The myth of freedom

Yuval Noah Harari in The Guardian


Should scholars serve the truth, even at the cost of social harmony? Should you expose a fiction even if that fiction sustains the social order? In writing my latest book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, I had to struggle with this dilemma with regard to liberalism.

On the one hand, I believe that the liberal story is flawed, that it does not tell the truth about humanity, and that in order to survive and flourish in the 21st century we need to go beyond it. On the other hand, at present the liberal story is still fundamental to the functioning of the global order. What’s more, liberalism is now attacked by religious and nationalist fanatics who believe in nostalgic fantasies that are far more dangerous and harmful. 

So should I speak my mind openly, risking that my words could be taken out of context and used by demagogues and autocrats to further attack the liberal order? Or should I censor myself? It is a mark of illiberal regimes that they make free speech more difficult even outside their borders. Due to the spread of such regimes, it is becoming increasingly dangerous to think critically about the future of our species.

I eventually chose free discussion over self-censorship, thanks to my belief both in the strength of liberal democracy and in the necessity to revamp it. Liberalism’s great advantage over other ideologies is that it is flexible and undogmatic. It can sustain criticism better than any other social order. Indeed, it is the only social order that allows people to question even its own foundations. Liberalism has already survived three big crises – the first world war, the fascist challenge in the 1930s, and the communist challenge in the 1950s-70s. If you think liberalism is in trouble now, just remember how much worse things were in 1918, 1938 or 1968.


The main challenge liberalism faces today comes not from fascism or communism but from the laboratories


In 1968, liberal democracies seemed to be an endangered species, and even within their own borders they were rocked by riots, assassinations, terrorist attacks and fierce ideological battles. If you happened to be amid the riots in Washington on the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated, or in Paris in May 1968, or at the Democratic party’s convention in Chicago in August 1968, you might well have thought that the end was near. While Washington, Paris and Chicago were descending into chaos, Moscow and Leningrad were tranquil, and the Soviet system seemed destined to endure for ever. Yet 20 years later it was the Soviet system that collapsed. The clashes of the 1960s strengthened liberal democracy, while the stifling climate in the Soviet bloc presaged its demise.

So we hope liberalism can reinvent itself yet again. But the main challenge it faces today comes not from fascism or communism, and not even from the demagogues and autocrats that are spreading everywhere like frogs after the rains. This time the main challenge emerges from the laboratories.

Liberalism is founded on the belief in human liberty. Unlike rats and monkeys, human beings are supposed to have “free will”. This is what makes human feelings and human choices the ultimate moral and political authority in the world. Liberalism tells us that the voter knows best, that the customer is always right, and that we should think for ourselves and follow our hearts.

¶

Unfortunately, “free will” isn’t a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology. Theologians developed the idea of “free will” to explain why God is right to punish sinners for their bad choices and reward saints for their good choices. If our choices aren’t made freely, why should God punish or reward us for them? According to the theologians, it is reasonable for God to do so, because our choices reflect the free will of our eternal souls, which are independent of all physical and biological constraints.

This myth has little to do with what science now teaches us about Homo sapiens and other animals. Humans certainly have a will – but it isn’t free. You cannot decide what desires you have. You don’t decide to be introvert or extrovert, easy-going or anxious, gay or straight. Humans make choices – but they are never independent choices. Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself. I can choose what to eat, whom to marry and whom to vote for, but these choices are determined in part by my genes, my biochemistry, my gender, my family background, my national culture, etc – and I didn’t choose which genes or family to have.

 

Hacked … biometric sensors could allow corporations direct access to your inner world. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

This is not abstract theory. You can witness this easily. Just observe the next thought that pops up in your mind. Where did it come from? Did you freely choose to think it? Obviously not. If you carefully observe your own mind, you come to realise that you have little control of what’s going on there, and you are not choosing freely what to think, what to feel, and what to want.

Though “free will” was always a myth, in previous centuries it was a helpful one. It emboldened people who had to fight against the Inquisition, the divine right of kings, the KGB and the KKK. The myth also carried few costs. In 1776 or 1945 there was relatively little harm in believing that your feelings and choices were the product of some “free will” rather than the result of biochemistry and neurology.

