-plus specimens into the wild before their protein deficiency could be phased out; effectively letting a horde of cannibalistic monsters (a lot of whom are Tragic Monsters Living on Borrowed Time rather than the animals he wants them to be) loose to satisfy his warped ambitions of making a new ecosystem. Nozama for its part is trying to clean up the mess...by covering as much as they can up while mercenary teams in the single digits hunt the specimens down the hard way. | |
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Hunter: The Vigil: Cheiron Group is a medical Mega-Corp in public and a sinister Creature-Hunter Organization behind the Masquerade, capturing supernatural entities — including magical humans — to dissect for research and raw materials. They're also Bad Bosses to their own agents, happily grafting them with monster parts to field-test the effects. | |
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Subverted in Contagion (2011). Alan Krumwiede tells people that the pharmaceutical industry has ulterior motives and can't be trusted, but that's because he's a Snake Oil Salesman pushing a Spice Rack Panacea for the pandemic that he just so happens to sell. While the pharmaceutical companies and the medical authorities make their own mistakes, they are presented as genuinely trying to get the pandemic under control. | |
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Euphoria: Rue has a series of extremely complex mental health problems and has been bounced around the system. Rue explicitly says that she was over-prescribed different kinds of medication because nobody knew how to handle her. This level of preexisting dependency caused her to become addicted to her father's painkillers as he was dying, before escalating into full-blown addiction as a teenager. | |
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All the Beauty and the Bloodshed: One thread of the documentary is about Nan Goldin's advocacy work against the Sackler family as part of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), which protests the mass addiction and thousands of deaths they believe to be linked to the Sackler empire. | |
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Appearing first in Grand Theft Auto 2 and mentioned offhand in GTA III, Zaibatsu Corporation are a Japanese and American pharmaceutical company and criminal syndicate, with the GTA III appearances only referencing their legitimate business. | |
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Venom (2018): The Life Foundation's biotechnology research has produced revolutionary cancer treatments and other drugs. However, they perform illegal, deadly human experimentation on Disposable Vagrants, keep Private Military Contractors to eliminate problem people, and have an Evilutionary Biologist at the helm, casting them as the main human villains of the story. | |
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In MadWorld, The Reveal is that the current televised Death Watch games were set up by the Fallmont company, who created the lethal virus and spread it to the citizens of Jefferson island to force them to compete with the promise of a vaccine, so they could terrify the world into paying through the nose for the vaccines. | |
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In The Boys (2019), the company Vought is this combined with Villain with Good Publicity, as they hold a sizable presence in most markets and have created superheroes (most notably the Seven) to take out huge threats (though they are treated more like marketable celebrities). What the public doesn't know is that Vought was founded by a Nazi who escaped imprisonment after WWII due to making a deal with the American government and creating Compound V, which (if injected into a fetus) allows a person to be born with superpowers). | |
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Scanners III: The Takeover: The pharmaceutical company itself is not inherently corrupt, until Helena kills her father and goes on a crazy killing spree, corrupting the company. However, this is really a subversion, since Helena herself is a scanner who doesn't even need to bother with your typical medical scam, other than using it to manufacture more Eph-3 for herself and her followers. Once she discovers that her mind-control powers work just as well through a satellite signal including crowds, she decides to Take Over the World. | |
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The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: In Chapter 74, a spy working for an overseas pharmaceutical company tries to coerce Kusuri into working for him by poisoning her parents and offering the antidote in exchange for her services. He threatens to shoot Rentarou when he attempts to stop him, leading Kusuri to act as a Human Shield. | |
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Supernatural: Sort-of in Season 5. It's revealed during the last few episodes that demons in Lucifer and Pestilence's employ have infiltrated a pharmaceutical company called Niveus, and they're using the company to test out a new, hyper-virulent strain of the demonic Croatoan virus, before they plan to cause a spontaneous U.S.-wide Zombie Apocalypse via distributing the virus inside swine flu vaccines across the country all at once. That being said, the company's human staff aren't depicted as evil, they've just been infiltrated by inhuman monsters without realizing it, and several scenes show their staff from warehouse workers to lab scientists to a board member all being mercilessly cut down by the demons for the sake of the project. | |
