The life-saving blood cancer drug Revlimid, a derivative of the disgraced drug thalidomide, has extended tens of thousands of lives but costs patients nearly $20,000 a month despite costing only 25 cents to manufacture. Through patent manipulation, blocking generic rivals, and co-opting doctors, its manufacturer Celgene turned the drug into a $100 billion monopoly. This case study illustrates how systemic flaws in the U.S. healthcare system allow pharmaceutical companies to exploit patients through unrestrained price gouging.
**THE $100,000,000,000 MEDICINE RACKET!**
*Scribe Exposes How a Poisoned Elixir of Yesteryear Became the Robber Barons’ Golden Egg while Dying Citizens Foot the Outrageous Bill!*
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**THE DAILY INQUIRER**
*Special Dispatch by David Armstrong*
**NEW YORK** — It was a gray, foggy February dawn in the year 2023 when the Silent Reaper first gave me a wicked jab in the ribs. The pain was a regular Joe Palooka punch to my midsection—so fierce I had to brace myself against the plaster just to stand upright.
For weeks, I’d been nursing a dull ache I figured was nothing but a runner’s cramp. But at the municipal hospital, the sawbones took one look at my X-ray plates and pulled me into a private backroom.
"We’ve found something highly concerning," the medical man whispered.
The plates showed bone-rot—nasty little lesions eating away at my hips and breastbone. It was the telltale signature of multiple myeloma, a ruthless cancer of the blood that leaves the human frame looking like Swiss cheese. Later scans showed countless holes from my noggin down to my hoofs, alongside two busted ribs and a cracked spine.
"No cure," the doctor said flatly.
I walked out into the cold air, my stomach doing flip-flops, and sat on a cold iron bench. I consulted the modern electric brain known as "Google." The very first dispatch warned that a fellow with my diagnosis had three to five years before taking the Big Sleep.
But as I soon uncovered, that grim forecast was yesterday's news. Today, folks are beating the reaper for much longer, all thanks to a magic pill with a dark and deadly pedigree.
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### THE GHOST OF THE NURSERY
A hospital specialist told me I’d be taking a derivative of Thalidomide.
"Say it ain't so, doc!" I gasped.
Every soul who remembers the dark days of the mid-century knows the horror of Thalidomide. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, European apothecaries sold the stuff to pregnant dames as a cure-all for morning sickness. It was a tragic swindle. Over ten thousand innocent babies were born with shortened limbs, malformed hands, or no arms at all.
While Uncle Sam’s own heroic reviewer, FDA inspector Frances Oldham Kelsey, kept the poison off American shores, the drug was banned worldwide and relegated to the pharmaceutical graveyard.
Yet, like Frankenstein’s monster, this discredited potion has been granted new life as a cancer-slayer.
Today, I swallow a tweaked version of this notorious compound called Revlimid. It has extended tens of thousands of lives, including my own. But here’s the rub: this little capsule costs a cool $1,000 for a single daily dose! Meanwhile, confidential papers reveal the laboratory bakes the pill for a measly two bits—just 25 cents!
This high-hat pricing has sent desperate families straight to the poorhouse, forcing them into crushing debt or leaving them to simply cross their fingers and wait for the undertaker.
As a veteran ink-slinger who has spent decades exposing the graft and greed of the medical trusts, I wanted to know how this racket operated. What I discovered is a tale of high-society heartbreak, backroom deals, and a corporate piggy bank that federal G-men failed to bust.
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### THE PLUCKY DAME AND THE COWBOY SAWBONES
Our story begins on a moon-splashed beach in the Cayman Islands, winter of 1995. Ira Wolmer, a swell young New York heart-doctor, and his lovely wife, Beth—a sharp-witted mouthpiece for the high-powered Skadden Arps law firm—were strolling hand-in-hand.
Suddenly, a blinding flash of pain struck Ira’s cheekbone. Back in New York, the diagnostic machines delivered a grim verdict: multiple myeloma. The local specialists gave him two years to live.
Refusing to take defeat lying down, the couple boarded a steam-train for Little Rock, Arkansas, to see a eccentric medical maverick named Dr. Bart Barlogie.
Barlogie was a short, bald fellow with red-rimmed spectacles, a booming German accent, and leather jackets. He wore cowboy boots that clattered loudly down the hospital corridors. He was a practitioner who took off the kid gloves when fighting the reaper.
"We must do something!" Beth demanded.
At his clinic, Barlogie was bombarding patients with double stem-cell transplants—a brutal treatment that nearly killed Ira three times. By 1997, the poor doctor had lost his thick black hair, suffered a stroke, and was hooked up to a kidney machine.
But Beth Wolmer was a pint-sized dame with the ferocity of a Chicago copper. "She is terrifying," recalled Dr. David Siegel, one of Ira’s medical team. She spent her nights pacing the library floor, poring over medical journals, hunting for a miracle.
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### EUREKA IN BOSTON!
In Boston, a legendary surgeon named Judah Folkman was being laughed out of medical societies for his wild theory: he believed you could starve a tumor by cutting off its blood supply.
A young researcher in his lab, an energetic fellow named Robert D'Amato, was hunting for a pill to do just that. D’Amato realized that drugs causing birth defects might do so by stopping blood vessel growth in unborn babes. He drew up a list of candidates. At the top was the outlawed Thalidomide.
