The Disease Dealers: Inside the Pharmaceutical Industry’s Business of Making You Sick

By Michael Rodriguez

First edition: Oktober 2025
Published by Resource Economics Press
New York • London • Singapore

ISBN: 979-8231847839 (Hardcover)
ISBN: 979-8232197353 (eBook)

About the Book

Picture this: You open your medicine cabinet at 2:47 AM, searching desperately for your child’s fever medication. Instead, you find a pharmaceutical graveyard—thousands of dollars worth of pills you never took, conditions you’re not sure you had, and medications prescribed not because you needed them, but because a drug company paid your doctor to prescribe them.

This is the Disease Dealers’ business model: a meticulously engineered system where pharmaceutical giants don’t cure diseases—they manufacture them. Where medications are designed not to heal, but to create lifetime customers. Where clinical trials are manipulated, research is corrupted, and patients are transformed from human beings into profit centers generating billions in shareholder returns.

Through eighteen months of intensive investigation across pharmaceutical company internal documents, FDA regulatory archives, clinical trial databases, and whistleblower testimonies, “The Disease Dealers” exposes the most profitable con in human history: an industry that has weaponized medicine itself, transforming healthcare from a healing profession into a predatory profit-extraction system where your sickness is their revenue stream.

Michael Rodriguez obtained unprecedented access to pharmaceutical company strategy memos, marketing plans targeting vulnerable populations, internal communications revealing conscious decisions to hide lethal side effects, and financial records documenting how companies like Pfizer, Purdue Pharma, Johnson & Johnson, and GlaxoSmithKline engineered the opioid epidemic, invented diseases to match their medications, and charged Americans 100 times more than patients in other countries for identical drugs.

From doctors bribed with luxury vacations to FDA regulators hired directly by the companies they’re supposed to oversee, from clinical trials conducted on prisoners without consent to life-saving medications priced beyond reach while costing pennies to manufacture—this investigation reveals how pharmaceutical corporations have corrupted every institution meant to protect patients, turning medicine into Wall Street’s most lucrative scam.

What You’ll Discover

💊 The Disease Invention Playbook

Internal marketing documents revealing how pharmaceutical companies literally invent medical conditions—”restless leg syndrome,” “social anxiety disorder,” “pre-diabetes”—then convince millions of healthy people they’re sick and need expensive medications.

🧪 The Clinical Trial Deception

Forensic analysis of how drug companies manipulate research by cherry-picking data, hiding dangerous side effects, testing on vulnerable populations without consent, and publishing only studies showing positive results while burying evidence of harm.

💰 The Price-Gouging Algorithm

Financial records exposing pricing strategies where medications costing $3 to manufacture are sold for $84,000, insulin prices increase 1,200% overnight, and Americans pay 10-100x more than patients in other countries for identical drugs.

🎭 The Doctor Bribery Network

Documentation of pharmaceutical rep tactics, including $89,000 recruitment investments per representative, luxury vacation “conferences,” cash payments disguised as consulting fees, and systematic targeting of doctors who over-prescribe.

🔴 The Opioid Genocide Blueprint

Internal Purdue Pharma documents proving executives knew OxyContin was deadly and addictive, deliberately targeted vulnerable communities, paid doctors millions to prescribe higher doses, and created the addiction crisis that killed over 500,000 Americans.

⚠️ The Regulatory Capture System

Evidence showing how pharmaceutical companies control the FDA through revolving door employment, fund 75% of the agency’s budget, write their own safety guidelines, and ensure dangerous drugs stay on the market regardless of death tolls.

Key Revelations

• The Medicine Cabinet Scam: Americans have an average of $500 worth of unused medications per household—totaling $3 billion in unnecessary prescriptions annually, with pharmaceutical reps trained to exploit doctor psychology through attractiveness, athletic backgrounds, and manipulation tactics costing $13.5 billion yearly

• The Invented Disease Economy: Pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than research, creating conditions like “female sexual dysfunction” (rebranded low libido), “adult ADHD” (expanded diagnoses), and “pre-hypertension” (inventing illness from normal readings) to sell medications

• The Testing on Prisoners Scandal: Internal documents showing pharmaceutical companies conducted dangerous drug trials on incarcerated populations, foster children, nursing home patients, and psychiatric ward inmates—vulnerable people unable to refuse participation

• The Patent Evergreening Scheme: Legal strategies where companies make tiny, medically irrelevant changes to medications (changing color, splitting doses, adding inert ingredients) to extend patent monopolies for decades, blocking generic competition and maintaining price-gouging capabilities

• The Global Price Discrimination: Financial analysis proving American patients subsidize global pharmaceutical profits by paying 10-100x more for identical medications, with companies threatening to withhold drugs from countries demanding fair pricing

• The Whistleblower Punishment System: Documentation of how pharmaceutical companies destroy careers, file criminal charges, and deploy legal warfare against employees who expose safety violations, research fraud, or marketing corruption

About the Author

Michael Rodriguez is an investigative journalist and economic analyst specializing in pharmaceutical economics, corporate healthcare profiteering, and the intersection of medical power with financial interests. His groundbreaking exposés have influenced international policy debates and shaped public discourse about drug pricing reform.

Rodriguez’s previous bestsellers include “The Profit Machine,” “The Bush Machine,” “Weaponized Economy,” “Silver Empire,” and “The Trillion Dollar Shadow.” His investigations consistently reveal patterns of institutional profit-seeking that drive policy decisions affecting millions of lives.

For “The Disease Dealers,” Rodriguez conducted eighteen months of intensive research, analyzing pharmaceutical company internal documents, clinical trial databases, FDA regulatory records, and interviewing over 500 sources including medical whistleblowers, patient advocates, regulatory officials, and former executives from Pfizer, Purdue Pharma, Johnson & Johnson, and GlaxoSmithKline.

Rodriguez’s methodology combines forensic financial analysis with investigative journalism, connecting corporate boardroom decisions with their real-world impact on public health. His work exposes how drug companies use patent manipulation, regulatory capture, clinical trial fraud, and disease mongering to ensure perpetual revenue growth regardless of actual patient benefit.

His unique contribution is demonstrating that pharmaceutical exploitation is not aberrational but systemic—a feature, not a bug, of how modern capitalism interacts with healthcare. Rodriguez continues to investigate how pharmaceutical interests shape healthcare policy and medical practice, revealing uncomfortable truths about who truly benefits when patients get sick.

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