CANADIAN MEDS
by
John Moynihan
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
John Moynihan on Smashwords
Canadian Meds
Copyright © 2009 by John Moynihan.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009907302
ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4415-5748-3
Softcover 978-1-4415-5747-6
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, companies and medications are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, persons, companies, pharmaceuticals or medications is entirely coincidental and unintended. This book was printed in the United States of America.
To order additional copies of this book, contact:
Xlibris Corporation
1-888-795-4274
Orders@Xlibris.com
* * * * *
To Deborah
* * * * *
One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all.
Grace Slick, 1967
* * * * *
Prostata
“No, no, no. Hell, no! It needs to be bigger,” Bill Callahan said loudly into the phone. “And redder, much redder.” He was standing with his back to the office door, looking out in profile onto the parking lot below his window. Most of the cars were late-model Toyotas and Hondas sitting in the early winter sun. He was the president of Tundra RX, an Internet drug retailer based in Canada. He was medium-framed, with a little extra weight around the middle, still handsome with most of his hair, which was slowly turning salt-and-pepper gray. Callahan was dressed in the basic CEO uniform of dark pressed slacks, loafers, and a blue striped, open-collar dress shirt.
“Look, Bill,” the voice said on the other end. “We’ve sent you three foam samples so far—what’s wrong with them?”
“You want to know what’s wrong? I’ll tell you. We need this prostate big, and full, and hard. This thing is supposed to be like an anatomically exaggerated stress ball. Foamy and firm, and big. The operative word here is big. As in big and sore.”
“I think a prostate is the size of a golf ball, isn’t it Bill?”
“It doesn’t matter what size it really is. When we give this to our customers who are buying Prostata, we want them to subconsciously think that this is their prostate. Their own puffy, sore, oversized prostate. Make it the size of a baseball, if you can. But it’s got to be bigger and redder, and raw.”
“Yeah, we can do that pretty easily. We’ll just increase the size of the pour mold. The foam is really flexible. It’s good stuff, they use it in the space program.”
“Jesus. Remember, what we’re trying to do here is ship this little foam prostate to our customers along with their Prostata pill order as health education. You know, teach ’em a little something, a sort of show-and-tell. That way, they can see their prostate and all the little connections that can get clogged.”
“You thinking they’ll keep it on their desk in their home office, huh? Is that what you’re telling me?” The foam salesman laughed. “You’re fucking nuts.”
“Yeah, that’s the idea. We want them to think that this foam replica is just like their own prostate. That’s why the goal is to make it a little enlarged and puffy, and bright pink. Pink, almost red. Red is the real color. It’s the color of inflammation. We want them to think that their prostates are inflamed and over-extended, so they’ll take their Tundra RX prostate pills religiously, everyday. That’s the holy grail.
“What a bunch of bullshit.”
“Look, do the best you can,” Callahan said. “I need to see another prototype in my office by Monday. We’ve got five thousand of these pills to ship this month and I’d like this little marketing aid to go with each order. So, help me out here.”
The foam salesman promised to send another prototype in the next forty-eight hours.
Bill Callahan knew that he needed to finish this “consumer marketing” for Prostata before the company shipped its first pill. It was a new product line for them and he wanted to get it right. He punched in his marketing director’s extension.
“Julie, can you come down here for a minute please?”
“Sure Bill, be right there.”
Thirty seconds later, Julie Sontag showed up in his office. She was a tall, attractive, auburn-haired woman wearing slacks and a sweater. As usual, she was very well put together. She was Tundra RX’s head of marketing and sales.
Julie had come to Canada five years ago to pursue a relationship with a professional hockey player. But she quickly realized that beyond the sporting events, nice dinners, and the physical relationship, they had very little in common. She had drive and ambition. Her ex was a hockey player who spent his free time taping his stick, playing video games, and talking on his cell to his buddies.
Callahan moved several stacks of paper around so that there was some clear space on the table for them to work.
“Julie, we’ve got to develop a guide sheet for Prostata. Something that talks to the problems that men face when they have a prostate issue.” Callahan leaned back in his chair as he spoke. He had developed a slight softness around his waist, and it was noticeable when he rested his hands on his stomach. It was the result of too many hours in the office and not enough in the gym.
“What are you thinking?” Julie said. “We put in a drug disclosure sheet with the meds, just like we always do. Are you talking about an additional marketing piece?”
“Yeah, exactly. We need more marketing sizzle for this one. I want to push this one out the door. I’m thinking about a piece that highlights the problems of older men. I want you to put a picture of a man in distress in silhouette as wallpaper, in profile. Then write a paragraph about prostate problems. Under that, I want the textbook symptoms listed in slightly larger font.”
Callahan grabbed a pad of paper and drew a facial outline of a man. Then he dropped in bullet points beneath:
Low flow
Erection problems
Painful urination
Irritation
Incontinence
Dribbling
Callahan underscored this last bullet twice and looked over at Julie. “Dribbling, Julie. You know what I’m goddamn talking about here? Men dribbling. Tell me, what’s worse than that?”
Julie groaned. “You’re disgusting,” she said. “I’m glad I’m a woman, that’s all I can say.” She was thirty-three, with a high energy level. She loved the repartee with Callahan, as she knew she could always hold her own with her boss. He respected it. She listened to Callahan’s concept for the campaign, and liked it. It would work.
“Think you can fix this?”
“No problem.” Julie looked at the picture. “How close do you want the headshot of this guy?”
“I’m thinking quarter turn, with the pained expression. Give me some options.”
“I think we should do a cool, blue background,” Julie said.
“No, give me pink. It’s the color of irritation.”
Julie shook her head. “No way. We can’t have pink or red for a male product.”
“Okay. Just bring me back something this afternoon.”
“I’ll start it right after I finish the ad copy for the July AARP issue.”