But now the belief in “free will” suddenly becomes dangerous. If governments and corporations succeed in hacking the human animal, the easiest people to manipulate will be those who believe in free will.

In order to successfully hack humans, you need two things: a good understanding of biology, and a lot of computing power. The Inquisition and the KGB lacked this knowledge and power. But soon, corporations and governments might have both, and once they can hack you, they can not only predict your choices, but also reengineer your feelings. To do so, corporations and governments will not need to know you perfectly. That is impossible. They will just have to know you a little better than you know yourself. And that is not impossible, because most people don’t know themselves very well.

If you believe in the traditional liberal story, you will be tempted simply to dismiss this challenge. “No, it will never happen. Nobody will ever manage to hack the human spirit, because there is something there that goes far beyond genes, neurons and algorithms. Nobody could successfully predict and manipulate my choices, because my choices reflect my free will.” Unfortunately, dismissing the challenge won’t make it go away. It will just make you more vulnerable to it.

It starts with simple things. As you surf the internet, a headline catches your eye: “Immigrant gang rapes local women”. You click on it. At exactly the same moment, your neighbour is surfing the internet too, and a different headline catches her eye: “Trump prepares nuclear strike on Iran”. She clicks on it. Both headlines are fake news stories, generated perhaps by Russian trolls, or by a website keen on increasing traffic to boost its ad revenues. Both you and your neighbour feel that you clicked on these headlines out of your free will. But in fact you have been hacked.


If governments succeed in hacking the human animal, the easiest people to manipulate will be those who believe in free will

Propaganda and manipulation are nothing new, of course. But whereas in the past they worked like carpet bombing, now they are becoming precision-guided munitions. When Hitler gave a speech on the radio, he aimed at the lowest common denominator, because he couldn’t tailor his message to the unique weaknesses of individual brains. Now it has become possible to do exactly that. An algorithm can tell that you already have a bias against immigrants, while your neighbour already dislikes Trump, which is why you see one headline while your neighbour sees an altogether different one. In recent years some of the smartest people in the world have worked on hacking the human brain in order to make you click on ads and sell you stuff. Now these methods are being used to sell you politicians and ideologies, too.

And this is just the beginning. At present, the hackers rely on analysing signals and actions in the outside world: the products you buy, the places you visit, the words you search for online. Yet within a few years biometric sensors could give hackers direct access to your inner world, and they could observe what’s going on inside your heart. Not the metaphorical heart beloved by liberal fantasies, but rather the muscular pump that regulates your blood pressure and much of your brain activity. The hackers could then correlate your heart rate with your credit card data, and your blood pressure with your search history. What would the Inquisition and the KGB have done with biometric bracelets that constantly monitor your moods and affections? Stay tuned.

Liberalism has developed an impressive arsenal of arguments and institutions to defend individual freedoms against external attacks from oppressive governments and bigoted religions, but it is unprepared for a situation when individual freedom is subverted from within, and when the very concepts of “individual” and “freedom” no longer make much sense. In order to survive and prosper in the 21st century, we need to leave behind the naive view of humans as free individuals – a view inherited from Christian theology as much as from the modern Enlightenment – and come to terms with what humans really are: hackable animals. We need to know ourselves better. 

Of course, this is hardly new advice. From ancient times, sages and saints repeatedly advised people to “know thyself”. Yet in the days of Socrates, the Buddha and Confucius, you didn’t have real competition. If you neglected to know yourself, you were still a black box to the rest of humanity. In contrast, you now have competition. As you read these lines, governments and corporations are striving to hack you. If they get to know you better than you know yourself, they can then sell you anything they want – be it a product or a politician.

It is particularly important to get to know your weaknesses. They are the main tools of those who try to hack you. Computers are hacked through pre-existing faulty code lines. Humans are hacked through pre-existing fears, hatreds, biases and cravings. Hackers cannot create fear or hatred out of nothing. But when they discover what people already fear and hate it is easy to push the relevant emotional buttons and provoke even greater fury.

