SEVERAL WAYS TO DIE IN MEXICO CITY
An Autobiography of Death in Mexico City
Kurt Hollander
In the ’80s, when author/photographer Kurt Hollander lived in New York and published The Portable Lower East, life there was particularly rough, and cops often drove yellow cabs as a method to surprise and roust its residents. Before the decade ended, Hollander moved to the equally rough climes of Mexico City, making his living writing and photographing for The Guardian, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and many other publications.
Hollander’s visual and textual extravaganza, Several Ways to Die in Mexico City, provides a perspective of this extraordinary city that could only have been caught by an observant outsider who lived in all its nooks and crannies for over two decades.
Crammed with caustic but fair observations of the city’s history, food, cults, drugs, and buildings, Hollander proves that he can love a city and culture that also kills its inhabitants softly. The book contains dozens of extraordinary photographs.
While living high in Mexico City, Kurt Hollander edited poliester, the renowned bilingual art magazine about the Americas. He also directed the feature film Carambola and wrote a successful series of children’s books. Grove Press published the Portable Lower East Side anthology in 1994.
“An amazing book that takes the reader on a wild, woolly, and consistently witty death trip, covering everything from Mexico’s rich history of human sacrifice to the dangers of eating, drinking and breathing in its capital.”
— Harold Schechter, author of The Whole Death Catalog
“. . . thank Kurt Hollander for leading us through a city in which many would not have the heart, lungs, stomach, or street smarts to survive.”
— New York Journal of Books
“Several Ways to Die in Mexico City stumbled into my lap and changed the way I think about what I eat and drink.”
– Hot Reads
{SNIP}....Drug Wars:
With the aim of gaining control of the hearts and bodies of 100 million potential consumers in Mexico, drug wars are currently raging in Mexico. In 1987, almost one hundred Mexican companies produced around 250 pharmaceuticals covering 67% of the market, but since the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect only one-quarter of these local companies have survived and multinational pharmaceutical companies dominate the market, their sales accounting for 70% of the annual 120 billion dollar legal drug sales in Mexico.
In addition to patented medicine, both national and international companies manufacture generic drugs, a lucrative market in Mexico. Generics provide the same therapeutic benefits without any need to run costly laboratory trials to prove their effectiveness, and thus can be offered at a discount of up to 75% of brand name pharmaceuticals. The main dealer of generics in Mexico is Dr. Simi and his Farmacias de Similares, in operation since 1997. Dr. Simi owns two pharmaceutical plants, over 50 laboratories and boasts over 3,500 drug stores that peddle his products (“the same but cheaper”) to 12 million drug users in Mexico alone (in Guatemala Dr. Simi has partnered up with Nobel-prize winner Rigorberta Menchu).
In addition to its aggressive ad campaign all over the city, in the Metro and on television (both commercials and with its own television show about health), Dr. Simi drugstores attract customers by hiring people to dance inside an oversized Dr. Simi cartoon-like character in a white lab suit. A long-used advertisement for the Dr. Simi drugstores showed a benevolent grey-haired man dressed as a family doctor (Dr. Simi) standing up to Raterín Raterón (Little Big Rat), a fat man in a top hat carrying a huge sack of money on his shoulder (representing foreign pharmaceutical companies).
In 2006, Dr. Simi, aka Victor González Torres, ran for president (he lost). His nephew is the president of the Green Party (the green refers more to money than to the environment) in cahoots with the PRI (Mexico’s ruling party for 70 years), and his brother owns another pharmacy chain. Due to its political connections, Dr. Simi has grown rapidly since the recent amendment to the Health Law which permits the inclusion of generics in over-the-counter healthcare. The government recently created Seguro Popular, a healthcare initiative designed to provide healthcare services and medicine, both brand name and generics, to 50 million people. With his political connections, Dr. Simi has been able to carve out 10% of the national sales of drugs.
Dr. Simi has long been engaged in an all-out drug war with the established drug industry, including the multinationals operating within Mexico and with the governmental regulatory institutions. Both sides have taken each other to court, with charges of fraud, slander, corruption and traffic of influence, but there has been no clear winner and, meanwhile, business continues as usual. Most of the multinational and local manufacturers have repeatedly attacked the lack of quality controls and medical ethics of Dr. Simi, while the USA has sued the Mexican Health Department for providing local industries with confidential information about their products without permission to sell copies of their products. On the other hand, Dr. Simi accuses the Mexican government (the PAN party in power for the last two presidencies) of being a patsy for foreign companies. (Like much of the Mexican economy, the only ones who can stand up to the multinationals are local business mafias promoted by corrupt politicians, and in neither case does the country or its people benefit.)
