This is the third part in a series, so if you have not already done so, you might want to read Part I and Part II before continuing.
Pat spent all night re-reading the complaint alongside the glowing testimonials the company had received, trying to reconcile them with each other. They sounded like they were about two completely different companies.
Pat decided to do some more research and started digging up information on the named plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit. That led her to websites of organizations protesting, not only her company and others like it, but the entire medical system. A system that relied heavily on drugs that too often treated symptoms without treating the root cause of those symptoms – at least according to the protesters.
She read story after story about people who had become addicted to their medication, and when their prescription ran out, had been abandoned by the medical community to deal with withdrawal in addition to the chronic pain, which they said always came back as soon as the medicine ran out. Not only had the medicine failed to fix their long-term problem, but it had actually made things worse in the long run.
At work the next day Pat stared at her blinking cursor in an attempt to come up with a message that would clarify for the public why the lawsuit was bogus. The problem was, not only was she sluggish from sleep deprivation, but she was finding it increasingly difficult to clarify the issue in her own mind.
“Productive day?” asked Sally.
Pat shook herself awake and blinked into the face of her friend and co-worker. “Not exactly,” Pat said with a wry smile. “I don’t know what to make of this lawsuit. I took this job because I believe in the good this company does, but I just don’t know how to reconcile the company I know and love with what this lawsuit is making us out to be.”
“Oh, honey. You really don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
Sally gave her a sympathetic look and walked away without saying anything else.
A few minutes later, an email from Sally popped up in Pat’s inbox. When she opened it, she found Sally had forwarded to her an entire chain of emails – several chains of emails in fact – between several members of the company’s executive team. There was a lot of talk of golf and share prices and other boring things, but there was also talk about convincing doctors to prescribe their products; overcoming objections doctors might raise to prescribing their products (most of which the federal government was now suing them for); drafts of emails to be sent to legislators to try to convince them to reduce the restrictions on opioid prescriptions. The worst ones discussed strategies for portraying addicts as criminals – punishing them as a way to deflect blame from the company.
Once she had read her way through them all, Pat sent an email of her own. This one went to her boss and it had only two words above her professional signature: I Quit.
The end.