π¨ββοΈ How to fool doctors (a Johnson & Johnson production)
The Oklahoma opioid judgement is a marketing blueprint for influencing scientists
There is almost always an explanation for how certain people sleep at night.
The CEOs of big oil, for example, can lay their heads down knowing that their product helps hundreds of millions of people commute back and forth to their jobs each day, and thus put food on the table for their families. The government officials who wrote the legal memos to justify torture, or who recommended drone strikes that killed dozens of innocents, can retire in the evenings telling themselves that their actions were intended to protect American lives.
But for the professionals who crafted the marketing campaigns for opioid distributors like Johnson & Johnson, Iβm frankly not sure what story they tell themselves to fall asleep at night.
Yesterdayβs landmark judgement in Cleveland County District Court against Johnson & Johnson is among many things: a watershed moment for the battle against opioid addiction and a warning to other pharmaceutical companies that they may be on the hook for the destruction they have wrought.
But the judgement is also a chronicle of marketing tactics used for evil - a blueprint for how to fool a target audience which prides itself on not being fooled. Doctors consider themselves to be scientists: guided by evidence, data-driven, and objective in their judgements.