If people cannot get to know themselves by their own efforts, perhaps the same technology the hackers use can be turned around and serve to protect us. Just as your computer has an antivirus program that screens for malware, maybe we need an antivirus for the brain. Your AI sidekick will learn by experience that you have a particular weakness – whether for funny cat videos or for infuriating Trump stories – and would block them on your behalf.

You feel that you clicked on these headlines out of your free will, but in fact you have been hacked. Photograph: Getty images

But all this is really just a side issue. If humans are hackable animals, and if our choices and opinions don’t reflect our free will, what should the point of politics be? For 300 years, liberal ideals inspired a political project that aimed to give as many individuals as possible the ability to pursue their dreams and fulfil their desires. We are now closer than ever to realising this aim – but we are also closer than ever to realising that this has all been based on an illusion. The very same technologies that we have invented to help individuals pursue their dreams also make it possible to re-engineer those dreams. So how can I trust any of my dreams?

From one perspective, this discovery gives humans an entirely new kind of freedom. Previously, we identified very strongly with our desires, and sought the freedom to realise them. Whenever any thought appeared in the mind, we rushed to do its bidding. We spent our days running around like crazy, carried by a furious rollercoaster of thoughts, feelings and desires, which we mistakenly believed represented our free will. What happens if we stop identifying with this rollercoaster? What happens when we carefully observe the next thought that pops up in our mind and ask: “Where did that come from?”

For starters, realising that our thoughts and desires don’t reflect our free will can help us become less obsessive about them. If I see myself as an entirely free agent, choosing my desires in complete independence from the world, it creates a barrier between me and all other entities. I don’t really need any of those other entities – I am independent. It simultaneously bestows enormous importance on my every whim – after all, I chose this particular desire out of all possible desires in the universe. Once we give so much importance to our desires, we naturally try to control and shape the whole world according to them. We wage wars, cut down forests and unbalance the entire ecosystem in pursuit of our whims. But if we understood that our desires are not the outcome of free choice, we would hopefully be less preoccupied with them, and would also feel more connected to the rest of the world.


If we understood that our desires are not the outcome of free choice, we would hopefully be less preoccupied with them

People sometimes imagine that if we renounce our belief in “free will”, we will become completely apathetic, and just curl up in some corner and starve to death. In fact, renouncing this illusion can have two opposite effects: first, it can create a far stronger link with the rest of the world, and make you more attentive to your environment and to the needs and wishes of others. It is like when you have a conversation with someone. If you focus on what you want to say, you hardly really listen. You just wait for the opportunity to give the other person a piece of your mind. But when you put your own thoughts aside, you can suddenly hear other people.

Second, renouncing the myth of free will can kindle a profound curiosity. If you strongly identify with the thoughts and desires that emerge in your mind, you don’t need to make much effort to get to know yourself. You think you already know exactly who you are. But once you realise “Hi, this isn’t me. This is just some changing biochemical phenomenon!” then you also realise you have no idea who – or what – you actually are. This can be the beginning of the most exciting journey of discovery any human can undertake.

¶

There is nothing new about doubting free will or about exploring the true nature of humanity. We humans have had this discussion a thousand times before. But we never had the technology before. And the technology changes everything. Ancient problems of philosophy are now becoming practical problems of engineering and politics. And while philosophers are very patient people – they can argue about something inconclusively for 3,000 years – engineers are far less patient. Politicians are the least patient of all.

How does liberal democracy function in an era when governments and corporations can hack humans? What’s left of the beliefs that “the voter knows best” and “the customer is always right”? How do you live when you realise that you are a hackable animal, that your heart might be a government agent, that your amygdala might be working for Putin, and that the next thought that emerges in your mind might well be the result of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself? These are the most interesting questions humanity now faces.

Unfortunately, these are not the questions most humans ask. Instead of exploring what awaits us beyond the illusion of “free will”, people all over the world are now retreating to find shelter with even older illusions. Instead of confronting the challenge of AI and bioengineering, many are turning to religious and nationalist fantasies that are even less in touch with the scientific realities of our time than liberalism. Instead of fresh political models, what’s on offer are repackaged leftovers from the 20th century or even the middle ages.

