Big Pharma's cure for Shiftwork Sleep Disorder

Fukitol is not the answer either

Well whaddya know.  There is Restless Leg Syndrome, Excessive Shyness Syndrome, Baldness Syndrome and all the other new syndromes and now there's another new one they have developed a pill for----- Shift Work Sleep Disorder. I wonder if a side effect of this one will be a four hour erection. 

This constant fatigue is a big problem for some shift workers like water plant operators or others whose job it might be to watch a computer screen all night to ensure nothing goes wrong.  The thing is that jobs like these are crucial as when things do go wrong the consequences can be severe or catastrophic.  I remember talking with an air traffic controller during the Patco strike in 1981who likened his job to a game of Pac Man except if two blips collide he lost 400 people. The pig Ronald Reagan fired them all and banned them from working in their industry for life.

Drugmaker Cephalon is spending $3.6 million to convince workers that the answer to their problems is their new "alertness"pill Nuvigil.  Nvigil is an upgrade, or what the industry calls an "new version" of its "blockbuster narcolepsy drug Provigil." Business Week writes. Cephalon's marketing campaign will flood the airwaves, doctor's offices, community meetings and the internet in order to "Educate America's 15 million shift workers about the disorder". It's a way to "build brand recognition" Business Week says.

The terms they use to describe their wares, "blockbuster".  You'd think that they were talking about a movie and how much it brings in after the first week.  For the private owners of the sickness industrial complex though, a new drug isn't any different from a movie. Investing their capital in the sickness industrial business or the entertainment business is basically the same process with the same goal, profit.  Marx couldn't have put it any plainer when he wrote: 

“a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.”

I have a doctor friend who said she once got a call from a patient who described her condition and the disease that caused it.  The doctor had never heard of the disease and asked her  who told her about it.  She had heard about it on TV in one of the drug company ads. The drug companies tell us what we have, create a drug for it, and then use the media to convince us we need it and pester our doctor to prescribe it.

Health care, from basic treatment to research should not be in the hands of private individuals and based on profit. One of the driving forces behind such medical treatment is that patents expire from earlier versions of these drugs which opens the door to generic cheaper versions that might take market share and lower prices.  So the Pharma capitalists "tweak" the drug a little like the software companies do with writing programs so the new painkiller 2.0 can be introduced as a new, different drug with a new profit protecting patent that helps keep drug prices high.

The other side of this is that this pill is really no solution at all as it doesn't address the cause. We live in a barbaric and uncivilized society where the production of social needs are not determined collectively by those that need them but privately by a minority who profit from having ownership and control of the means and process by which they are produced.

Even Cephalon admits that Nuvigil "may lead to limited physical or psychological dependence" and encourages doctors to keep a close eye on the patient.  Cephalon is just "educating doctors and the public about this disorder" says a spokesperson for the drug dealer. And like all drug dealers, Cephelon wants to win addicts from its rivals and hopes to do so so with a $12 per pill price tag that is $5 less than its "older sibling". Cephelon is also "providing customers with coupons for free trials and help with insurance co-pays to spur use of the newer drug" says BW. 

Many doctors are skeptical about this new drug and claim coffee is just as good with fewer side effects. "We want to treat the real condition, rather than just papering over the symptoms with a medication that can just keep people awake longer" says Douglas Moul a physician at the Cleveland Clinic Sleep Center.  The doctor is on the right track and admits that there's no magic pill "without trying lifestyle changes, such as strategic naps or wearing sunglasses on the way home to limit exposure to light"

But there is no individual lifestyle change that can solve this problem.  The lifestyle change has to be social and dramatic.   While there is obviously a need for what is called here a 24/7 surveillance of aspects of human life or of a workplace in general like a hospital  for example, many 24 hour shifts exist for one reason only---profit.  Why do we need 24 hour auto production for example or 24 hour textile production?  We don't.  Such a need satisfies only one desire, the insatiable thirst for surplus value, the value which has its source in the unpaid Labor of the worker and is itself the source of the capitalists' profit. Where we do, perhaps no longer than 4 hour shifts should be the norm with no loss in pay.  Only workers who do this can best determine how to organize it.

I have done shift work and in my former workplace shift work was a major issue for the Union and many of my co-workers watched over a computer screen which has serious side effects not least, trying to stay awake.

Workers have to decide which is best for us.  There is no such thing as "shiftwork sleep disorder", to fall asleep under such conditions is normal.  And we are only touching on one aspect of the negative side effects of such work. There is the effect on other aspects of health as well such as people's personal and family relations.  There is "disorder" in the way that work, human production is organized, this is the problem and there is certainly no pill for that.

How we deal with such needs as round the clock work places and the havoc such a work environment wreaks on workers' lives is the issue.  The capitalists in the profit making sickness industry want to ignore the economic and politics of it and sell us a pill that will ensure we keep our eyes open. The doctor, not to mention workers ourselves are conditioned to think that the way production is organized is the only way society can be organized---but that is not so. Part of the solution is recognizing that in our own minds.