With that, Julie ripped the top sheet of paper from the pad as a memory jog, and got up. Callahan watched her as she walked out of the room. He always tried to hire good-looking women to work at Tundra RX. It made the days interesting.
* * * * *
Erecta
The drug Erecta—the erection superpill—was the blockbuster product for Callahan when he started the company four years ago in Edmonton, in the back of an industrial park. Tundra RX’s “delivery system,” as Callahan called it in the company ads on the Internet, allowed it to get US pharmaceutical quality drugs at prices that that were twenty to fifty percent lower than what customers could purchase them for down in the United States. It was a bold statement.
The competitive advantage that Tundra RX had was its custom suppliers of pharmaceuticals. The company had an exclusive relationship with several small specialty pharmaceutical manufacturing plants, one in particular that was located in China, in Guangzhou province, just north of Hong Kong. This facility was state-of-the-art, and was able to make pills to any specification for Tundra RX.
For Erecta, the Chinese manufacturing plant could create either real or fake formulations at will. The real ones were perfect and were as good as any produced from a lab in the US. The facility could also produce Erecta tabs that were very close to the exact chemical compounding of the patented pill, but not exact, as the exact compound was much more expensive to produce. These pills would be close in potency to the real drug, but not quite the same. The plant could also produce purely fake Erecta pills—pills that looked identical to the real thing, right down to the markings and coating, but were essentially no more than sugar pills.
Callahan moved from selling real to fake to in-between pills easily and Tundra RX shipped all three types with the customers never knowing exactly which kind of pills they were getting in a particular order.
“Rakesh, I want us to start tracking the first-time Erecta orders we receive and fill them like this,” Callahan said while talking to Rakesh Gupta, his chief medical officer, one morning. “For first-time buyers, I want you to fill the order with the genuine stuff—full-strength Erecta. No fucking around.”
“Why?” Rakesh asked. “We won’t make any money filling orders using US-supplied real drugs. We’ll lose money because it costs us more to purchase the drug stateside, ship it up here, repackage it, and then ship it back down at our discount pricing. What are you thinking?”
“We’ve got to make sure the first order, particularly for these impotence drugs, works perfectly. We’ve got to create a satisfied customer,” Callahan said. “It’s obvious. If the customer isn’t getting an erection from our stuff, he won’t be a repeat buyer. He may even start to seriously badmouth us to his friends, and in public.”
“He won’t be badmouthing us in public about not getting a hard-on, I can tell you that much,” Rakesh said.
“That’s probably true. But he might loosen up to his buddies after a few beers at the club,” Callahan said. “Why risk it? We need to create a great first-time customer experience. But we’re only going to do it for the first shipment. Then we’ll flip over to our in-house, diluted brand for future orders.”
So that’s what Tundra RX did, and did very efficiently. The company would ship full-strength Erecta for the first order, and then use the house brand after that. Sometimes the house brand was just as good as the proprietary stuff, and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes it had other ingredients in the pills that didn’t belong there. Callahan knew that you could never absolutely count on consistent quality from the foreign drug manufacturers. By fulfilling the first order with the real stuff, Tundra RX avoided a stumble with their new customers and increased the likelihood of repeat business.
Callahan knew that the reason why Big Pharma could charge so much more for their drugs was the simple premise that their drugs were better and safer, and therefore, more effective. He knew that was all garbage. It was the simple fact that the drug companies had a patent in a regulated market and could charge whatever they wanted to well-off, middle-class Americans. It was a pharmaceutical license to print money. This well-off American market became Callahan’s target early on, and it was ripe for picking.
* * * * *
Birth of a Nation
Callahan sat with Julie Sontag in the cafeteria that Northern Properties had constructed in one of the buildings in the industrial park. It was big and had a hot food line, a salad bar, and cookies and snacks.
For three years before coming to Tundra RX, Julie had worked at Mullin Brown, the big advertising agency in Toronto. She had been a mid-level manager in pharmaceutical marketing, and had accounts with Smith Planter and Kingston Allen Carter. Over time, she learned what the drug companies thought about their products, how they marketed their wares, and how they exploited their expensive proprietary patents. These were all valuable skills for Tundra RX to exploit when she came over.
Callahan and Julie were off to the side, alone at a two-top table along the windows. Julie had her feet up on a chair, sipping a large, steaming cup of coffee. Callahan was sitting with his own coffee and a honey-dipped donut. It was January. They blended in with the sea of people in the room.
“How do you think we’re doing with our marketing?” Callahan asked as he swirled a flimsy wooden stirrer in his coffee.
“I think we’re just scratching the surface.”
“How so?”
“Look, let’s take it from the top. Big Pharma in the United States discovers a drug then creates a market for it. Did you ever hear of Erecta for erectile dysfunction or Prostata for prostate issues before Smith Planter and Mack started advertising them?”
“Of course not. They built the brand,” Callahan said. “It was a brilliant campaign. They took those closet afflictions and made them into everyday events. Not getting a hard-on became as mundane as getting the oil changed in the car at Quik-Lube. And you could talk about it in public as well.”
“That’s exactly right,” Julie said. “Now, we need to draft off that platform that Big Pharma created. We need to do more ads. Cheap ads, probably banner ads. We’re getting some of our best exposure from these banner ads. Take Canadian Hotties, for example. We got twenty-three orders from that site yesterday alone. That’s great traffic from just a banner ad.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Callahan said. “But are they cheap enough?”
Julie was on a roll now. “Yeah, we can. I think we also need to expand to other adult sites. Some mainstream ones and some radical ones. We’ve got to go both ways. But my problem is that a lot of these sites are just hard core porn,” Julie said as she sipped her coffee. “But I’ve got an idea.”
“Like what?” Callahan asked.
“You’re gonna laugh when I tell you.”