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In Final Fantasy XIV, Master Akebono is a pharmaceutical baron in Kugane. His medicines are of unparalleled quality, but he charges exorbitant prices by holding a monopoly on essential reagents entering the city, bankrupting the poor and infirm who need them to survive. He also becomes the main antagonist of the Stormblood Hildibrand quests, as he's been using the drug dewprism to brainwash a senior Sekiseigumi officer and later Godbert Manderville into doing his bidding. | |
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Torchwood: In "Reset", Torchwood investigates a biomedical research facility called the Pharm, who are secretly abducting and experimenting on aliens from the Rift to fuel their research and have caused several deaths by using "volunteers" as hosts for a drug that contained a deadly alien parasite as well as hiring an assassin to silence their volunteers. Captain Jack is revolted by the Pharm's mistreatment of the aliens, saying there's a fine line between policing hostile aliens and forcibly using them as lab rats without ethics, and he uses cyberterrorism to wipe out the company and Mercy Kill their test subjects. | |
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The Big Bang Theory: Played for Laughs with ZanGen, the fictional pharmaceutical company Bernadette and later Penny work for, which is mentioned in passing to have some rather unethical practices. In "The Romance Resonance", for example, Bernadette celebrates a potentially deadly raccoon virus passing the species barrier because it means more money for her company to develop a drug to treat it, and in another episode, she mentions experiments on death row inmates on whether deficiency of a certain enzyme stimulates fear. Downplayed since the company seems morally grey more than out-and-out evil, and is never a main source of conflict in the series. | |
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Juncture: One of Anna's targets is a pharma CEO who is revealed to have permitted the dumping of toxic waste in a lake, leading to the deaths of several children. When she confronts him, he suggests he's done worse things. | |
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Resident Evil: Umbrella, the evil Mega-Corp responsible for or at the very least connected to all of the biological and oftentimes world-threatening horrors that have occurred throughout the franchise, was using its pharmaceutical branch as a front for developing bioweapons from diseases as bad as Ebola. | |
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Old: The beach is revealed to be run by an American pharmaceutical company, who are using it in an experiment to figure out how to reverse ageing. The specific scientists are shown to be extremely affable, but the scheme has conspired in the deaths of many people. | |
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The Constant Gardener: Late in the film, Justin arrives in the Sudan via a plane dropping off vital medical supplies to remote villages. The Frontier Doctor he meets soon reveals that the supplies were donated by pharmaceutical companies for the sake of getting a tax break, and as such, most of the drugs are all long past their safe use-by-date, meaning that the entire airdrop has been completely pointless. The main villains of the film are Three Bees, a British pharma company testing the anti-tuberculosis drug Dypraxa on poor Kenyan villagers. However, the faulty drug ends up killing several test subjects, so to complete the trials on time, Three Bees opts to just bury the bodies in quicklime and stay schtum about the whole thing, intending to justify any deaths among their eventual customers by claiming Plausible Deniability. For good measure, they and their allies in the British Foreign Office are willing to assassinate anyone who knows about the deaths. KDH Pharmaceutical, the Greater-Scope Villain of the film, has predicted a major TB epidemic and created Dypraxa in a shameless attempt to exploit the imminent crisis. Earning the support of the British government by building a major factory in Wales, they're using Three Bees to carry out the trials as a buffer, and most of the assassinations are secretly overseen by KDH security boss Crick. On top of being corrupt as hell, they're also extremely fair-weather: when Three Bees becomes too unprofitable, KDH abandons their partnership and finds a new company to perform the trials — ironically turning Three Bees CEO Kenny Curtiss into an unexpected ally of Justin. |
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Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh: Curtis works for Wyntech, a pharmaceutical company that is clearly an Evil Corp. Company emails mention that they regularly pollute the environment and peddle dangerous drugs to their customers (one woman who sued them experienced liver failure and her hair turned blue). The CEO, Paul Warner, has opened a portal to an alien dimension and feeds those aliens live humans to synthesize exotic drugs for him. He's planning to market a new one that removes excess body fat but is also hopelessly addictive, apparently intending to enslave people with it. | |
