The following is a message from Alexander Zaitchik, author of Owning the Sun: A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines. This important new book was funded in part with research support from Social Security Works. When you buy it through this link, your purchase will support both independent bookstores AND Social Security Works. And you’ll get a truly revelatory book about how Big Pharma’s greed has distorted the world.

Dear [NAME],

As a Social Security Works supporter, you know that Americans pay the highest drug prices in the world. And you probably know Big Pharma’s single-note defense of its shameless price-gouging: that this is the “price” of medical innovation in a “free market drug economy.”

This is a lie in more ways than one. First, there is no “free market” in pharmaceuticals. The industry’s outsized profits depend on state institutions and interventions that prevent and delay natural competition, and obstruct our elected officials from doing the people's will, encouraging competition, and bringing prices in line with social need.

The problem begins with private monopolies granted to medicines developed with billions in government research subsidies. These monopolies are enshrined in patents that are increasingly extended for decades beyond the legal term of 20 years.

As a journalist, I have spent the last several years researching how this state of affairs came to be. How, exactly, did the industry come to possess such expansive monopoly power? How did it grow and defend this power— even as it wielded it in ways so clearly against the public interest? Why have the nation’s courts and government agencies allowed industry to turn the patent system against the people it is meant to serve?

These questions are at the heart of my first-of-its-kind history of the rise of Big Pharma, Owning the Sun: A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines. I believe this history is essential to the project of reclaiming our government’s rightful power to limit medicine monopolies and to directly negotiate drug prices on behalf of the American people, as in every other major country. Texas Representative Lloyd Doggett, one of Congress’s most dedicated voices of Pharma reform, calls Owning the Sun an “important and insightful history that demonstrates the urgency of restraining pharmaceutical monopoly power.”

Purchasing a copy today is a way to support Social Security Works, independent journalism, and the larger project of bringing the out-of-control drug companies to public heel.

Sincerely,

Alexander Zaitchik

Buy the book here: https://bookshop.org/a/526/9781640095069

Early reviews of Owning the Sun: A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines:

“Part history lesson on intellectual property and part damning critique . . . Zaitchik’s book is highly informative and deeply troubling reading.” —Library Journal

“A brave and timely reminder . . . A trenchant study of the dangers of turning medical knowledge into private intellectual property.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Comprehensive and illuminating.” —Publishers Weekly

“A must read for those wanting to understand how Big Pharma methodically gained global control over the largely public-funded 'intellectual property' required to manufacture new therapies (like the COVID-19 vaccines)." —John Abramson, M.D., author of Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It