This will be my last post as Pharmascenery, although that isn’t to say that I won’t use the name for a secondary, more specialized newsletter sometime in the future. It’s not that I don’t like the name. I do. But as I get into in this post, I feel backed into a corner with my hyper-specific brand, and I need some breathing room. (The timestamp on this post proves that I’ve been thinking about this for a while.)
The name change will allow me to try a new approach to writing a newsletter. The new approach will be more experiential, for one. It will still nominally be a newsletter about human research subjects, health, and medicine, but will be less concerned with finding a semblance of expertise and more driven by an impetus to write from life. I am not an expert in pharmacology, bioethics, or public policy, after all, and I am not good at pretending to be one; I am a human research subject with thirteen years of experience guinea pigging. This is what I know.
I want to write about pharma for the reader who is interested in reading something true about the world. This will be the starting point for my new approach. But I don’t just want to write about pharma, either. My revamped newsletter will have a broader span, covering labor (in particular, work that is usually overlooked), queerness, drugs, and culture, and how they intertwine within capitalism. It will be more me, in short. I think this will make my work on Big Pharma, investigational drugs, and brewing public health crises stronger—and more approachable, too. For, as I am wont to say: Everything is drugs. And everyone is testing them.
From now on, you’ll be receiving posts as May Include.1 (Completion Bonus was a close second.) Look out for my first post as May Include, which will drop sometime in late July on wage labor, AI surveillance, and the Amazon delivery industrial complex.
Before I go, here’s what I’ve been reading/watching
I’ve been ruminating a lot on this excellent article by Rachael Bedard about how combating the rise of anti-science and RFK Jr. is as much a political project as it is a project for reinstating the legitimacy of science, which has always been a field up for interpretation. It is so good and I highly recommend a read.
This Propublica piece, which worries that FDA cuts by HHS secretary RFK Jr. will limit the FDA’s power to perform safety inspections on overseas factories, where a lot of our medicine (especially generics) comes from.
This opinion piece about the buildup of physical drug waste in warehouses in Sierra Leone without fuel and staff to distribute them, and a tragic on-the-ground look at life after USAID.
This piece about a public gathering of New York doctors to tell true stories about the highs (and lows) of their profession.
In something out of Idiocracy, this reel about how the Louisiana legislature banned chemtrails.
This strange and public meeting of RFK Jr. and the Starbucks CEO.
I’m also halfway through Tramps Like Us, a mostly-forgotten 2001 novel which was recently republished by FSG. Tramps Like Us is one of those books that, 20 pages in, I already decided I loved. Both a road novel and a slice of life diary wrapped up in a gay coming of age set in the 1970s with a simple prose style which makes the setting feel lifelike—and disarms—the book provides off-the-cuff observations about youth and queerness that feel like revelations, providing powerful threads of connection between queer life now and then. (Here’s a review in NYT.)
I can’t wait for this pivot! And I’m truly appreciative of y’all for going on this newsletter journey with me : )
Until next time as May Include,
—Cory the Rat
Thanks go to my boyfriend for helping me with the name