A chance to cut is a chance to cure

When things fell apart, they did so quickly, like a sand castle that was deliberately built too close to the water.

Though it was easiest to suspect Caduceus to be behind it, in truth it may have been any or all of the other large pharma conglomerates. In his collected teachings, compiled after he was gone, Jōkei-san referred to them as conglamorates, as in groups that came together to create glamor, an illusion of perfection that masked the putrid decay beneath, έξω κούκλα, μέσα πανούκλα.

They came for the insulin first, as it trampled on their turf most brazenly. Legal threats from lawyers including me were sent, ordering to stop all production, pending government approval. Jōkei-san refused, arguing that he was allowed to produce medicines while patents were still pending and give out drugs as part of “clinical trials,” provided the patients knew that the drugs were not yet officially approved and that they understood the possible risks involved.

Police were sent to force the factory to cease production, but were met by walls of protestors, someone having leaked the plan to use the cops. The authorities had clearly underestimated how popular the affordable insulin initiative was among a population that was fed up with being forced to pay inflated prices for life-saving medication. The police was hesitant to use force against unarmed protestors, but, cops being cops, they used force all the same.

It was at this point that Jōkei-san appeared from out of the crowd, stepping out between the protestors and the shield wall of police. He drew the sword that he now always wore at his side and raised above his head, like Monju, the bodhisattva of wisdom. The sword blade glistened with reflected the sunlight, though later eye-witness accounts claimed that it miraculously emitted light.

Jōkei-san did not say anything. While the police later tried to claim that he threatened them with a deadly weapon, he had never pointed it at them. Nor was carrying a sword illegal, it was not a gun for which you’d need a permit, and as he carried it openly at his side, it was not subject to concealed weapon laws either.

Later commentators drew parallels to Matthew 10, where Jesus said that he did no come to bring peace, but a sword.

Whatever the legal, religious, or symbolic meaning behind his action was, the crowd took it as a signal to charge at the police, quickly overwhelming the shield wall and disarming all of them. The cops, stripped of their arms and armor, fled, while desperately calling for back-up, but there was no back-up coming. As it turned out, the intervention wasn’t legally sanctioned per se, but rather the result of a sizeable bribe to the police commissioner.

What was supposed to be a simple operation to close down an illegally operating business quickly turned into a huge fiasco, after which Jōkei-san became known as the “leper messiah,” following a line from an old glam-rock song.

The illegal attempt to shut down the insulin factory caused wide-spread public outrage over the corrupt dealings between law enforcement and the medical establishment. Legal experts were quick to point out that this clandestine cooperation had a long history, with police arresting countless people for selling the same substances that a medical professional was allowed to sell legally, and while this was always defended under the pretext that the doctor had the patient’s best interest at heart, compared to the street dealer’s sole desire for profit, the recent events showed that just the opposite could also be true.

Protests began to sprout up everywhere. Many of them were organized and spearheaded by people who had received treatment at Jōkei-san’s clinics. This led to their opponents labeling the clinics as secret training camps for extremists. I don’t really know what went on in the clinics or why so many chose to stay there, but it was clear from early on that these former patients were well-coordinated and skilled in asymmetric warfare.

Moreover, after the humiliating defeat at the insulin factory, law enforcement was hesitant to intervene, especially as the police commissioner was being pressured to resign. For a brief while it seemed like real, lasting change was inevitable.

Jōkei-san seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, as if he was some sort of magician or Buddha able to manifest multiple bodies. Officially, he was teaching at and directing his new medical school, yet there were reports of him overseeing production at the factory, as well as appearing at the various protests to give rousing speeches.

Soon, there was financial support for his causes flowing in from many directions, mostly from private individuals, but also a fair amount from religious groups and churches, which had historically been the biggest organizational supporters of charity medical care, far more so than state groups. Indeed, it seemed with sufficient monetary backing, the movement would be here to stay.

Considering the threat this posed to the medical industry, which had even deeper pockets and stronger connections to people in power, it was inevitable that it would be squashed the way it was in the end.