“No I won’t. You’re creative. That’s why you were hired—to figure some of this stuff out and push us into new areas.” Callahan took a sip from his coffee cup, looked over at Julie and waited.
“Well, there are a lot of other adult sites with straightforward sex that we should be attached to. That’s our mass market. Those sites are probably surfed by wholesome, middle-class guys who are watching light porn and want a performance edge.”
“Yeah, so what?”
“I think I know how to get more exposure here, differentiate us, but keep us legit all at the same time.” Julie smiled as she spoke. “I think that we need to brand ourselves on these adult sites with an image, a cartoony image but one that sticks. Like the lizard for the insurance company, or the duck. Or the dancing cowboys. You know what I’m talking about?”
“Yeah. They’re effective, for sure,” Callahan said.” “But how do we work it?”
“So I’m thinking that we should use a donkey.”
“A donkey? Cut the shit,” Callahan said.
“A small, cartoon donkey walking across the top crawler with his pecker underneath his legs. You know, donkeys are known for having big peckers. So his pecker is dragging on the ground. He swallows a pill and starts to smile. He jumps up on his hind legs, and he gets a human-like erection as he walks off the crawler, with his paws on his hips. It’s as if he’s saying ‘Look at me. Look what I’ve got!’ The erection is proportional of course, not grotesque. It’s gotta be funny and tasteful. We’ll run a Tundra RX logo underneath the banner. I think the men will love it. I’m working on some animation right now with Jeff. It’ll be like the dancing mortgage girls. What do you think?”
Callahan raised his eyebrows and looked at Julie. “Are you kidding me? It’s over the top. It sounds absurd. But it might get us noticed. And that’s what we need, something for us to stand out. An iconic image. There’s a sea of Canadian pharmaceutical ads out there, otherwise.”
“I know. Product recognition,” Julie said. “It’s a little raunchy, but trust me. I’ve got intuition on this one.”
“A donkey dick crawler ad? Maybe,” Callahan said, as he shrugged his shoulders. “Who has a bigger dick than a donkey? It might work.”
Julie blushed. “It’s not brilliant. It’s just that the male psyche is consistent, at least from my limited experience.”
“I’m sure your experience isn’t limited, but I don’t want to know,” Callahan said as he winked at Julie. They finished their coffees and headed back to the office. Julie made a mental note to finish the animation quickly, as Callahan didn’t reject the idea out of the box then and there. She took it as a green light. She needed to get a prototype working now.
* * * * *
Straight Shooter
Officer Michael Smith was a fifty year-old Massachusetts state trooper on the prowl. He was six foot tall, and in reasonably good shape. Reasonable was the operative word. No paunch. He could still fit in the dress uniform that he graduated in from the Police Academy over twenty-five years ago. But he was definitely slowing down. Smith was divorced for three years now. His twenty year marriage had produced two girls. Both were grown up.
Now that he was divorced from Carole, he occasionally started to take some of the cell phone numbers that sometimes came his way. He was pretty awkward at the dating game. It was hard to keep conversation going with a state cop for an entire dinner, he knew. He could talk about fingerprinting and running licenses, and how to keep your foot hovering just above the brake pedal while going ninety miles an hour in the passing lane, floating two inches off the bumper of the guy in front, but not many women wanted to hear about that. At least, not the attractive ones.
No, they were occasionally interested in sex, and that was about it. Mike could generally produce in that department, for the most part. Two weeks ago, he dated a blond that he met coming off a Delta flight from Atlanta, and had a hell of a good time. After dinner, they ended up at her place in Woburn, screwing in her condo.
Once in a while, his machinery didn’t work as well as he wanted it to. He got limp at the wrong time or couldn’t get it up, usually right when his date wanted him to perform like an acrobat. This was not good stuff from his perspective, but since he only saw each of these women once or twice, it didn’t rattle him.
But it did get him thinking that he was starting to get older and that he probably needed a little productivity boost to keep his pecker running straight and true. The false starts were happening on a more than random basis, and he was a little worried. One of the cops in the barracks was bragging about Erecta lately, and that the cheapest way to get some was by buying it from one of the Canadian mail-order drug companies. Not only was it cheaper on the Web, but you did it anonymously—no doctor’s visit or prescription. The anonymous part was what interested Mike. The last thing he wanted was some doctor in Boston asking him sex questions about how frequently he had impotence problems or when was the last time he jerked off.
He stood in his bedroom in his condo in South Boston as he placed a call. It was the third-floor unit of a triple-decker, with great views of the harbor. He could see all the way over to the gas tank beyond the Dorchester Yacht Club from his open living room.
“Hello, is Susan there?” he asked. He threaded his shiny black belt through the trouser loops on his tight blue jodhpurs as he talked. He had to wear his dress blues with the pants and black boots on the airport detail.
“Speaking”, Susan Jefferson said. Susan was a computer storage saleswoman who traveled a lot, selling memory drives and upgrades to large corporate users. She was blond and good-looking. She was a little older herself—early forties and also divorced. Susan had been married for ten years, but her constant traveling and poor choice of husband finally did her relationship in.
“Hi. This is Mike, the state policeman from Logan. We met at Dunkin’ Donuts last week, remember? We talked about the bad weather and your BMW’s starter problems.”
“Of course I remember, Mike,” Susan said. “I was wondering if you were going to call or not,” she answered.
“This isn’t easy for an old guy like me,” Mike said as he shifted the phone onto his other shoulder, and finished clasping his belt. “I’m not good at calling up and asking for dates. It feels like high school.”
“Then I’m going to leave you hanging and see how you do,” Susan said. “You’re doing fine so far, though. You had the courage to at least call me up and exposure yourself to failure. I admire that.”
“No kidding. Failure? Wouldn’t be the first time,” Mike said as he laughed. “I figured I’d call and see if you wanted to go dinner this weekend. Place on the South Shore, the Harbor Grille.” His restaurant repertoire was small, so he led with his best.
