Here it comes…”killer” drug on a rampage…

Painkiller kills four people; Sue Mueller; Foodconsumer.org; 2007-09-13.

This is worrisome, because it points to a strategy where huge sums of corporate assets are being ‘seized’ to fund the drug war apparatus (the Purdue ‘settlement’ was earmarked by the court almost entirely for drug war funding).

I wonder what the patent status of Fentora is? I have always felt that the pharmaceutical industry has a natural interest in opioid prohibition. With physicians afraid to prescribe opioids, their efforts to “do something” for patients who have chronic pain usually involve resorting to a barrage of trials of expensive (patented) medications. I think chronic pain is a serious market asset for the pharmaceutical industry, and the nonpatentable opioids are a serious threat to them. It would be interesting to examine Cephalon’s lobbying history. Purdue had some unusual patterns in lobbying over the years before their debacle. Their “settlement” was a neat little deal where nobody really got in trouble, but the drug war got a huge injection of corporate cash.

From the quote below, it looks like that might be what is being planned with Cephalon. I wonder if it would be possible to do a cost/benefit analysis on pharmaceutical corporations here? If pharmaceutical corporations agreed to turn over all assets from opioid sales to the drug war, would that result in a net financial gain through increased sales of other more expensive patented drugs? Is it possible that what we are seeing here is a “privatization” of funding for the drug war? Are we being set up for a long string of corporate renouncements of, and “apologies” for, opioid therapies? Could this be a mechanism through which the industry itself could be laying plans for privately funding the drug war as public support for the issue dries up?

“A person familiar with the matter said Cephalon is ‘in active discussions’ about a possible settlement with the Connecticut attorney general and the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, though the talks are at a sensitive stage and might break down. Any settlement would involve a large fine and require that Cephalon take remedial measures to reform its aggressive marketing practices, this person said.” (The Wall Street Journal Online, September 14, 2007, p. A4: http://tinyurl.com/36xtvp)

They call people like me “conspiracy theorists” (which is probably not a really bad thing to be in a world of corporate conspiracies!)