US pharmaceutical companies have long known that the potential market for their products is limited by the finite number of sick people; so they have turned to the healthy for further expansion of their markets, using exploitative, fear-inducing advertising techniques.

Thirty years ago the head of one of the world’s best-known drug companies, Merck, made some over-candid comments. The aggressive chief executive, Henry Gadsden, who was close to retirement at the time, told Fortune magazine of his distress that Merck’s potential markets had been limited to sick people; he said he would have preferred Merck to be more like the chewing-gum manufacturer Wrigley, because then Merck would be able to “sell to everyone”; it had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people. His dream has since come true.

The marketing strategies of the world’s biggest drug companies now aggressively target the healthy. The ups and downs of daily life have become classified as mental disorders, common complaints are transformed into frightening conditions, and more and more people are turned into patients. The $500bn pharmaceutical industry is changing what it means to be human, with promotional campaigns that exploit our deepest fears of death, decay and disease. Rightly rewarded for saving life and reducing suffering, the global drug giants are no longer content with selling medicines only to the ill. As Wall Street knows well, there is a lot of money to be made telling healthy people that they’re sick.

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