“I know it. It’s one of my favorite places,” Susan said. “You’re not coming in a police cruiser, are you?”
“Don’t laugh. At least we’d find a parking spot near the front.”
“Surprise me,” Susan said.
Mike ended the call and dropped the phone from his shoulder into the cradle. He had a good vibe with Susan early on that he didn’t usually get with other women that he dated. He liked her sarcasm. She was sharp.
He finished getting dressed and gave his knee-high black boots a quick polish with a brush that he kept in his drawer. He was happy, thinking about the upcoming weekend as he headed north on Route 93 in the cruiser. He drove in the passing lane at seventy-five miles per hour, with his wrap-around Oakley sunglasses and hot coffee in the cup holder, the traffic moving out of the way as he passed.
* * * * *
Working It
“You like this place?” Mike asked, as he cut into his T-bone steak diagonally. It was Saturday night. He was into his second glass of the Cakebread Cellars cabernet that Susan had chosen. She was having the veal chop and polenta.
“Yes, good choice,” she said, as she cut into her entree. “So tell me, what’s it like to be a cop? Sorry, I mean, state policeman. Why have you stayed at it so long?”
“It’s basically a simple job. Like flying planes. A lot of boredom and a few moments of absolute terror,” Mike said. “I actually like wearing the uniform and walking around schmoozing. It’s pretty simple to talk to most people at the airport because I’m a cop. People know they have to talk to me if I start a conversation.”
“So you like to talk to people but within a set of defined social boundaries,” Susan said, picking up on the thought. “So what’s our designated interaction tonight, Officer Smith? Tell me.”
“I don’t know yet. You have to decide if you like me or not, if you want this to go anywhere,” he said.
“Indeed I do.”
Susan and Mike continued to eat and drink. He refilled their wine glasses.
“Well?”
“Keep talking,” Susan said and smiled as she cut her veal. “The night’s young.”
By the time they chose the bananas foster and cappuccinos for dessert, they had both recapped their marriages, how each now spent their free time, and how little of it they had.
“Come on in for a drink, Mike,” Susan said when they pulled up around midnight to her condo in Cohasset. The neighborhood was quiet. He put the car in park, and looked at her in the glow of the streetlight nearby.
“Are you sure? It’s pretty late. I should probably be going back to Southie.”
“Just one glass of wine. I’ll show you the renovation of my kitchen and you can tell me what you think,” Susan said.
So in they went for drinks. Mike had a beer and Susan had a glass of wine. They sat and talked. Eventually, Susan moved closer to Mike, and they started to kiss. In a little while, their clothes were off in a pile on the floor. Since Susan knew where this was headed, she got up before they got too far into it, and took Mike’s hand and smiled.
“I forgot to show you the renovation work that I did in my bedroom. Come on and check it out for a second,” she said. “I’m interested in your opinion.” Susan wasn’t the top systems saleswoman in her office for nothing. She always knew how to close a deal.
#
When Mike awoke next morning Susan was already at work under the covers. He could barely keep up his erection. Three times in less than ten hours was too much for a fifty year-old cop. He struggled to perform. He finally came, but only after much hard work by Susan.
“Hang out for the morning,” Susan said later in the kitchen. They were both putting orange marmalade on croissants they had just toasted. She sipped her coffee from a large ceramic mug that she wrapped her hands around.
“I can’t,” Mike lied. “I’ve got a shift at three this afternoon.”
“You’re always working,” she said, mildly disappointed. She wanted to spend a little more intimate time with Mike to see if he was worth investing any energy in. “Maybe next time,” she said. Susan made sure that there was no pressure to hang around, but left the “next time” feeler out there with Mike. She looked over at him, sizing him up.
Mike was nervous. He got the hell out of there fast. He liked Susan a lot—maybe too much, for a first date. He was sore as a polecat, though, from all the screwing. Something had to change. He wasn’t getting any younger, and he needed performance help. He remembered the Erecta conversation with his buddy from the barracks as he was driving back up Route 93 toward South Boston. He decided to look into it some more. Maybe that was the solution.
* * * * *
Substitutions
As it turned out, both the Mexican and Chinese pill manufacturers that Tundra RX used had similar operations. Callahan was right on in his initial assessment on the due diligence of each group, initially. They both had the talent and the equipment to grind out the finest in pharmaceuticals, from pills to caplets.
Callahan learned that it was best to use different manufacturers for different products the company sold. The Mexican facility was best at sleep aids and some high blood pressure meds. They were great at propranolol and metoprolol and the other beta blocking agents. For other classes of drugs, he would go to China. For statins and for the specialty erectile dysfunction, or so-called ED drugs, Hong Kong was the place to go.
“Hello, Pablo? This is Bill Callahan at Tundra RX. How are you?”
Pablo, the compact Mexican sales director at Pharmaceutico Real, knew Callahan well. Tundra RX was one of his larger customers. “I’m doing fine, Bill. What can we get you today?”
“I need some sleeping pills. Miloden MR and Sonotol. Five thousand pills each, end of the week.”
“Ah, that’s tough for us right now, Bill. Demand has shot up, and we’re running two production shifts already. We can’t keep up. I have two back orders for Europe already in front of you. The best I can do is fourty-five days out.”
“Cut the shit, Pablo,” Callahan said as he leaned back and swiveled in his big overstuffed leather chair. “We can’t pay a premium every time we order. Our pricing model doesn’t support it. We’ll go broke.”
“Bill, I’m not asking you to pay a premium every time you order. I don’t understand about your pricing models, either. I’m just saying that if you want the order shipped now, you’re going to have to pay more for it to go to the top of the list. A lot of other Canadian buyers want the same stuff. Everybody is having trouble sleeping now, you know.”
