How did India’s Cobra Problem Spiral Out of Hand?

In 19th century India under the British Raj, cities were ravaged by cobras which were especially troublesome for the British overlords. To combat this, they offered the local Indian populace bounties for each cobra killed, which could be proven by handing in a corpse of the venomous creature. However, it did not take long for the local Indian communities to realize that they could breed the venomous snakes faster than their natural rate, kill a few of their offspring while leaving enough to reproduce, collect the bounties, and repeat as long as the cobra population sustained itself. Soon, the British administrators noticed these cobra farms, and cancelled the bounty program. As a result, those who entered the cobra-breeding industry released their now unprofitable snakes into the wild, worsening the cobra infestation relative to before the bounty program.

This isn’t the only time an incentive designed to reduce injections of poison backfired. Big pharma has also profited by worsening crises it was trusted to solve by selling numerous harmful drugs and medications to customers. Pfizer, long before its Covid-19 vaccine brought its record profits in 2021 and 2022, was issued the biggest criminal fine in American history for misbranding its drugs, and paid billions in civil fines for paying doctors to issue improper prescriptions. Predictably, its mRNA vaccines have caused surges in cancer, heart injuries, and diabetes in young adults, contributing to record high excess mortality in said demographic in more vaccinated countries. When these same companies are also planning to sell the cures to these health conditions, and when multiple manufacturers of insulin have colluded to maximize their profits, the perverse incentive becomes only more apparent. 

In the United States of America, prescription drugs cost magnitudes more than in virtually any other developed country. Pharmaceutical companies justify these price hikes, and politicians argue against price caps, by alleging that they are necessary to fund their research and development of new drugs. But the vast majority of Big Pharma’s expenses are not related to R&D, and in fact, R&D represents a similar share to advertising, due to the United States’ regulations being anomalously permissive among developed countries once again. And given that the research is often conducted in order to develop harmful drugs with the goal of creating even more sick and dependent customers as mentioned, it is safe to say that Americans are getting massively ripped off. This has resulted in Americans rationing their medications, and costs Medicare billions each year. But as long as patent laws allow “evergreening“, the process of extending the patent life of a generic drug for introducing even a slight modification to it, competition will never be unleashed in the pharmaceutical industry. As it turns out, the corruption of Big Pharma has been a bigger threat to public health than any single disease.