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Johnny Mnemonic: The Mega-Corp PharmaKom produces a treatment for the disease NAS (Nerve Attenuation Syndrome) that earns it a great deal of money. During the course of the film, it tries to violently suppress a permanent cure for NAS that would reduce the number of customers for the treatment and its profits. | |
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Minor villain Gene Carcani and his company Carcani Pharmaceuticals in Watch_Dogs 2 is heavily based on "Pharma Bro" Martin Skhreli, where both men bought the patent to a life-saving medicine and raised the price by several hundred percent. | |
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The unnamed "corporation" in the Big Finish Doctor Who story Cobwebs is one. They essentially kicked off the plot of the drama by hiring three researchers, wiping and creating backups of their memories and holding those backups hostage, to find a cure for Richter's Disease, doing gain-of-function experiments on the virus to create an even more virulent strain to release into the wild and creating a vaccine/curative for that strain to sell at an exorbitant markup. | |
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The Overwatch short story "What You Left Behind" highlights a company called Sainclair Pharmaceuticals, which holds a monopoly over Haiti's pharmaceutical supply, using its leverage over the country to ratchet up its prices following the Omnic Crisis, leaving much of the country remaining in disrepair. Its namesake owner, Vernand Sainclair, was secretly a mole for Talon, who actually found him so intolerable that they send a crew to have him assassinated, though primarily because he's been skimping out on payments even as profits have increased. | |
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Utopia (US) reveals that The Conspiracy is a pharmaceutical company whose plan is to release an extremely deadly Synthetic Plague, Stearns Flu, that will target (and kill) children first. They will then release a vaccine that "cures" their victims (it doesn't) but will sterilize the survivors, allowing them to work with a dramatically reduced population. | |
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Side Effects: Every which way. At first, this appears to be a more straightforward story about the severely depressed Emily, who is put on Ablixa by Banks, a haughty doctor who has taken money from pharmaceutical companies, only for her to kill her husband while under its effects. It's then revealed that while Banks is taking money from Big Pharma, Emily is conspiring with her former therapist Dr Siebert to drive down and then inflate the price of Ablixa in order for them to make millions together. She killed her husband and frames multiple people for this scheme. However, at the end, Banks proves he's Not So Above It All by placing Emily in an essential permanent coma of emotional torture for framing him, scheming against him, and killing Martin all for money. | |
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Sanitarium has the doctor Jacob Morgan who is the CEO of a pharma company allegedly working on a cure for a deadly virus. When his partner Max accused him of not being interested in a cure (because treating the disease is more profitable than curing it) and attempted to develop the cure on his own, Morgan sabotaged Max's car and landed him in a coma. | |
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Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Dr. Rick Stanton mentions pharmaceutical organizations among the list of organizations and agencies that might try to poach a live Titan for resources or research material, or otherwise trade in such via the new Titan DNA black market. | |
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Dopesick depicts the Corporate Conspiracy of the Sackler family as they push to get mainstream recognition of their drugs and flood the market by paying off doctors and pharmaceutical reps. This is contrasted against cases in states like West Virginia that show the deadly effect the prescription of these extremely addictive drugs. | |
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Biotechnica from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners has more than a few shades of this, especially if the "Let You Down" video is any indication. During the video, Sasha Yakovleva learns while doing a hacking run against Biotechnica that their prescription painkiller Securicine was known to cause neurodegeneration, but that they did not disclose this side effect to the public, leading to the deaths of Sasha's mother and who knows how many others who took the stuff. This angers Sasha enough to leak the info about this to Network 54 at the cost of her life. | |
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In God of Carnage and its film adaptation, Carnage, Alan is an Amoral Attorney who believes that there's no such thing as altruistic behavior and works for a pharmaceutical company. Over the night, he's working on an apparent scandal related to a medication with fatal side effects, which Michel's mother is taking. | |