“Yeah. I’ll remember that when you call me to unload some of your overstocked inventory next month. I’ll tell you that I don’t want the shit.”
“It’s up to you, señor.”
“How much?” Callahan finally asked.
“A dollar fifty a pill.”
“That’s too much. Way too much. I can do seventy-five cents a pill and that’s it,” Callahan countered.
Pablo paused. “All right, we’ll do it at that price but you need to take a ten thousand-pill lot.”
“It’s a deal. Send me a confirmation,” Callahan said. “We need the inventory now.”
#
One of the problems for Tundra RX in retailing pharmaceuticals to the public was keeping up on the purity of the drugs that they sold. It was all well and good that the manufacturing plants that Callahan dealt with were state-of-the-art, and able to turn out drugs that rivaled American plants on a pill-for-pill basis. They had the equipment and the formularies. But having front-of-the-shop research and development capabilities in no way assured buyers like Callahan that the product they actually paid for and got was the real deal. That was often the case with foreign pill purchases. Quality control was questionable. It was never because the companies couldn’t make the right drugs if they wanted to. It was simply whether they wanted to.
“Carol, how’s the quality on the stuff that we’re buying from Pharmaceutico Real?” Callahan asked. Carol Ferris, the director of research and quality control, had just come into his office. She had on a white lab coat and a pair of bright red glasses pushed up into her black hair. She was a single mom, thirty five years old and reasonably attractive, and the mainstay of the Tundra RX research area.
“We test checked three of the last shipments and they were so-so. The Miloden was full-strength, but there were problems with the Erecta. Even the basic blood pressure stuff they send us now has problems a lot of the time.”
“What was wrong with the Erecta?” Callahan asked. This was one of the most profitable drugs for Tundra RX, and they were selling a lot of it.
“Yeah, we checked and the formulary was off by a lot. They’re having a tough time getting the selendafil chloride for the mix. I think they’re just too lazy and nobody is picking up on it,” Carol said.
“Damn it. We need to stay on top of that with them. What does that do to the drug?”
“Limp dicks, Bill,” Carol said matter-of-factly. She looked directly at him. She was a straight shooter and didn’t go for small talk with Callahan.
“Doesn’t sugarcoat it,” he said as he laughed.
“Hey, you asked.” She prided herself on her bluntness.
“Shit, we can’t have that,” Callahan said. “We’re just starting to get traction for the ED drugs in our Web space.”
“You mean the donkey dick ads?” Carol said, shaking her head. “You’re bringing us down to new levels.”
“Hey, the marketing may be a little seamy, but it’s working. We’ve been selling a lot more Erecta since the ads started running. But the pills can’t be bogus. We need real pills, and real erections. We need satisfied customers.”
“I know, Bill, I know. Believe me, we all need erections of steel,” Carol said as she winked at Callahan. She was on the dating circuit, now that she was single again. She had been divorced for two years and had custody of her two grade school kids.
“So who’s doing it?”
“It’s the Chinese, as usual. They keep changing the formularies, and they think that we don’t know what’s going on. You need to talk to Zhu. In the sampling that we’re doing now, we’re seeing twenty-seven percent of our order not meeting basic chemical composition requirements.”
“‘They’re screwing us over,” Callahan said.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but we need to clean it up. You and I should go down there one of these days and have a meeting with Zhu and the team and get it straightened out.”
“That’s not a bad idea. Talk to Fran. See if we can schedule something going forward.”
“I’ll look at your calendar,” Carol said halfheartedly as she got up and left the room. She knew that the trip was just happy talk, and that Callahan would never fly to China to have a working session with the Lucky guys.
Callahan wondered how he was going to keep Carol out of the loop as to what was really going on at the Guangzhou production plant over the long term. She was inquisitive with a high energy level and would find out soon enough if he wasn’t careful.
* * * * *
Surfing for Pills
Mike Smith was in his kitchen late on a Thursday night, off-shift, in jeans and a blue Red Sox T-shirt with CRISP in big white letters on the back. He had cracked a Budweiser and had the Celtics on, early season, playing the Lakers on the West Coast. The game had just started. Kobe Bryant was in and had scored the last four points. Like every Boston fan, Mike hated the fucking Lakers, particularly when they played in LA. The camera kept panning to Jack Nicholson and the other stars all sitting courtside in the expensive seats.
He was sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop, scrolling through about twenty ads for Erecta online, all without a prescription. There was no way he was going to the doctor’s to ask for this stuff in person. Besides, Mike knew what he wanted. A pill for one of those four-hour erections that they warned you about during the pro football games on Sunday.
Mike was having the time of his life. He was starting to see Susan regularly. They were doing romantic dinners and then sex back at her townhouse every other week. Susan was a woman who knew what she wanted and was not afraid to tell him. The problem was that it left Mike exhausted and unable to keep up.
Last Sunday they had made love in the morning, and afterwards, Mike was reading the Sunday Globe and watching the Fox NFL Pre-game Show in bed with Susan. She had a beautiful fourty-one-inch flat-screen right in the bedroom, on the wall. He was in heaven. Soon enough, she was interested in more lovemaking. He struggled to do it again, and ended up missing the entire pregame show, which was running in the background on mute. He decided then that he needed help.
He clicked through the lead page on the Web site, and was now on the Tundra RX Male Potency Page. This was the portal on the Website that had all the sexual potency and erectile drugs. It was set up with a very attractive Danish-looking blond who was smiling on the front page. She had Nordic features—high cheek bones and straight, almost platinum, hair parted to the side. She was gorgeous, and Mike stared at her before dropping down the screen.
He scrolled through the multiple offerings Tundra RX had listed. Each type of pill had a sample picture—in color—and then had its pricing, both on a package and a per-pill basis. The pills were all in bright colors, and were shown on a white background.