When you try to engage with these nostalgic fantasies, you find yourself debating such thingsas the veracity of the Bible and the sanctity of the nation (especially if you happen, like me, to live in a place like Israel). As a scholar, this is a disappointment. Arguing about the Bible was hot stuff in the age of Voltaire, and debating the merits of nationalism was cutting-edge philosophy a century ago – but in 2018 it seems a terrible waste of time. AI and bioengineering are about to change the course of evolution itself, and we have just a few decades to figure out what to do with them. I don’t know where the answers will come from, but they are definitely not coming from a collection of stories written thousands of years ago.

So what to do? We need to fight on two fronts simultaneously. We should defend liberal democracy, not only because it has proved to be a more benign form of government than any of its alternatives, but also because it places the fewest limitations on debating the future of humanity. At the same time, we need to question the traditional assumptions of liberalism, and develop a new political project that is better in line with the scientific realities and technological powers of the 21st century.

Greek mythology tells that Zeus and Poseidon, two of the greatest gods, competed for the hand of the goddess Thetis. But when they heard the prophecy that Thetis would bear a son more powerful than his father, both withdrew in alarm. Since gods plan on sticking around for ever, they don’t want a more powerful offspring to compete with them. So Thetis married a mortal, King Peleus, and gave birth to Achilles. Mortals do like their children to outshine them. This myth might teach us something important. Autocrats who plan to rule in perpetuity don’t like to encourage the birth of ideas that might displace them. But liberal democracies inspire the creation of new visions, even at the price of questioning their own foundations.

What I learnt from being fired

Robert Armstrong in the FT

The anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy has prompted lots of reflection on the damage done. But there were winners, too. I was one of them: I got fired. A decade ago I was an analyst at a hedge fund. We owned some stocks, and bet against others. At the end of 2008, after five years at the fund and with Wall Street flat on its back, I was let go.

Getting sacked is not the standard way to win in a market collapse. Some will argue that, say, John Paulson, who made $4bn personally betting against mortgages, comes away looking better than I do. This strikes me as a rather conventional take. In any case, the crisis taught me two key things and, more importantly, saved me a lot of embarrassment.

The first thing I learnt is that doing the right thing only goes so far. The two portfolio managers at my fund were smart and despised risk, and they were quick to recognise that something serious was going on. As they only owned stuff that was easy to sell, sell they did, and early on. Their clients lost nothing during the crisis and the fund survived. But the clients pulled their money anyway. They needed it and we, not having lost it, had it. So expenses had to be cut, and I was one of them.

The economy — or, if you prefer, the universe — is a big machine. No matter how smart or careful you are, you might get caught in the gears. Most people learn this eventually. I’m just glad I learnt it by losing a job rather than by, for example, getting struck dead by a meteor. 

Lesson two. In a crisis, nobody knows anything. The writer William Goldman made this point about Hollywood: until you get a movie in front of the audience, no one can say with anything like certainty whether it is good or not. Most of the time, by contrast, finance is a business where the important variables are predictable to within a certain range. But when a storm comes, finance is — no matter what anybody tells you in retrospect — as mysterious and fickle as a popcorn-gobbling rabble. Because that is what, in the final analysis, it is. 

At one point in 2007 I was working with two colleagues on a simple job: determine which of the big European banks have significant exposure to US housing. But the banks were, for some reason, hesitant to answer our questions in very clear terms. In some cases they seemed oddly unwilling to answer the phone.

Nor did the thousands of pages of disclosures from the banks contain anything helpful. The annual reports that had previously appeared to me to be precise quantitative descriptions of businesses looked, suddenly, like a brittle superstructure of certainty erected over a heaving morass of unknowns. 

It is reassuring to think of this like a freshman-philosophy Socrates. Knowing what you don’t know is the beginning of wisdom, and all that. That is a comforting thought when you are sitting in a lecture hall on a crisp autumn afternoon. When you are lost in the woods, knowing what you don’t know is just scary as hell. 