Both the pharmaceuticals and the generic manufacturers have to compete with miracle products that are sold not as medicine but rather as dietary supplements, cosmetics, herbs or hygienic products. Some of the wealthiest Mexicans deal in these miracle drugs. Genomma Lab is a new firm that produces over-the-counter medicines and miracle cures (laxatives, treatments for wounds, and remedies for obesity and acne), and it is rumored that the company belongs to Carlos Slim since it distributes its products mainly through his chain of Sanborns. Omnilife, owned by Jorge Vergara (who also owns the Guadalajara Chivas soccer team), and other vitamin manufacturers also carve out a piece of the health pie by employing legions of door-to-door salespeople who receive commissions instead of a salary.
Sports medicine is also a huge market in Mexico. Initially, anabolic steroids were used to treat depression, osteoporosis, bone fractures, cancer and other chronic illnesses, but in the last few decades these steroids have been the drug of preference for the world of sports and physical fitness. Although they are forbidden in international competitions, within Mexico steroid use among soccer and baseball players, boxers, wrestlers and weightlifters is common. As there is no law against their production or consumption in Mexico, steroids are widely produced in Mexico for both local consumption and for export.
In the US, however, steroid use is illegal. Over 80% of all anabolic steroids confiscated by police in the US come from Mexico, and this illegal steroid market generates over 50 million dollars in profit each year, with eight Mexican companies dominating this market since the early 1990s. Steroids such as Omifin, Novaldex, Novegan, Stenox and Humatrop are sold out of Mexico through the Internet and in pharmacies located near the US/Mexico border.
Before WWII, sex hormones derived from slaughterhouse animals’ brains were produced by German companies, but their production was suspended during the war, allowing the US to take the lead in the race to synthesize the hormones more inexpensively. US researchers began extracting steroids from wild poisonous yams (including one called cabeza de negro or black man’s head) and other plants naturally abundant in Mexico, and from these were able to synthesize progesterone. After the war, steroidal sex hormones were produced in Mexico and exported around the world. The same company began to produce corticosteroids, considered a wonder drug for metabolic diseases and arthritis. (Research into sex hormones in Mexico led to the patent in the US of the contraceptive pill, first marketed in 1960 and one of the global pharmaceutical industry’s all time best seller.)
An early brand, Dianabol, first appeared in 1960 and quickly became the most used anabolic steroid in sports. When it was taken off the shelves due to health risks, it became one of the most commonly bought black market oral steroid in the US. Chemically, it is very similar to testosterone, producing side effects such as enlarged breasts, water retention, oily skin, acne, body hair and male pattern baldness. Long-term use can often lead to the atrophy of sexual glands and to impotence. Heart and circulatory problems, as well as leukemia, are common and its continued used can cause jaundice and liver dysfunction and increases aggression and mood swings. Dianabol varieties manufactured in Mexico still sell well on the black market in the US.
Due to the mostly unregulated manufacture and consumption of pharmaceuticals, steroids and chemicals of all kinds in Mexico, a world in which labels promise miracles, ingredients remain a mystery, pharmacies sell almost everything over the counter without a prescription and smiling doctors receive kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies, the drug wars in Mexico have become a bloody business.
Drug Stores:
With all the diseases and health problems that come from living in the city, and having to deal with so many quacks and bogus treatments, it’s a miracle anyone can remain healthy in Mexico City. A population free of illness, however, would prove quite unhealthy for a large part of the city’s economy. In contrast to the Aztec’s holistic view of the body, the modern medical-industrial complex has dismembered the human body into separate organs that need to be attended by specialists and treated with costly medicine. Instead of viewing sickness as an imbalance between the workings of the body and the world around it, diseases have been reduced to mere symptoms, and in turn symptoms (such as sneezing, coughing, phlegm, pus, fever) are no longer viewed as the body’s natural defenses but have become evils that must be eliminated. The stress of battling traffic and urban congestion, the extremely high levels of pollution, and food and water laden with parasites and toxic chemicals are all godsends for a medical-industrial complex that offers medicine for every symptom.