He scrolled over to dosage, and immediately clicked on the strongest dosage in stock: 100 milligrams per tablet. Up came a popup. “Have A Doctor’s Prescription?” He clicked “No,” and a follow-on appeared. “No Problem. A prescription is not necessary when ordering from us. We ask that you research the drug you are purchasing on our Website, and take it in appropriate doses. Serious side effects are possible.” That was the extent of the disclaimer that Tundra RX had for any of its on line purchases.
Mike read the disclaimer, clicked on “I agree,” and moved on. The site also made him approve a medical liability waiver since he had no prescription for the drugs. When it was all said and done, he purchased fifty Erecta tablets, a multivitamin compound for men over fifty, and a bottle of Vitamin E Natural caplets in the 150-milligram size. He read somewhere that Vitamin E promoted good heart health so he figured he should try the pills if he was going on an Erecta campaign.
He clicked through to his shopping cart and splurged on the One-Day FedEx service. He wanted the Erecta pills for the weekend. He and Susan were going down to Chatham for a long weekend away, and he wanted to be primed and ready for action. He paid with his New England Patriots MasterCard. He then opened another beer and went back to watching the Celtics. They were up by eight points in the second period. Mike noticed that Nicholson had a knockout blond seated next to him, young enough to be his daughter.
He leaned back in his chair as he sipped the cold beer, watched the game, and wondered what kind of shit he was getting himself into, taking pills to have better erections. He shook his head and felt a little perverted. He had never done anything like this before. He hoped it didn’t cause more problems than it was worth.
#
Miguel San Luis was the head of production for Pharmaceutico Real CV in Mexico. He was sitting in Juarez in his office, doodling with his black Scripto Fine Writer pen on a pad of note paper that a sales rep had given him. He was talking on the phone to his plant manager, Eduardo. Miguel shook his head as he listened.
“We may need to shut the line down in Zone 1,” Eduardo said quietly.
“Why, what’s up?” Miguel said.
“We don’t have any more dutasteride for the Prostata run.”
‘How far into it are you?
“We’ve batched twenty thousand pills so far and the run is thirty thousand.”
“How’d it happen?”
“How does it always happen? We screwed up on the production mix, okay?”
“What?”
“Jose thought the run was only going to be fifteen thousand pills so we mixed for that level.”
“Can’t you add more filler?”
“Do you think I’d be calling you if I had more filler to add and finish off the batch?” Eduardo said.
“Okay, you’re right,” Miguel said. “So what do you want?”
“I need your authorization to mix in a different placebo to round out the formulation and finish the batch.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Acetaminophen or maybe basic aspirin, amigo. Should be no problem.”
“We ever have problems substituting aspirin in our other drugs?”
“Not yet. Nobody’s called me up to complain, at least. It’s pretty harmless stuff for most people.”
“Most people?” Miguel said sarcastically.
“No, not everybody. Don’t bullshit me. You know that some people can have allergic reactions to it, like internal bleeding, maybe worse. But the odds are they’ll probably never notice it in a prostate drug, though.”
“Okay, go ahead and use it then. Finish the run off. But Jesus Christ, we’ve got to start watching this closer. If people found out and could trace the pills to this factory, they’d have our cojones nailed to a tree, no doubt,” Miguel said.
“Thanks, boss. This at least lets us finish up the production for the night,” Eduardo said. “My son’s playing soccer at six, and I can go watch him now with this run out of the way.”
“Remember, nothing on paper,” the plant manager said.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m a poor Mexican that can barely read and write English anyway,” Eduardo said sarcastically as he put down the phone and went back to work.
* * * * *
Medical Input
Bill Callahan walked down the corridor to the research section of the office. It was a beautiful Canadian morning with the sky, brilliant blue, visible through all the windows. He went to Rakesh Gupta’s big office at the end of the corridor. Gupta was sitting at his desk, working intently at his desktop computer.
Rakesh was a real medical doctor. He was the only one on the Tundra RX staff. He held the title of Chief Medical Officer. It was a role that was largely marketing in nature, but an important one. Gupta fit the position perfectly.
“Bill, what brings you to my squat surroundings?” Rakesh said as he turned from his screen and smiled at Callahan. He had been surfing the Web MD site looking for info on Prostata, to bone up on it. Gupta was a Pakistani with a mottled complexion and a full head of jet-black hair. He wore stylish black rimmed glasses, giving him an intellectual look which was geared perfectly for his role in the company. He was also a clotheshorse and that, coupled with the glasses, made him an ideal fit. He was handsome, to boot.
Callahan saw the screen and recognized it before Rakesh could minimize it. “Rakesh, no wonder we’re so fucked up all the time,” he said. “You’re looking up medical research on Web MD. What the hell? Shouldn’t you be on the Journal of Canadian Medicine or some other bullshit highbrow medical site? You know, the good stuff, the stuff that regular people can’t understand. I can look shit up on Web MD, for Chrissake,” Callahan said as he laughed. “And I’m an accountant by training.”
He remembered how he had come to hire Rakesh for the company two years ago. Gupta had been in a public health clinic in Toronto where he was head of the clinical practice. He had received his medical degree from McGill, but he had two disciplinary actions on his record. Both of them were for unauthorized prescription activity. He was in his forties and divorced, and as it turned out, liked the restaurant and club scene in the city, along with a variety of prescription meds that he would sample along the way.
He let his hobby get out of control, and was eventually writing fake prescriptions for seven or eight drugs for himself. He got tripped up when he started sampling the Oxycontin. He finally got his medical license pulled for six months by the Board of Medicine, and was required to go to a rehab clinic in Montreal for three months to dry out.
Callahan remembered that he had tracked him down through a private detective. “Do you think he’s back on the straight and narrow now?” Callahan asked the ex-cop.
“Not a goddamn chance in the world. I trailed him in Montreal for about three days. He’s in the strip clubs every night. And I don’t mean hanging at the back. He’d be right up front where the action is. The guy’s not clean, trust me.”