The conflict escalated to a new level when the country government stepped in, over and above the state that failed to control the situation. Jōkei-san was accused of taking money from known terrorist organizations, though these wire-transfers would later be revealed to have come from the government’s own shadow accounts typically used for clandestine operations. This being a very serious offence, Jōkei-san was now accused of treason, a charge that could carry the death penalty.

The protests were infiltrated by government agents who both sowed discord among the protestors, and escalated situations towards violence against authorities, which granted them the right to hammer down on the protests in earnest. This was no longer a conflict between sick people and corrupt cops, but between suspected terrorists and the national guard. The leaders of the protests were quick to catch on to what was happening and coordinated dispersals to avoid loss of life, though the damage to their reputation had already been done.

Next came the mysterious explosion at the insulin factory, all the stranger for the fact that no part of the process of the drug’s manufacture is flammable. This was spun to suggest that the factory was a front for a terrorist organization and the location was used to create explosives, one of which went off accidently, citing the previously “discovered” illicit transfer. Nobody really believed that story, and knew the state was responsible, but such beliefs can do little in the face of overwhelming violence.

Finally, a specialized military team was sent to apprehend Jōkei-san at his school, where he had continued to teach throughout all these events. What happened there is still subject to wide debate. Some of the body-cam footage worn by the soldiers during the operation was leaked online soon after.

It shows them breeching the campus, while using deadly force against everyone who tried to stop them or warn the others. Eventually they make it to the main lecture hall where Jōkei-san is seen teaching to a dozen or so students who chose to remain despite the sounds of gunfire.

When I saw these videos, I could barely recognize Jōkei-san as being the same crooked curmudgeon Hideo-sensei that I worked with for so long. His posture was that of a gymnast or a martial arts master, while his gentle, measured movements seemed like that of a professional dancer. His face was relaxed, with a faint smile, like that of some Indian deity. His formerly dry, patchy, pale skin was now taut and radiated a certain golden glow.

He concluded the class by closing the book in front of him. At that point the videos cut off. Most people’s first reaction was that the body-cams were deliberately turned off so that the soldiers could massacre everyone in the room, but then certain impartial technical experts said that the way the videos cut out suggests an electro-magnetic glitch. Moreover, not Jōkei-san, nor the dozen students, nor the soldiers, were ever heard from again, which in turn led to suspicions concerning the footage’s provenance.

Though at first it seemed his mission had ended in failure and that all his projects were crushed by the forces that be, in time it became clear that he did leave a lasting impact. Sure, Caduceus and the other pharma giants remained in business, and soon recovered from their temporary financial losses, yet the events did lead to a significant lowering of the price of insulin and higher accountability for the businesses’ role in creating the opioid epidemic. Perhaps most importantly in the long run, the number of medical degrees awarded annually went up drastically, largely thanks to an enormous scholarship fund Jōkei-san had set up with the money his movement received at its peak, and the societal pressure placed on schools after he made the role of the med-school cartels in manufacturing artificial scarcity become common knowledge.

I still wonder what was in Jōkei-san’s sword, was it the Philosopher’s Stone, the alchemist’s vial, some common opioid, or simply nothing. If I ever see him again, I will ask him.

Recently rereading Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde,” I was struck by its almost mirror-like inversions. Stevenson wrote his most celebrated story after getting sick from ergot poisoning, the same hallucinogenic effect that’s been linked to the Eleusinian mysteries and the Salem witch trials, but also a precursor to the hippie movement and the great acid-wave of the late 20th century. While for Victorian Era’s Stevenson, this psychedelic experience appeared as a corruption of all that was proper and moral, was this not just a symptom of the repressive time he was raised in?

I don’t know what was in the vial. Perhaps it was just water, and all the subsequent changes were a result of placebo and self-hypnosis. Wouldn’t that be something? After all, in his posthumously published lecture notes, Jōkei-san says that substances don’t actually cure the body, they just motivate it to cure itself, and thus all medicine is a form of faith-healing and self-hypnosis. I am no doctor, so I can’t say one way or the other.

All I know is what I witnessed with my own eyes. That used to be considered objectivity, but I suppose now something that only one person saw is termed subjective, how things change.

I thought that after decades of service to the company, I should at least provide an explanation for my resignation.

While I’ve wasted most of my life, perhaps I can still make something of the time I have left.