Mexico is the 10th largest consumer of pharmaceuticals in the world. Even though medicine is cheaper in Mexico than in the rest of the Americas (with the exception of Ecuador and Venezuela), drug profits are still greater than in any country except for the US. Drug culture within Mexico is well entrenched. Multinational companies push their product through governmental initiatives and major media ads (pharmaceutical companies are not prohibited from advertising their products on television, as in most other countries). In cahoots with the pharmaceutical companies, doctors tend to over-prescribe drugs, untrained employees in pharmacies push drugs to anyone who comes in off the street and self-medication is a national pastime.
In Mexico City, where economic interests are never seen as a conflict but rather an opportunity, doctors not only act as willing stooges for pharmaceutical companies who lavish them with free samples, equipment and even kick-backs, many also own their own private drugstores. This all leads to a situation in which more than half of all medical consultations end with drugs being prescribed to a patient. As a direct result of the zealousness of pharmaceutical companies, ten percent of all hospital deaths result from erroneous prescriptions or over-medication. Twenty-four-hour drugstores cluster around city hospitals, parasitic on the sick and ailing, their profits increasing with the rise in acute and chronic illnesses in the city.
Perhaps the most abused drugs in Mexico are antibiotics. The blunderbuss approach of antibiotics might cure symptoms rapidly but over time they provoke health problems that convert people into chronic users (a pharmaceutical company’s best customer). As a result of the abuse of antibiotics, E. Coli and the microorganisms responsible for urinary infections have developed antibiotic resistance of up to 90% in more than half of the population in Mexico City. Although antibiotics are not an effective treatment for viral infections, which represents the main cause of the common cold, doctors, especially pediatricians, have no qualms about prescribing them to their sniffling patients even before receiving the results of laboratory studies and sometimes without even conducting a check-up (phone consultations with doctors usually end with drug prescriptions).
Even so, around 95% of chilangos don’t even bother to call their doctor and instead self-medicate. When Mexicans have doubts about what medication they need, and when they are unwilling to wait for a doctor’s appointment or to pay a doctor’s fee, they just head over to their neighborhood drugstore for advice. Unfortunately, Mexico is the country in the Americas with the fewest pharmacists actually working in pharmacies. Being that trained pharmacists are expensive employees, owners of drug stores instead hire unskilled workers, whose recommendations for medications are often just shots in the dark or verbatim advice from drug companies. Many times, though, people don’t even ask pharmacy employees and just go right ahead and order their favorite brand of antibiotics or other prescription medicine by phone from a drug store and have them brought to their home by bicycle delivery boys.
Due to their easy availability and low cost (medicine is subsidized by the Mexican government), drug abuse is widespread in Mexico. Up to 40% of all prescription drugs are sold over-the-counter without a prescription in most drug stores (such as the Farmacia de Dios, God’s Drugstore), or in pharmacies located in department stores or supermarkets.
Mexican drugstores, whether inside larger stores or alone, are among the fastest growing sector in terms of profit and in the number of units being inaugurated each year. In addition to free medical advice, drugstores offer injections into peoples’ butts for a small fee right behind the pharmacy counter. Besides the pharmacies, there are hundreds of non-licensed, non-trained individuals (many of them housewives) working out of their own homes all over the city who offer injections for a nominal fee, as well.
Around 70% of all consultations made in the past years by Mexicans who possess government insurance were in clinics attached to pharmacies (such as Dr. Simi), and these clinics represent the privatization of medical attention in Mexico. To open up one of these clinics an entrepreneur need only fill out the usual paperwork for any business, without any special knowledge or authorization. By law, pharmacies and clinics must be separate entities, but a thin wall is enough to divide them, and patients often pay for the consultation (around $3 dollars a visit) and the medicine in the same window. Unlike government hospitals, no appointments are needed, and unlike hospitals that tend to be located far away from patients, pharmacy clinics are available in every neighborhood and, in some neighborhoods, on almost every corner. Since 2010, you now need a prescription to buy antibiotics in most drugstores in Mexico City, but the only real result of this measure has been to funnel more business into these clinic/pharmacies where consultations that lead to prescriptions can be had in minutes.
