I might have gone for the scandal of spiked tobacco, designed by Western manufacturers to cause addiction and incidentally cancer in Third World communities already plagued with AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and poverty on a scale few of us can imagine. I might have gone for the oil companies, and the impunity with which Shell, for instance, triggered a vast human disaster in Nigeria, displacing tribes, polluting their land and causing an uprising that led to kangaroo courts and the shameful torture and execution of very brave men by a wicked and corrupt totalitarian regime. But the multinational pharmaceutical world, once I entered it, got me by the throat and wouldn't let me go. In pharma jargon, these patent-free copycat drugs are called generic. Big Pharma likes to trash them, insisting they are unsafe and carelessly administered.
Practice shows that they are neither.
They simply save the same lives that Big Pharma could save, but at a fraction of the cost. Big Pharma did not invent these lifesaving drugs that they have patented and arbitrarily overpriced, incidentally. Anti-retrovirals were for the most part discovered by publicly funded US research projects into other diseases, and only later entrusted to pharmaceutical companies for marketing and exploitation. Thus a price tag was attached, and the Western world, by and large, fell for it. Nobody said it was a massive confidence trick.