I should note that internalising these two points — that I am not in control, and don’t know much — has cost me money. It has made me much too conservative in how I have my savings invested, and I’ve missed much of the current stock market rally. At the same time, though, I think it has made me a better person and a clearer writer. It is a trade-off I can accept. 

That the effect of the crisis was to make me reflective and over-cautious reveals something else. I probably did not belong in finance in the first place. The low prices of stocks after the crisis made good investors greedy. They made me contemplate the vanity of all human striving.

That is how the crisis shielded me from embarrassment. As it was, I lost my job when a lot of other people did. No one was surprised then and no one asks for an explanation now. It was just one of those things that happens. If there had been no crisis, my guess is that somebody would have got around to firing me for being useless. Which would have been awkward.

Finance, like law, is a profession that attracts a lot of reasonably intelligent, hard-working people who rather like money. People like me. Most of us are not really suited to it, though, and that makes for a lot of unhappy careers. The financial crisis saved me from that, and I am grateful.

How to burst your political filter bubble

Tim Harford in the FT 

There are certain resolutions that are easily made and easily broken: lose weight; drink less; be mindful. They all seem a cinch compared with the challenge of our age: think less tribally. Try meeting people who disagree with you. Try to understand both sides of the argument. Most of us instinctively feel that this is desirable. Each of us has something to learn from others. And even if we do not, even if the other side of the argument is utterly wrong, how are we to persuade them if we are not on speaking terms? And yet bursting our own bubbles is infuriatingly hard. 

Here’s one obvious approach: use social media to follow people with opposing opinions. If you see what they are saying, you can ponder their arguments and try to see the world from their point of view — at the very least, you can understand how best to convert them. 

To investigate this idea, a group of social scientists (Christopher Bail, Lisa Argyle and others) recently recruited several hundred people with Republican or Democrat leanings, and gave them a small financial incentive to follow a Twitter bot for a month that would expose them to the opposing point of view. Republicans followed a liberal bot that would retweet 24 messages from elected Democrats, left-leaning media outlets and non-profit groups; Democrats followed a conservative bot. 

But the Twitter bot’s efforts at fostering understanding backfired. Being exposed to opposing views on Twitter pushed people away from the centre ground. “Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative post treatment,” write the researchers. Democrats moved further left — although their moves were not as large nor as statistically reliable. 

This is a disappointing finding, but not entirely surprising. Some earlier research has found evidence of backfire effects in other contexts — perhaps because we find contrary views or inconvenient facts discomfiting and may immediately recall or invent reasons to demean or dismiss them. And Twitter is hardly the venue for a deep meeting of minds. 

Still, the conclusion is clear enough: if our aim is to find common ground or at least to foster mutual understanding, simply being exposed to the comments of our political opponents will not do it. It leads to aggravation, not understanding, and it is as counterproductive as it sometimes seems. 

What, then? Cass Sunstein, an academic who has served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, makes an intriguing suggestion in his new book The Cost-Benefit Revolution. He points out that we can protect ourselves from certain cognitive errors by translating arguments into an unfamiliar form — perhaps a second language, or perhaps a mathematical abstraction. When you see the argument thus rephrased, you are forced to stop and think. Your response is less emotional. 

I am persuaded that this exercise would slow me down and force me to think more with my brain and less with my gut. But it would not be easy to force myself to apply a cost-benefit framework as I pondered the appeal of a hard Brexit, say, the benefits of GM food or the winners and losers from restrictions on abortion. Alas, I doubt the prescription has broad appeal. 

So we are back to trying to appreciate the other side’s point of view by talking to them, and that probably means talking to them respectfully, attentively and at some length. To understand what is going on in the head of someone who sees the world very differently from me — say, an evangelical Christian, a diehard Trump fan, a Corbynista or a hard-Brexiter — I would need to spend proper, quality time with them. And they would need to spend proper, quality time with me. 

Unless one of us had the patience of a saint (and it would not be me), that would require some other social glue. If we could first spend time together as friends, neighbours, colleagues or teammates, we might later have a chance to talk in depth about politics and values. Starting with politics is likely to lead nowhere. 

