Behind the contraceptive pill is a sigh deep in the Mexican rainforest

Short-acting contraceptives are no longer new to us. Since its introduction in the 1960s, it has benefited more than 30% of young women of childbearing age around the world, protecting them from unwanted pregnancies, being able to be closer to their partners, and enjoying the freedom to work, travel, and learn.

However, when I looked through the historical data of birth control pills, I found such a past. In general information, it does not even appear, or at most becomes a footnote, but it is an extremely dazzling microcosm of modern pharmaceuticals.

The story begins with a plant.

                                         Business opportunities deep in the rainforest

A tropical rain forest in southern Mexico produces a plant called Dioscorea mexicana.

It has heart-shaped leaves, curved and slender stems; the most noticeable is the shaped, football-like massive root system. It is a close relative to yam, but it is not delicious at all.

Dioscore in the field

This plant was once an important cash crop in Mexico. Because it grows in remote mountains, mining is almost entirely dependent on local farmers. What they have to do is to get into the poisonous snake dense, sweltering and humid jungle every morning and morning, and carefully dig out the roots in the intricate knots, cut them into pieces to dry (or they will soon break), and hurry before the sun sets. Take it to the middlemen in exchange for a meager income.

1kg of dried yam can sell 0.5 Mexican pesos (about 2 cents) in the 1960s.

Mexican yam is the raw material of short-acting contraceptives (such as Yasmin, Mafulong). This close relative of the Dioscoreaceae plant and yam from the tropical rain forest constitutes the daily life of many women of childbearing age in the world.

In the 1950s, American scientist Russell Marker discovered that diosgenin extracted from Dioscorea can synthesize norethynodrel (norethynone) through a series of chemical processes; then, Gregory Pincus proved Effective contraception. This is a huge business opportunity. After all, before the synthetic method was invented, progesterone could only be extracted from animals, which was very expensive. With the advent of Mexican yam, the price of progesterone dropped to one thousandth of the original, and the commercialization of contraceptives became possible.

Mexican farmers are moving huge yam

In fact, the production of many other steroid drugs (such as cortisone) also depends on this plant. In the 1960s, Mexico produced 80% of the yam. For farmers in Oaxaca, this has almost become their only source of livelihood.

250kg of yam can purify 1kg of steroids, and only 1g of progesterone can bring the drugmaker a profit of $ 40.

From the farmers who dig potatoes to birth control pills, the difference is 8,000 times.

Farmer holding huge yam root in hand

                                            Crazy mining

The huge profits were partly taken away by local middlemen in Mexico. These people have almost control over the yam trade in specific areas, and most farmers must rely on them. There are even some farmers who can't get any money from middlemen and can only get some basic daily necessities.

The bigger players are undoubtedly big drug dealers.

Many people may know that Searle Corporation in the United States has developed the first short-acting contraceptive pill Enovid. But in subsequent developments, Syntex later came on top. The American-registered, steroid-producing company in Mexico has long monopolized the production and supply of yam in Mexico. They can even negotiate and formulate policies with the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture so that they can use patented technology to synthesize intermediate products locally in Mexico, so that products shipped out of Mexico will not appear on the tax list. Other pharmaceutical companies either cannot obtain mining permits or their products are subject to import and export taxes. Schering, a German company, went bankrupt in competition with Syntex.

In the late 1970s, when the Mexican popular party, the Echeveria government came to power, one of the important measures was to nationalize the production and purchase of yam, so as to obtain twice the price for farmers.

Enovid's first contraceptive pill approved by the FDA

Behind the low cost is the global expansion of large pharmaceutical companies. From 1957 to 1965, the number of women taking short-acting contraceptives in the United States changed from 0 to 4 million, and European countries followed suit, and demand for yam suddenly skyrocketed.

However, yam is a very difficult to domesticate crop, and all of them have to be excavated in the wild. According to Mexican data, about 100,000 Mexican farmers were engaged in the mining of yam in 1974. In 1955-74, a total of nearly 100 million tons of yam was produced in southern Mexico.

