“Welcome to the former Soviet Republic of Boratchickzthan, hub of the new-generation enterprise spirit! Just call me Ferdi! We Caucasians are known all over the world for our great and intoxicating hospitality, and I will do everything to prove it to you!”
“I hope this long taxi ride from Grawltzky Airport to our picturesque little village of Rutvakantskaya didn’t… Yes the roads, the roads, I know… Just yesterday broke the front wheel suspension of my brand-new Lamborghini Diablo. It’s a shame. Good thing I do have a Hummer, too. But we’re making progress. Really. Here’s to this interview. Za vashe zdorovye!”
“Yes my full name is of course Ferdinand Fettischmishkin, but because people sometimes have spelling troubles, I decided right from the start to go through life as Fettish. Short and clear. Exuding confidence. Just like the name of my business, Depri-Pharm. Clarity. I do hate nonsense and pretentiousness – yes that’s strong stuff, eh? 70%! Keep drinking, you’ll get used to it in no time.”
“I asked you to come and interview me because I want to state, once and for all, that all those rumors about Depri-Pharm being some kind of online scam are just mean, vile slander. So I want to be completely open with you. You’ve seen our great-looking and very reliable web shop, on this hired Canadian Depri-Pharm server? Yes that site is a very professional job. From there, we ship all well-known antidepressants, Prozac, Effexor, you name it, without the need for any prescription nonsense. At nearly half the price! And yes, it’s true that in spite of their brand names, our products contain nothing but plain old aspirin. But this is no scam! It just means we are in the placebo business!”
“Right now, Depri-Pharm is already #9 in the world top list of best-selling placebo antidepressant companies. Our Business Plan aims at making the Top Five within the next two years. Considering how we started as a modest family business only a few years ago, our growth has been, how shall I put it, almost explosive. And our profits… well it’s exceeding all expectations. But a scam? No sir. We’re serving our depressed customers in the best possible ways.”
“I will explain that to you. But meanwhile, come along into my garden, I’d like you to see our humble beginnings. Yes, do take your glass with you. I’ll take the bottle. See this little old shed? This is where it all began. Based on a brilliant idea of my mother, and my own business instincts and perseverance. Unbelievable, isn’t it? No one here in Rutvakantskaya could have thought that from here, this stunning rebirth and revitalization of our whole village – what do I say, an economic boost for entire Boratchickzthan – would take such an amazing flight!”
“You do know about the placebo effect, of course? A placebo is some innocent non-effective stuff that to the customer looks exactly like the real medicine. It’s a proven fact that in 90% of all cases, a placebo will help people just as well as the real thing. What works wonders is their belief that they are taking an actual effective medicine. Now this is important: naturally, a placebo will work only if you do not know it’s a placebo. So to make sure our aspirin-based placebos will work as expected, we can not advertise this fact on our Depri-Pharm website. We have no option but to hide the fact that we’re selling placebos: because otherwise, they wouldn’t work. Do you understand now why this isn’t a scam?”
“So here, inside this shed, is the improvised lab where I first developed my skills in mashing standard aspirin to powder, mixing it with a glucose coagulant, and pressing it into the form of lookalike antidepressant tablets again. Originally I used this small hand-press here, with primitive molds made for me by György Rasputin, our blacksmith. He now is the manager of our production line and shipping center near Grawltzky Airport. We nowadays work in a fully industrial way, providing meaningful jobs for many attractive Boratchi girls who otherwise would have remained destitute and unemployed. I really love those job interviews! Did you notice how the most beautiful girls in the world can be found right here along the main road in Rutvakantskaya?”
“But I digress. Our business model, and our placebo products, offer many great advantages to the average depressed consumer. We promptly deliver, within three days, without any prescription chores. We are cheap enough to save our customers a lot of money. And in most cases, our aspirin-based pills appear to work for them: we never get any complaints about that! And there are many more advantages. Our placebo will produce hardly any one of the expected side effects! And, some of those real antidepressants can be dangerous if you take an overdose of them. But if a desperately suicidal user takes an overdose of our pills, he will miraculously survive with only a few stomach problems!”
“To make all this possible, we’ve invested in a semi-automatic high-tech production line. Actually we now have two of them. One produces the capsule-format antidepressants, filled with aspirin powder and colored just like the real thing. The other one, a bit more simple, makes the pressed-pill kind using a great variety of all possible molds.”
“Of course I cannot give away all our company secrets but here’s a picture of the industrial-quality machines we use for the pill-pressing kind: do you see? The aspirin powder goes into the big funnel at the top, we add a few ingredients for color etcetera, and at the bottom the Nortrilen pills or whatever keep streaming out. Ah, I can stand just looking at this process for hours. It’s so great, you could say it’s almost like a money-printing machine. No no, it’s not our own design. We simply bought them from Scrogey & Sons, a very reputable hardware firm in Sheffield. These things are cheaper and more reliable than my Ferrari and Lamborghini, I can tell you!”
“To ensure the placebo effect, we take great pains to make sure everything looks exactly like the real thing. Our local printer, Iosiphka Dzhugashvili, now thanks to us finally has a flourishing business again. He prints all kinds of packaging material for us from existing examples. The end result, pills, packages, is in one word amazing. Here, look at this. At the left is a specimen of a real antidepressant. At the right, you see our own aspirin-based product. Apart from our Depri-Pharm sticker of course, do you see any difference? No you cannot, do you?”
“Ah yes. You want to know about the few people for whom our placebos won’t work. Well, I can tell you, nearly all of our customers probably don’t suffer from really serious depression at all. They just feel a bit wobbly, a bit down, and then they see our website and they right away order our pills just to make sure, see? That’s why our placebo will work so easily and so well in the first place.”
“Now I have to admit there are a few stupid fools out there, say one or two in every thousand customers, who are really very depressed. And if they, to save money or whatever, don’t go for professional help but instead order our cheap prescription-free placebo, it just might happen our pills will do them no good.”
“I must be honest here; I cannot rule out that very very sporadically, one of those truly depressed fools may even fall victim to suicide because he kept using our harmless placebo instead of a real antidepressant. But then that would be entirely his own fault, wouldn’t it? His own incredible stupidity!”
“So I can maintain that on the whole, for nearly all our customers, the availability of our cheap placebos is a great and highly effective blessing. Depri-Pharm is a wonderful company: our product helps to bring out the best in most people. As for the few exceptions to that rule, let me tell you this wise old proverb we have here in Boratchickzthan: One cannot chop wood without losing some chips. That’s exactly how it is. I’m sorry, but I cannot help it.”
“Now for my payment to you. How much did you have in mind for this interview? What do you say? Nothing? Nothing at all? You give me all this publicity for free? Gee… you’re almost just as naive and unworldly as my online customers! Here then, here’s at least another bottle, to take with you on the flight back home. No! No, my friend, I insist you accept this! Want some aspirin, too?”
• note: As StayOnTop’s editor, I like to apologize in advance to all honest and hard-working citizens of Boratchickzthan who feel that this satirical post unjustly reinforces any existing prejudices against the Boratchi people and their creative, innovating business concepts. Please understand that this was not my intention.
May 22, 1859 –
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