That was all Bill Callahan needed to hear. It was exactly the character recommendation that he wanted.
Callahan was in Montreal the next day, and he scheduled an evening meeting with Rakesh at Paul Mathew’s steakhouse. Over prime rib, four cocktails, and two bottles of Stag’s Leap cabernet, Callahan cut his deal with Rakesh Gupta.
Later, they went out to a strip club that Rakesh suggested, and blew about two hundred Canadian dollars into the G-strings of some of the best-looking and raunchiest girls in town. Callahan was no stranger to the strip club scene, and nursed his own addiction to the young women, just like Rakesh. The two men formed a fast bond early on.
They hacked out the terms of an employment agreement over the next two days, and two weeks later, Dr. Rakesh Gupta, addictions and all, was working at Tundra RX as the Chief Medical Officer.
“Rakesh, we need to look at our purchases more closely from Pharmaceutico Real and Lucky,” Callahan said as he snapped back to the conversation. “They’re starting to water down their shipments to us more frequently than we want. A lot of their shit is all of a sudden coming into our warehouse.”
Rakesh had medical journals stacked high on his desk and side table. He had a keen interest in pharmacology, and would study articles that were relevant to Tundra RX and their business. He was a practical expert in most of the drug lines that the company sold.
“Yeah, I saw the report from Carol yesterday. I didn’t have a chance to meet with her yet, though,” he said. He pushed a mass of black hair off of his forehead as he frowned and adjusted his glasses.
“We need to watch what they’re sending us,” Callahan said.
“I know. They think because we’re asking for some dilution to cut costs that they can do whatever they want. That’s not the way it works. They can’t send us any more shit that’s not exactly as we ordered. End of story. We don’t have the luxury of tamping down our products any more. We have to hold the line somewhere.”
“I’ll call Arturo today and go over the mixes that we’re currently on order with.”
“You better. We’ve been successful in diluting the generics with a whole bunch of trash but we can’t get tripped up now. If we get a reputation for diluted pills, it’ll pass through the market like shit through a goose and kill sales.”
“I know,” Rakesh said as he frowned at Callahan.
“We need to fix it fast. This is our livelihood.”
Rakesh’s right hand was resting on his desk, and Callahan could see that he had the shakes, but just barely perceptible. Several of his fingers twitched slightly as the men spoke.
“I know that you’re on some stuff now,” Callahan said. “You’ve got to be careful. It’s one thing to be sampling the product, but you’ve got to keep it controlled. What were the terms of your license suspension?”
“If I’m caught writing another illegal prescription in the next year, I lose my license for five years. Then if it happens again, I lose it permanently.”
“Shit, we can’t have that. You’re our real marketing guy. We need your license for legitimacy. Can’t you keep your habits to after-hours and weekends at the clubs?” Callahan asked.
“No worries, Bill,” Rakesh answered. “I don’t write prescriptions for myself or for anyone else anymore. If I need to clinically test a drug in the interests of quality control for the company, I just go down to the warehouse floor and take a few foil cards. No one is the wiser.”
“What about the pill count on the inventory floor? Aren’t we short whatever amount you’re skimming?”
“I go into the inventory control program and mark small amounts down as ‘damaged in transport.’ It’s all fully supportable if we’re inspected. There’s no other paper trail. No record. I can’t risk getting my license pulled either.”
“No shit, Dr. Gupta. Where else are you going to make three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year for selling a bunch of knock-off pills to the unsuspecting public? You’ve got to protect your lifestyle or you’ll lose it.”
“Bill, no lectures, please. I’m the medicine man. I know what to do. Let’s focus on the business and not my occasional sampling of the product.”
“Just don’t let your hobby get in the way of our business or the possibility of Canadian prison is there for both of us.”
“You’re always so melodramatic.” Rakesh went back to his screen as he spoke to Callahan.
“We need to work together to pull as much money out of this machine as we can before it explodes. That’s all I’m saying,” Callahan added.
“Yeah, I agree. This is too lucrative for the both of us for me to screw it up.”
“Anyway, the reason I’m here, Rakesh, is to understand how you’re handling the Tenata production from Lucky. We need to watch those guys. Carol just found out that they were jimmying up the Miloden CR shipments with thirty percent junk.’’ Callahan paused and looked over at Rakesh.
“That’s not good,” he said. “That amount of inert material will definitely affect the potency of the drug, without a doubt. I’ll look at her report and then call Zhu. That’s bullshit.”
“They’re thinking that they can change any of the drugs without us picking up on it. You’ve got to talk to them and tell them that they can only modify the drugs that we tell them to. Otherwise, it’ll be out of control.”
“You’re right. We’ll have no quality assurance and we’ll get derailed pretty quickly.”
“Speaking of quality control, how much are we cutting down the Tenata mix?”
“I’ve tamped it down by seventeen percent. Nobody will pick it up from usage.”
“How about chemical analysis?”
“Well, with a mass spectrometer and chemical sampling, the drug components will come out. But Tenata is a patented drug. There’s just a slim chance that a general analysis lab could trace the dilution back to us. Only Kingston Allen has the formulation, and they keep it tightly guarded.”
“How about if Kingston did the tests?”
“Then we’re screwed. But with the hundreds of thousands of pills that are made and shipped by them worldwide, that’s pretty unlikely. And the chance of someone local doing the testing is pretty small too.”
“We’ve still got to watch out.”
“Agreed. But we’re not in trouble yet, are we? Statins are my area of expertise. I read up on them constantly. I actually do research on Tenata and Tenoril. I know you find that hard to believe.”
“No shit, I do find that hard to believe,” Callahan said.
“Remember, we’ve been stepping on the potency of these drugs for twenty-four months now, and no one has complained.”