Medicine of Mass Destruction:
The relatively recent discovery of microscopic creatures proved to be a miraculous shot in the arm for the medical world. By immediately branding these invisible creatures as hostile aliens, the medical-industrial complex was given total liberty to declare war against all microorganisms. Doctors and pharmacists were licensed to hunt down and kill all the illegal aliens in our mouths, armpits, crotches, large intestines or wherever else they roamed. Huge healthcare and hygiene industries popped up that sold a whole range of products of mass destruction, including mouthwash, antiperspirants, deodorizers, detergents, anti-flu medicine and antibiotics). The bacterial communities that had co-evolved with human beings for hundreds of thousands of years became our enemies almost overnight and interspecies symbiosis was unilaterally abandoned.
This paranoia, however, wasn’t completely unjustified. Throughout the history of mankind, and up until just a few decades ago, parasites were responsible for the greatest number of human fatalities. With the invention of antibiotics, parasite-related deaths dropped spectacularly. The problem is that not all microorganisms are parasites. Although the great majority of friendly microorganisms help us to fend off aggressive parasites, antibiotics aren’t designed to differentiate between beneficial bacteria and aggressive invaders.
In the long run, and when viewed in terms of the whole species, antibiotics do more damage. As deaths caused by parasite-based diseases plummeted with the advent of antibiotics, extreme overpopulation exploded all over the planet, especially in the developing world. Too many human beings living together in densely populated urban spaces for longer lifespans tend to overwhelm developing economies and cause widespread poverty, disease and death.
Parasites are the embodiment of natural selection, killing off the weakest organisms while allowing the fittest to survive. Parasites also help maintain harmony by not allowing only one species to dominate all others, thus preventing the human race from expanding so much that we completely deplete the environment and cause our own demise and that of other organisms.
Human beings, however, believe we are this planet’s chosen species, towering alone above all others on the great pyramid of life, and thus any other creatures, large or small, that dare to threaten our position must be annihilated. When microorganisms come under attack and can no longer fulfill their role of maintaining equilibrium, things start to fall apart for all species.
With an interspecies war in full swing it was easy for medical authorities to convince us that our own defenses were actually illnesses that needed to be treated with industrial-strength medicine. Throughout our history, we humans have had to rely on our own body to defend against parasite infections, but with the pandemic spread of modern medicine we are no longer capable of fighting our own battles.
On a macro-economic level, the global medical-industrial complex is part of a united front of predators that make developing countries dependent upon imported products and technology, thus redirecting the flow of their capital and resources and weakening the local communities and traditional culture that had maintained their self-sufficient economies. By making the human race dependent on medicine and health and hygiene products, the global medical-industrial complex has reordered biological systems around the world, positioning itself as the sole intermediary between the human species and microorganisms (exactly as the Catholic Church positioned itself as the sole intermediary between man and God) The global medical-industrial complex, like neo-colonialism in general, acts like nothing so much as a parasite, weakening local communities (which up until then were perfectly functional and self-sufficient) and transforming them into economies designed to turn a profit for their new master.
By treating all microorganisms within us as our enemies, the medical-industrial complex completely misunderstands health. Health is not the absence of organisms that cause illnesses. In fact, most of us live most of our lives with potentially lethal parasites and even cancer cells in our bodies. The fact that they are not triggered and do not multiply is due to our immune system, that is, to the billions of beneficial bacteria that keep them in their place. Only when our defenses are compromised, by poverty, malnourishment or stress, by the build-up of toxic substances within our organs or by an indiscriminate use of antibiotics, do these parasites and cancer cells multiply and expand.
It’s time that we realize that we are only as healthy as the beneficial communities of microorganisms within our large intestine. By casting microorganisms as our enemies, by bombarding our bodies with uneeded health, hygiene and beauty products, we are exterminating our greatest allies.
Everything humans do to their fellow human beings they also do to the microorganisms within them. The complex communities within the large intestines of those living in Mexico-Tenochtitlan underwent the same genocide as the Aztec civilization. The parasites that provoked the plagues that decimated the indigenous cultures in Mexico were able to kill so many millions precisely because the local gut flora had been decimated by stress, poverty, slavery and malnutrition, thus leaving the Aztecs defenseless on all levels against foreign invasion. The radical transformation of the local diet over the last few decades, along with the indiscriminate use of antibiotics and other products designed to kill ‘germs,’ has been just as destructive to the local communities of microorganisms, that is, to our gut flora, leading to a whole slew of chronic, degenerative diseases and new ways to die. Because human beings now rarely die from parasite infections, they rarely die natural deaths from natural causes. Instead, human beings now suffer and die mostly from chronic, degenerative diseases caused by their inability to defend against their own urban environment.{SNIP}....
