The Copley Archive: Drugs and Pharmaceutical Industry: An Annotated Catalogue of the Newspaper Cuttings (October 2025)

Merv and Janet Copley were a Newcastle couple devoted to the communist cause and active in community and union affairs.

In 1993 Janet Copley described how she and Merv worked together. Around 4pm every Friday she took a shopping trolley to the Trades Hall, the Waterboard, the Seamans Union and other Newcastle offices and picked up the week’s daily papers that had been finished with and bought them home. Merv would clip articles and Janet would record the source and the date of the clipping on it in pencil.

There are two files of newspaper cuttings in the Copley Archive concerning drugs and the
pharmaceutical industry, held in Box C061. One consists of cuttings pasted into a book, in date sequence from1960 to 1965, as reproduced on the front page; the other is a random collection of cuttings in a loose folder, They have been catalogued together, but many of the cuttings concern chemical (and other) companies that did not produce or wholesale pharmaceuticals, and these have not been included. The source of this material, and the limitation of its suitability for quantitative analyses has been described in detail in the Auchmuty Library Special Collections: The Copley Health Archive. An annotated Catalogue of the Newspaper Cuttings, 19/10/25)

Their newspaper cuttings about health and medical matters are held in archive boxes CO87 to CO93 in the University of Newcastle Auchmuty Library Special Collections, as The Merv and Janet Copley Collection. Various brochures, notices and pages torn from copies of Hansard also held in those boxes have not been included in this documentation.

A Listing of the material is here:

radicalnewcastle.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/the-merv-and-janet-copley-collection/

Digitised Selections are here:

livinghistories.newcastle.edu.au/nodes/view/110374

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THESE CUTTINGS

Malerba and Orsenigo (2015) have described how the period 1945 to 1975, as covered by these clippings, was the ‘golden age’ of the pharmaceutical industry. This was the result of the technological and organisational infrastructures of the ‘crash program’ during WW2 created for the production of penicillin and the sulphonamides, combined with a global post war governmental investment in health research and an increasing consumer demand.

Initially there was a ‘random’ testing of thousands of compounds with the serendipitous, rapid and profitable development of hundreds of new chemical entities and new, important classes of drugs, starting from small base. This was achieved by a small number of large companies and a large number of small companies. A heavy investment in sales and marketing was followed by the introduction of government regulation.

Fundamental changes occurred in the mid 1970 with rapid advances in biochemistry and
pathophysiology, and the introduction of hedge fund financing.

It has not been plain sailing. The industry has faced extensive criticism for its marketing practices: disease mongering to extend its markets (Moynihan, 2002), biased medical education, undue influence on doctors by sales representatives (Fabbri, 2017; De Jong, 2016), fraud (Ungar-Sagon 2025), and profiteering (Reif, 2018).

Copyright David Smith 2025