Pink ribbons, National Breast Cancer Awareness Month – Those sure make us feel good about ourselves. We’re standing together to fight a deadly disease. Or are we? What do we actually accomplish?
National Breast Cancer Awareness Month was founded by the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, which until 2000 simultaneously produced agrochemicals, including the cancer-causing carcinogen acetochlor, and also owned a string of cancer centers and produced cancer-fighting drugs. (Yep, they profited on both ends of that one.)
AstraZeneca dropped its agricultural division in 2000, but it continues to own cancer treatment centers, pharmacies and testing labs, and it manufactures the top-selling breast cancer drug tamoxifen, which brings in $573 million per year.
AstraZeneca has the final say about everything which goes into official materials of the campaign. However, instead of promoting research into the causes and possible cure for breast cancer, they focus entirely on “awareness” and early detection, which leads us into a cycle of more tamoxifen sales and profits for the company.
Now I’m not saying AstraZeneca wants people to have cancer, but it clearly isn’t promoting the best strategy to beat the disease. Sure, it’s important to educate people on the dangers of breast cancer, but the focus is far too slanted only toward awareness.
For example, those beat-cancer runs do a great job of connecting cancer survivors with others who have had a similar experience. But they don’t really turn out much money to begin with, and much of what they do raise just goes toward paying for the event itself.
Just remember that every dollar spent on some kind of awareness campaign or event, every dollar spent on some kind of T-shirt or pink ribbon, every dollar spent to tell people the same things we’ve all already heard over and over is a dollar not spent on researching the causes of breast cancer or finding a cure.
What about those pink ribbons? These days, it seems like all kinds of companies are emblazoning pink ribbons onto their products, promising to donate some amount money to a cancer-related cause. Seems pretty cool, right?
Wrong. Unfortunately these ribbons are often nothing more than a symbol of corporate greed and exploitation. In a process labeled “pinkwashing,” many companies will promise to donate some percentage of their profits to breast cancer research foundations, but actually only donate a small amount (often only a few cents per product sold – much less than someone who wanted to make a donation would actually give), or they put a cap on how much they will give but continue to profit off the ribbon-adorned product once they reach that mark.
Using these ribbons, companies exploit people’s emotions to drive up profits because studies have shown putting a pink ribbon on a product consistently drives up sales. Here are some examples of especially nefarious companies:
• Fox Home Entertainment once sold $14.95 “DVDs for the Cure,” but actually only donated 50 cents per DVD sold. Sure, every bit helps, but Fox clearly just used the ribbon as a ploy to increase its own profits rather than actually trying to help defeat cancer.
• Give Hope Jeans and Campbell’s Soup both placed limits on how much they would donate to cancer research, $200,000 and $250,000 respectively. Not only is this a not enough to cover even a single patient’s cancer treatment, by putting the pink ribbons on their products and not mentioning the donation cap, they made far more profits with the pink ribbon, even with the seemingly large donation. And once they reached their limit of donation, they were still selling products with the pink ribbon on them, continuing to profit off people’s good intentions without giving even a penny to fight cancer.
• Even more sinisterly, Lean Cuisine put the pink ribbon on its boxes with the promise of helping breast cancer research, but actually required customers to go online and purchase a tote bag in order to make a donation to breast cancer research. Customers weren’t aware of this until after buying the meal. Seriously, some corporate executive should have gone to jail over that.
So, no, I won’t be wearing a pink ribbon (or, more accurately, corporate greed and exploitation ribbon) today or any other day. It’s not that I don’t support finding a cure for this awful disease – that’s absurd; of course I do. But I’m not going to display a symbol that is primarily used by greedy companies to play off consumers’ emotions and churn out profits.
What if instead of us all wearing pink ribbons, we all sent some kind of donation to a cancer research foundation? We’d bypass the insincere corporate exploiters and go straight to the source.
However, one problem here is there is no unified national (or worldwide) effort to fight breast cancer. There are hundreds of companies who are researching various possible causes, be they genetic or environmental, or cures, but these companies aren’t very transparent with their research, so who knows if research is being duplicated. Somehow these organizations need to either be unified or at least be required to openly share all of their results.
Here’s another example of a borderline fraud: thebreastcancersite.com. This Web site promises “Click to give free mammograms.” When I came across this site, I thought it was a great idea and I readily clicked the link.
The site makes it seem like every single click gives a free mammogram, but it conveniently don’t tell you free mammograms only come after every 45,000 clicks. All of a sudden I feel like my click didn’t really accomplish much. In fact, since you’re only allowed to click the site once per day, it would take me 123 years to provide a free mammogram just by clicking.
But what if instead of 45,000 clicks on a Web site link, those 45,000 people called or e-mailed their congressperson and demanded more government funding for research into the causes and cures for breast cancer? What if those 45,000 wrote a check themselves to an organization that researches those things? Maybe the cure wouldn’t be so far off.
We can defeat cancer. There is no limit to what mankind can do when we care. We beat the odds and defeated two powerful fascist regimes in World War II. In 66 years we went from the Wright Brothers to Apollo 11, and we completely abolished smallpox from the planet.
We can do the same with breast cancer, but it’s going to take a lot more than talking about awareness and buying commercial products which have fooled us with pink ribbons.
Harry Nelson is the opinion editor of The Reflector. He can be contacted at [email protected].