“I know, I know. But I still get nervous. You can’t weaken the pills any further for now. We can’t risk it. We’re running full bore and need to make as much money as we can.”
Rakesh sat back as he listened to Callahan rant and tried to lift a sesame seed with his tongue that was stuck between his teeth from the morning’s bagel. It was irritating the shit out of him.
“Does anybody else in the company know that we’re decreasing the potency of the drugs we sell?” Rakesh asked Callahan straight out.
“Are you crazy? It’s just you and me,” Callahan said. “And that’s the way it’s got to stay. Everybody else thinks that we’re good at buying our drugs wholesale. That we get our drugs cheaply because we’re having them produced in China and Mexico, and we drive down the price through a competitive process. Julie and Carol probably suspect though, but they’re not looking to ask any hard questions,” Callahan said. “At least, not yet.”
“Why not?” Rakesh asked.
“Carol’s divorce just got finalized, and she’s got the autistic kid. I think she’s flat out just trying to keep it together day-to-day. Julie’s got the good lifestyle thing going, so I don’t think that she’s looking for problems either. But you never know, though.”
“What a fucking miserable world you’ve trapped us in, Bill,” Rakesh said as he laughed. “We’d be drawn and quartered under Canadian law if we were ever found out.” The lines hardened in his forehead above his glasses as he spoke.
“Yeah, I love compromised employees. Just keep your eye on the ball and your hobbies in check, and we’ll be okay. Start doing some test sampling on the inventory we’re getting from Lucky,” Callahan said. “I don’t trust those guys at all. They’re the ones who’ll send us bogus pills without our knowing it.”
“I’ll start random testing on all the products coming in-house for consistency. Carol will understand that.”
“Just don’t let her know too much or test too much.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“You better be,” Callahan said as he got up, stretched, and looked out the window. “Cause otherwise we’re fucked.” He smiled at Rakesh and then left his office. He headed back down the corridor to see how the day’s sales were going.
* * * * *
All Mixed Up
Carol Ferris was on her cell phone in her office on Monday evening. She was talking to her nanny at home. She was opening an e-mail from Biotest Services as she talked, multitasking.
“Anat, did he finish his homework? Okay. Did he take his pills? The orange ones that I left in the cup that said six pm on the stickie underneath. Yeah, those ones. Then let him watch wrestling for an hour in exchange. Yeah. Yeah. Make sure that he takes a shower and brushes his teeth. I’ll be home at 8:30 to put him to bed. Let me talk to him for a minute.”
The phone went quiet for a minute as Carol’s nanny went to get her son on the phone. Carol could hear the television blaring in the background. Ever since her divorce two years ago, it had been hard. She had gone back to work to help pay for the special schooling for her son, Seth, who was diagnosed with a mild form of autism. She had to hire the nanny so that she could go back to work full-time when her husband just walked out.
“Hello.” The little voice on the end of the phone was dull. Carole knew that she had interrupted Seth’s television time and he would have little to say.
“You need to take your pills and brush your teeth. I’ll be home in a little while, and we can watch a movie together. The Traveling Mouse. Alright?”
“Okay.”
“I love you sweetheart. Now put Anat back on.”
Her son quickly put the nanny back on the line and went back to his TV.
“Be sure all his work is done and he’s ready for bed before I get home. I’m tired,” Carol said.
They hung up, and Carol put her cell phone back into her pocket. She had a lingering resentment from the divorce. Frank walked away and didn’t do jack-shit. He paid the mortgage and that was it. She was left to work and take care of their special-needs son and another daughter. It was hard. He paid child support sporadically, and Carol was emotionally exhausted from chasing him with a lawyer and trying to collect money all the time.
She went back to her computer screen, focused, and started scrolling through test results that she had obtained that morning from Biotest, the outside lab that Tundra RX used for a lot of its testing. Just this week, she had sent a mix of pills to be tested for purity to the lab on the QT. She didn’t want her assistant or anyone else to know about it. She just had a gnawing feeling, and she needed to resolve it once and for all. It was her secret testing protocol.
The dirty secret in the industry was that all the drug retailers, like Tundra RX, would order placebos or “knock-offs” from the drug manufacturers to sell. These weren’t shabby fakes with the drug name misspelled or coding not stamped on the pills accurately. These were substitutions of the highest order. They looked, smelled and felt real. The only way to tell if the pills were bogus was to actually break them down in a lab and subject them to chemical analysis. This rarely happened.
Tundra RX got most of the pills it sold to the public, like every other drug reseller, from China. China was fast becoming the pill producer of choice for the world. It was because China was the world’s cheapest location to manufacture pharmaceuticals. Testing, inspection, and regulation were lax, and corruption was rampant. It was a heady and dangerous environment. Tundra RX ordered a significant amount of its pills from Lucky Pharmaceutical, which of course was China-based.
Carol reviewed the report online from Biotest on a clandestine sample of fifteen pills that she had sent the company last week. She told nobody about the testing. The compounds were all listed in a detailed PDF attachment. She went straight to the summary page and focused her eyes on the results. There in black and white on her screen was a set of testing results that showed that the pills she had sent were all adulterated and a lot contained virtually none of the chemical ingredients they were supposed to. Nothing! She couldn’t believe it. They were basically fakes. Placebos.
Carol’s heart quickened as she read through all the pages and the listing of the compounds that were present. Most of the pills were composed of either filler or drug compounds that had nothing to do with the medicine in question. She started to panic as she thought about what this meant. It was one of two things. One was that Tundra RX was paying for real drugs and getting ripped off from Lucky. The other was that people at Tundra RX were part of the scam. That would be Bill Callahan and Rakesh Gupta, buying pills from a shadowy Chinese manufacturer, and selling them to an unsuspecting public. She didn’t know what to think, but she knew that she had to get to the bottom of it all. And soon.
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