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Law & Order: It's revealed that a low-level con artist knowingly put a fake vaccine on the market, and had been warned by his own people that this could result in numerous widespread deaths. Jack McCoy decides to try him for manslaughter, pointing out that by knowingly putting out an unsafe product he knew could cause people to get sick and die, as they had no protection, he had engaged in depraved indifference against everyone who died of the vaccine, and even those who got the fake shot but were fortunate enough not to get sick. | |
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World War Z: Breck Scott is a pharmaceutical CEO who peddled a false cure, Phalanx, for the zombie virus. He is a giggling sociopath who feels zero remorse for his role in events and is proud of the fact that he made billions on a phony cure that almost certainly led to a lot more deaths (as it gave those who took it a sense of artificial safety). However, he's in the Jerkass Has a Point land, because although he's an unrepentant monster, he does perhaps have a point that the government could have stopped him (they chose not to) and that the unnamed reporter who revealed that Phalanx was phony then immediately led to the Great Panic, which directly caused thousands of deaths in the U.S. | |
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Gossip Girl (2021): Monet is the most aggressive bitch in high school and, as a reflection and extension of her bitchiness, her parents are pharmaceutical executives. | |
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Ultimate Spider-Man: Roxxon, a company with its fingers in many pies, has several Evilutionary Biologists working for them, including Sandra Miller, Nathaniel Essex, and Mendel Stromm. This is revealed when it's learned that two teenagers who were presumed dead in a car accident, Tandy Bowen and Ty Johnson, had been taken by Roxxon to do unethical medical experiments, like injecting them with dark matter to see what would happen. The result? They become the superhero duo of Cloak and Dagger. And in the same issue, we learn that Bombshell was created by experimental drugs provided to her mother by Roxxon while pregnant. | |
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Good Omens: One of the Horsepersons of the Apocalypse plays this trope straight (albeit with a twist), while another subverts it. Famine is reimagined as a brilliant biochemical engineer who is using pharmaceutical labs to create and sell "food" that has absolutely no nutritional content, yet gets people addicted anyway. His old friend Pestilence is the subversion: it turns out that genuinely well-meaning drug companies that manufacture helpful medicines like penicillin have rendered him powerless, so he's retired and passed on his spot in the quartet to a new entity named Pollution. | |
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Leverage: "The Double-Blind Job" has the team uncovering and exposing the plans of a Pharmaceutical CEO. He intends to knowingly sell a deadly drug, reasoning that the profits from it will far exceed any consequences they might receive. Shockingly, this is one of many Leverage plots that were Ripped from the Headlines, as described here In the finale, Nate tells an investigator that the whole thing started when the doctor who had treated his late son told him that a pharmaceutical company had ceased production of a drug that was proving successful against a rare form of cancer (the same one that killed his son) and that they needed the samples of the drug to save a patient. The disease was too rare, and the drug wasn't profitable, so it was being shelved. Nate vows to get the existing supplies for them. This is all actually a lie, but neither the audience nor Sterling knows this just yet. In truth, the target is the records of financial corruption and market manipulation that caused the crash of 2008, known as The Black Book. But Nate's history of taking down Corrupt Corporate Executives, and his history of going overboard to protect children after the death of his son makes it a convincing distraction. |
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The East: One of the East's targets is a pharmaceutical company, McCabe-Grey. They marketed an anti-malaria drug that Doc prescribed to his beloved sister, unaware that the fine print warned that it could lead to horrific side effects. Upon her health and sanity being destroyed, she was Driven to Suicide. Doc himself also develops the same side effects, as does the Pharma exec that The East targets. | |
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The Fall of the House of Usher (2023): The Ushers are a "crime family" who made billions from pharmaceuticals after a Deal with the Devil... or some malignant presence. Verna is a spirit of vengeance who is determined to rip through all the Usher heirs and kill them, innocent and guilty alike, in revenge for the hundreds of thousands of people they've killed. They are portrayed as completely corrupt and amoral, bribing and outright owning any oversight bodies that could stop them, falsifying medical studies, and having built their empire off huge amounts of false advertising that claim their (addictive) pills are non-addictive. | |