Occasionally — rarely enough that each instance is memorable — I have sat and respectfully disagreed with someone for hours: listening to them, understanding their viewpoint, presenting my own ideas and searching for common ground. Without exception, these heart-to-hearts have been preceded by months of friendship built on some other shared interest or experience. You can have a civil debate with a political enemy, but it really helps if the political enemy is a friend in real life. 

It is sobering, then, to ponder the enthusiasm with which various activists on both sides are keen to make everything political. I do not object to anyone, on any side, who believes that there are deep political issues more important than entertainment, sport or music. 

But the cumulative effect of the polarisation of everything is not healthy. Paradoxically, a vibrant, thoughtful politics needs some parts of life that are free of politics, free of the idea of them-and-us. Otherwise we stop listening to each other. We often stop thinking entirely.

Lessons for all from the great Tarek Fatah

How Purdue’s ‘one-two’ punch grew the market for opioids

 David Crow in The FT

Accused of exaggerating the benefits of OxyContin, the company’s owners had a bigger share than realised.

Like many salespeople working in the US pharma industry, Carol Panara had often heard about the legendary bonuses on offer at Purdue Pharma, the maker of the now infamous opioid painkiller OxyContin. 

“I remember one of their reps telling me you could make $40,000 or $50,000 a quarter in bonuses,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Wow, there are actually companies paying that kind of money, why can’t I find something like that?’ I had two kids that were getting ready to go to college. It sounded as if it was too good to be true.” 

In 2008, Ms Panara decided to quit her job at Novartis, the Swiss drugmaker, and join Purdue, a career move that has since become the source of bitter regret. Over lunch at a diner in Medford, New Jersey, she recounts how she became concerned about the tactics Purdue used to grow sales of OxyContin, a drug that has been blamed for sparking the US opioid crisis. 

Ms Panara claims she and her colleagues were instructed to boost sales of OxyContin — a potent and addictive painkiller — by aggressively targeting inexperienced doctors while underplaying the risks of abuse. 

“I feel bad that the company was so blasé, so negligent about taking responsibility,” says Ms Panara, who left in 2013, and who was last year subpoenaed by the state attorney-general in New Jersey. “I feel they misled the public, they misled the doctors, and they misled their salespeople.” 

The actions of Ms Panara and her colleagues at Purdue have become central to the legal case that prosecutors are now building against the company. There are more than a thousand lawsuits brought by states and local governments in the US alleging the drugmaker’s marketing practices ignited and then fuelled the opioid crisis, which claimed more than 42,000 lives in 2016. 

The litigation, which is expected to reach court early next year, is designed to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from the company and its owners, the billionaire Sackler family. Public officials say they need the cash to help offset the bill for the health epidemic, which was recently pegged at $79bn per year by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Purdue’s defence will not be helped by the revelation in the FT that the Sackler family also owns one of the biggest generic producers of opioids — little-known Rhodes Pharma. 

In a statement, Purdue said: “In 2007, the company accepted responsibility for the actions of certain Purdue supervisors and employees in connection with marketing OxyContin before that time. We paid a significant fine as well as a heavy price in terms of the public trust. To suggest that we did not substantially change our practices is simply wrong.” 

Ms Panara was not mistaken about the bumper pay packets on offer at Purdue. In one quarter of 2009, she earned a bonus of more than $16,000, according to a payslip seen by the FT, while her total annual package easily outstripped $100,000. Nor was she among the highest earners, like the sales reps from Florida and other lucrative states — known as the “toppers” internally — who were rewarded with luxury trips to Hawaii and the Caribbean, she says. 

However, almost as soon as she joined, she says she felt queasy about the company’s ethics. For a start, she claims her managers played down Purdue’s 2007 settlement with the US Department of Justice, which saw it plead guilty to criminal charges of misleading regulators and doctors over the addictive properties of OxyContin. “They said, ‘We were sued, they accused us of mis-marketing, but that wasn’t really the case. In order to settle it and get it behind us we paid a fine,’” she says. “You had the impression they were portraying it as a bit of a witch hunt.” 