This weed-like plant used to be everywhere, and farmers only need to walk a short distance to dig a few kilograms. As resources become more scarce and excavations become more and more dangerous, farmers need to find them in deeper and deeper forests to make life difficult.

However, in the past 20 years, the purchase price of yam raw materials has hardly changed. Behind the relatively cheap contraceptives is the almost zero cost of raw materials, making mining uncontrolled.

In the late 1970s, yam was extinct in some places in the wild.

Russell Marker and Dioscorea

Fewer and fewer yam and the toughness of the Mexican government have led pharmaceutical companies to find other ways-this routine has actually been played for hundreds of years. The exploration team brought the scientists to the small islands of Africa or Australia to collect hundreds of species of plants and animals, one by one, and then exploited them. This is called bioprospecting, which is the screening of resources for commercial purposes such as domestication, cultivation or trading. And bioprospecting is often accompanied by a certain degree of biopiracy-patents and property rights fall into commercial groups, and locals are forced to become the end of supply.

                                           This hero story, they have no name

From pharmacists to bioengineers, they have no concept of real plants and how to mine them, relying on the experience and knowledge accumulated by the farmers in the place of origin; however, before the powerful political and economic group, the locals were weak and worthless. Mexico's indigenous research power cannot support the huge pharmaceutical industry, and they all need to import contraceptives and other hormone drugs.

Similarly, African and South American countries have the most abundant biological resources, and those large companies who come with exploration resources to collect, identify and apply for various patents and realize commercial applications write their own hero stories, and Africa South America is almost irrelevant.

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The crazy exploitation of the internationalized industry has made even a local species in a small area into a small end of the global industrial chain, involved in huge industrialization and capital operations. It and the environment to which it is attached are extremely fragile in front of huge production machines.

Right whales and sperm whales died in commercial whaling; the endangered bison was not because of hunter greed, but because of the crushing of the modern leather industry. At the beginning of the 20th century, the white hardwood forest (Quebracho) in the Chaco Plain of Argentina was used for industrial leather tanning in Europe and America. Within 40 years, 10 million hectares disappeared, equivalent to 10% of Argentina's entire forest. The local environment has not yet restore.

In fact, the biodiversity of yam is very rich, and many of them have potential medicinal synthetic value. But in any large-scale industry, diversity is actually very fragile-they only need one, and what we lose may be our own chances for survival.

Contraceptive drug trial in Puerto Rico

What is missing are the local indigenous people, the land where their ancestors lived, and the resources they once owned but no longer own. They used to be bustling backgrounds, but bustling, after all, has nothing to do with them.

In the 1980s, Japanese scientists developed a microorganism-based chemical synthesis method that replaced plant extraction. Dioscorea is safe, and we do n’t have to worry about eating without contraceptives; the Mexican dioscore industry has experienced the separation of pharmaceutical companies, the efforts of nationalization, and the decline of resources, and it has finally become history.

Farmers in the Oaxaca rainforest are still living in poverty. The contraceptive pill is still far away-it's a luxury of $ 10 a month, and they may not even know the existence of the contraceptive-many digger farmers think that what they dig is for soap.

At the other end of the border, millions of women wake up every morning to swallow a pink pill. They are studying at the university and are free and close with their partners. They are enjoying the best time in their lives.

This story is not to tell us that contraceptives are bad or that we should not have contraceptives. Birth control pills are definitely one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century.

But, as Gabriela Soto Laveaga, a professor of history of science at Harvard University and author of Jungle Laboratories: Mexican peasants, national projects, and the making of the pill, says, Mexico The story of the peasant should not be just a footnote to "the great scientist saves mankind". Should we take care of half of the world's population, and take care of those who should be taken care of most? Can we do better in terms of environment and resources?

This is the meaning of historical existence.