D'Amato cracked open a fertilized chicken egg, applied the Thalidomide, and—hallelujah!—the blood vessels stopped dead in their tracks.
When the plucky Beth Wolmer called Folkman’s lab in late 1997, he told her to try the banned drug. Barlogie agreed to test it on Ira and two other patients who had one foot in the grave.
Alas, the potion did not save brave Ira Wolmer. He died on March 10, 1998, at the tender age of 38.
But the third patient—a dying fellow named Jimmy—had a miraculous turnaround. Two weeks after taking the pill, his cancer markers plummeted. Dr. Barlogie was so astonished he grabbed his colleague’s hand, flung open his office window, and shouted to the heavens, "Thank you, God!"
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### THE CORPORATE SYNDICATE
Word of the miracle recovery quickly reached the offices of Celgene Corp., a struggling pharmaceutical outfit nestled in the New Jersey scrublands. Money was so tight at the time that company bigwigs were having violent fistfights over whether to charge employees for office coffee.
Celgene had picked up the rights to Thalidomide years earlier, hoping to sell it to AIDS patients. But Jimmy's recovery changed everything.
In December 1998, at a grand convention of blood doctors in Miami Beach, Dr. Seema Singhal presented the Arkansas data. The room was so packed that fire marshals had to clear the aisles. The results were a sensation: one-third of the doomed patients had improved. The crowd erupted in wild applause. The treatment landscape was changed forever.
My own experience tells the tale. After my diagnosis, my doctor put me on Revlimid. The first month’s supply cost a breathtaking $18,255, luckily footed by my insurance. Within weeks, my pain vanished, and my blood tests showed the cancer was in full retreat. It was a miracle—but a miracle with a hefty ransom.
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### TAKING "JIMBO" TO THE WOODSHED
Seeing the goldmine in their hands, Celgene’s executives set out to protect their monopoly. Because Thalidomide was an old drug, their patents were weak. So, their chemists tweaked the molecule to create "Revlimid" and filed a fortress of new patents to keep rival generic makers out of the game.
When a rival firm named EntreMed threatened them with dueling patents, Celgene used its newfound cash to settle the beef, paying them $27 million to buy them out. They learned that competition could be easily neutralized with a fat stack of greenbacks.
In 2005, Celgene launched Revlimid at $218 a pill. Seven months later, they jacked it up to $280. They knew they had the consumer over a barrel. "Cancer patients are willing to pay almost any amount," a whistleblower executive later revealed.
When a Los Angeles specialist named Dr. James Berenson started badmouthing the drug's price at patient meetings, Celgene executives growled in internal emails: "It is time for us to take Jimbo to the woodshed."
Instead of a beating, however, they handed him a fat consulting contract. Over the years, Berenson pocketed at least $333,000 from the firm. Between 2013 and 2018, Celgene dished out $11 million to various doctors for speaking gigs, even renting out the Houston Astros’ baseball stadium to throw a lavish wing-ding for a hospital department.
"They are like an octopus with cash on every tentacle," remarked David Mitchell, a clean-government advocate.
Meanwhile, they froze out poor Beth Wolmer. After promising her a seat on the board for her role in the discovery, they cut her off completely. When she sued for $300 million in 2009, a judge threw her case out on a legal technicality, though he praised her "contribution to the struggle."
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### THE G-MEN LOSE THE SCENT
By 2010, generic medicine manufacturers were preparing to copy the drug, which would slash prices by 85%.
To block them, Celgene played a dirty hand. Under the guise of a government-mandated safety program to prevent birth defects, Celgene refused to sell samples of Revlimid to generic companies for the necessary testing.
The G-men at the Federal Trade Commission smelled a rat. "The Commission’s patience is wearing thin!" warned Richard Feinstein, an FTC enforcement official, in a fiery 2013 letter.
But Celgene’s slick lawyers dragged their feet, promising to cooperate while doing no such thing. The FTC eventually got cold feet and closed the case in 2017 without firing a shot.
With the generic threat sidelined, Celgene’s chief Mark Alles ordered price hikes just to beef up first-quarter earnings. They raised the price 26 times! By 2017, a single pill cost $662.
The corporate brass lined their pockets with the loot. CEO Robert Hugin walked away with $51 million in compensation over three years, while sales reps pocketed million-dollar bonuses and went on paid vacations to luxury resorts in Hawaii.
By 2019, Bristol Myers Squibb bought out Celgene for a staggering $74 billion. Mark Alles walked away with a cool $27.9 million severance package.
When grilled by Congresswoman Katie Porter in 2020 about why the price kept rising while the drug remained exactly the same, Alles had no answers.
"The drug didn’t get any better," Rep. Porter boomed, banging her gavel. "You just refined your skills at price gouging!"
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### THE DRUMBEAT GOES ON
This past November, my doctor told me my cancer was in remission. It was bittersweet. There was no bell to ring, no victory parade. I am a patient for life, bound to monthly injections and a daily regimen of these gilded capsules.
Under the new ownership of Bristol Myers Squibb, the price hikes continue. Last July, my monthly prescription bill rose to $19,660.
At the start of this year, my insurance provider switched me to a generic copy of Revlimid, hoping to save the company treasury some serious scratch.
But the monopolies have done their work well. The "cheap" generic pill still costs a whopping $17,349 a month.
The graft, it seems, goes on forever.