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Absolon: Unified Pharmaceutical Corporation is a Mega-Corp that has manufactured a dependency on the miracle drug, Absolon, which apparently cures NDS, the extremely deadly plague that has killed billions of people worldwide. In reality, The Plague died out a long time ago, and the UPC's Corrupt Corporate Executive, Murchison, kills anyone who either tries to stop them or finds out the truth about Absolon. | |
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The Healing Tower in Doctor Player is the fantasy version of this trope. They manage and watch over all Healers, assign them ranks, so on and so forth. They see no problem with the exorbitant price of high rank healing that only nobles can afford, while the poor and commoners are left with lower rank healers that can't even garantee their survival, as they also refuse to acknowledge that Heal isn't the solution to everything. When Raymond introduces modern medicine and surgery at a low fee, which would save tons of lives, they see it as witchcraft and try to slander his reputation multiple times. | |
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Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: In the main plot of the first season, the investigation of the Laughing Man incident uncovers a massive conspiracy by the Serano Genomics corporation. To start, Serano is suppressing all knowledge of the Murai vaccine (a cure for the otherwise uncurable disease cyberbrain sclerosis) so they can instead sell costly, long-term nanomachine-based treatments that don't actually work. Worse, some of these nanomachines are actually experimental espionage and military applications, not treatments for cyberbrain sclerosis at all. Serano is, of course, bribing enough politicians to let them get away with using the Japanese public as guinea pigs, and hires assassins to kill anyone who gets too close to the truth. | |
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Leverage: Redemption: The first episode introduces new crew member Harry Wilson as having the primary motivation of wanting Fletcher Maxwell, a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Richard Sackler, to pay for his role in the opioid crisis; since Maxwell is above the law due to his wealth and connections, Harry resorts to trying to sabotage an exhibit in his name at the Boston Museum of Art. | |
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Sweet Girl: Ray's wife and Rachel's mother dies of cancer because the pharmaceutical company that made the miracle medication that was curing her pulled the medication in order to make money. Diana Morgan also turned to the dark side, and away from her initial goal of affordable healthcare, after taking bribes from the company. | |
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Grand Theft Auto Online: In the "Los Santos Drug War" DLC Last Dose mission line, Dr. Friedlander has his goons kidnap The Fooliganz' Clandestine Chemist Labrat, and after the player shakes down other suspects, they find that Labrat is being held at FriedMind Pharmaceutical Corporation, and Dr. Friedlander reveals that his plan is to corner the psychedelics market to sell them as therapeutics but with his control. | |
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Dead Rising: Phenotrans is a mysterious pharmaceutical company that has been granted sole right by the US government to manufacture the anti-zombie drug Zombrex. Because zombrex doesn't outright cure a person of being a Zombie Infectee, and can only prevent them from turning with regular doses, Phenotrans' critics often accuse it of deliberately Withholding the Cure for zombification since it would reduce their customer base. Worse, because the parasitic queen wasps that spread the zombie virus are also used in the drug's manufacture, Phenotrans has no qualms about deliberately causing zombie outbreaks, or making existing ones worse, just so they can breed more wasps to use as raw materials. | |
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Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: The CEO of Cradle Pharmaceuticals, Gentarou Hongou a.k.a. Ace, had abducted 18 children 9 years prior to the story's events in order to force them into playing the Nonary Game as part of an experiment to tap into the Morphogenetic Field. | |
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Justified: Quarles comes from Detroit to Kentucky to buy off doctors and hook the population on addictive painkillers to make a fortune for the Tonin crime syndicate. The destructive consequences are demonstrated by how Quarles himself is already a violent, mentally unstable sadist behind a paper-thin Faux Affably Evil facade who takes pleasure in torturing teenagers to death. | |
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The Fugitive: Richard Kimble discovered that Devlin-MacGregor was producing the medication Provasic, knowing that the drug causes severe liver damage, and after he uncovered this, his friend Charles Nichols hired the one-armed man to attack him and his wife Helen. | |
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