The 2007 plea deal did little to stem Purdue’s blistering growth rate. In the following two years, the drugmaker regrouped, hiring more than 100 new sales reps to boost revenues from OxyContin; by 2010, the medicine was pulling in more than $3bn a year. One Purdue executive says: “They did not listen to their critics and insisted they had just a few isolated problems. After the settlement, they didn’t change — the way the sales force was managed and incentivised, everything stayed the same.” 

Andrew Kolodny, an academic at Brandeis University and an expert on the addiction epidemic, says Ms Panera’s experiences are “critically important” because they show it was “business as usual” at Purdue following the 2007 settlement. “The bulk of what Purdue has done to cause this epidemic stems from their promotion of the drug as safe and effective for chronic pain,” he says. “All of that continued after the plea deal, and the result was they paid a fine but there was no significant change in their behaviour.” 

Lawyers working on the current legal effort against Purdue say the question of whether the company reformed itself after the plea deal could become a critical issue in the forthcoming court cases. That is because the deal included a non-prosecution agreement stating “there will be no further criminal prosecution or forfeiture action by the United States for any violations of law, occurring before May 10, 2007”. If prosecutors want to impose new penalties, they will have to show the company has continued to mislead doctors and patients during the last decade. 

Ms Panara says she and her colleagues were instructed to market the drugs to general practitioners treating common ailments like back pain, rather than only to pain specialists and oncologists more experienced with opioids and their risks. “They had us calling on family doctors, because there are many more family doctors out there than pain management doctors,” she says. 

If a doctor expressed concern about a patient showing signs of addiction, Ms Panara was trained to counter those fears by educating them on so-called pseudo-addiction, she says. For example, an addict might turn up at the surgery requesting a fresh batch of pills before their 30-day supply should have run out, claiming they had lost the tablets or accidentally dropped them down the toilet. The advice that she was told to give the doctor was that the patient’s dosing was too low and should be increased, she says. 

“The theory of pseudo-addiction was that a patient might exhibit these drug-seeking behaviours, but if their pain were adequately managed by giving a higher dose, then that drug-seeking behaviour would cease,” she says. “Thereby we were building their tolerance, building their physical dependence, and making them an addict.” 

Another sales rep says they were discouraged from reporting a suspicious doctor’s surgery to the authorities — a possible “pill mill” that might have been set up with the express purpose of prescribing and profiting from opioid painkillers. The person says they tried to tell their superiors, but were told they could not report the surgery because it was a satellite outpost of a larger practice that was located in another rep’s sales region. 

 “It was only open two-and-a-half days a week,” says the rep. “It was a small dirty, bare room with plastic chairs, but it was always packed with patients.” 

Ms Panara’s managers warned her not to overtly claim that OxyContin was better or safer that other opioids — which is what landed the company in so much trouble in 2007. However, she says she was trained to talk about the product in ways that implied it was safer. For instance, Ms Panara touted the benefits of a 12-hour formulation, which releases the drug into the body over a longer time period than traditional opioids. 

“You could say that with a shorter-acting medication that wears off after six hours, there was a greater chance the patient was going to jump their dosing schedule and take an extra one a little earlier,” she says. “We couldn’t say [it was safer], but I remember we were told that doctors are smart people, they’re not stupid, they’ll understand, they can read between the lines.”

In its statement to the FT, Purdue said that “we have strived to do better”. It said it had strengthened its ethics and compliance program, “repeatedly re-trained” its sales force and then in early 2018 ceased all promotion of opioids. 

A person close to the company claims it has not received a warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration since 2003 related to OxyContin promotion. 

Ms Panara and another sales rep say they were incentivised to grow not just sales of OxyContin, but also generic versions of extended release oxycodone. Whereas pharma salespeople are usually compensated based on their ability to grow a particular medicine, part of the bonus for Purdue’s staff was calculated according to the size of the overall market, according to compensation statements seen by the FT. 

The set-up meant that Purdue’s marketing force was indirectly supporting sales of millions of pills marketed by rival companies. Between 2008 and 2010, roughly $1.3bn worth of generic extended release oxycodone was prescribed by doctors, according to figures from Iqvia, a data provider. 

It is not clear why Purdue adopted this strategy, and one government official at the US Department of Health and Human Services describes the set-up as unusual: “It’s the equivalent of asking a McDonald’s store manager to grow sales of Burger King and KFC.” 

However, Ronny Gal, an analyst at Bernstein, says it is not uncommon for drugmakers to try to grow the size of a market as well as a particular product. “As the leader in the field, Purdue would not have been able to grow the pie unless they could get physicians to prescribe more opiates overall,” he says.  

A former senior manager at the company describes the strategy as a “one, two punch”, explaining that as long as doctors were comfortable prescribing an opioid — even if it was not Purdue’s — then sales reps could convert them to OxyContin in time. 

One company that would also have benefited from greater demand for opioids is Rhodes Pharma, a drugmaker also owned by the Sackler family. The Connecticut-based company was set up in November 2007, according to registration documents filed in Delaware — just four months after Purdue pled guilty to misleading patients and doctors. 

Rhodes has not been publicly connected to the Sackler family before, and their ownership of the company may weaken one of their longstanding defences: that they cannot be held responsible for the opioid crisis because Purdue accounts for a small fraction of overall prescriptions. 

In an article on the Purdue website, entitled “Common Myths About OxyContin,” the company says: “The terms oxycodone and OxyContin are often used interchangeably, creating the misperception that all oxycodone abuse involves OxyContin. News reports often mistakenly refer to OxyContin, even when other medications containing oxycodone are specifically named by authorities.” 

The article says that OxyContin accounted for just 1.7 per cent of total opioid prescriptions in 2016. However, according to figures seen by the FT, Rhodes is a much larger producer of opioids by volume, and the combined companies accounted for 14.4m prescriptions that year, giving them an overall market share of 6 per cent. 

That would make Purdue-Rhodes the seventh largest opioid manufacturer in the US, just behind generic drugmaking giant Teva, and well ahead of many of the other companies targeted in the recent wave of litigation, such as Johnson & Johnson, Endo and Depomed. 

According to a US FDA database, Rhodes Pharmaceuticals makes a wide range of opioid products containing highly addictive opiates such as morphine, oxycodone, hydromorphone. Although registered as a separate entity from Purdue, employees say that little distinction is made internally between the two companies. Staff share the same employee handbook, according to a copy of the 2017 manual seen by the FT. 

A former senior manager at Purdue says Rhodes was set up as a “landing pad” for the Sackler family in 2007, to prepare for the possibility that they would need to start afresh following the crisis then engulfing OxyContin. It could still serve the same purpose, he says, noting the company’s decision to hire restructuring experts last month. People familiar with Purdue’s finances say they are under pressure as it struggles to contend with mounting legal bills and falling sales of OxyContin. 

The former employee is one of hundreds of people that have departed the drugmaker this year, some of whom left because they knew people who had become addicted. “There were a lot of people who had personal experiences — family members, and friends who became addicted — and they started to ask if the benefits of opioids outweigh the risks,” the persons says. “I think that unless you’re a zealot it’s hard to see that they do not.”

Is this good customer service from Amazon?

by Girish Menon

Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who claims excellent customer service as his motto, should be able to answer this one.

On July 10, 2018 I ordered a book from Amazon India, It was to be delivered only after three weeks. An Amazon courier delivered the book and I gave him the money expecting the packet to be the real goods. It wasn't. I had to then run around and call Amazon to get the real book. They collected their original material and told me they'd deliver the goods after another three weeks. They have not yet delivered the book. When I spoke to myriads of Amazon officials all I requested them was to send me the book to my new address. They refused. All they were willing to do is to give me a refund. Is this good customer service?

It is now nearly two months since I placed my order. Amazon still hold my money and refuse to deliver the goods to my new address. I have spent over three hours complaining and am none the wiser.

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Deepak Chopra and Swami Sarvapriyananda on Consciousness