Sunday, February 24, 2019
Over 1,000 Whistleblowers At Pentagon! Plus Bernie Sanders Running & more
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98IJQBAyjIs
Big Pharma is taking advantage of patent law to keep OxyContin from ever dying
November 18, 2017
The US opioid epidemic seems
to many to have come out of nowhere, and there’s been much finger-pointing in
recent years about how this state of affairs came to be. Some have argued
that inadequate
mental healthcare is to blame. Others have
postulated that doctors were naively over prescribing them as a way to
quickly treat pain and please their patients. But, according to a recently
published draft report, at least some of the blame should be attributed to
the way pharmaceutical companies have manipulated patent extensions over the
past decade.
In the 1970s and 80s, doctors
were looking for better ways to control pain, and many believed
opioids a good, non-addictive option. In the 1990s, drug manufacturers
began aggressively marketing the
painkillers to doctors and patients. Soon, patients (or their
loved oneswho stole their pills) were developing tolerances for low doses,
and graduated to abusing the drugs by crushing them and either snorting or
liquefying and injecting the powders, or turning to heroin, often fatally. By
the time the science caught up in the early 2000s, it was too late: Thousands of
people were addicted to opioids. Opioids have killed over 560,000 people in the
US since 2000. Last month, president Donald Trump declared the crisis a public
health emergency.
Pharmaceutical companies
profited from this demand, and the exclusive rights they had to make these
compounds. This allowed them to pump even more money into marketing, which
inevitably led to doctors prescribing more of them.
From the moment a drug company
patents a compound, it has 20 years of exclusive manufacturing and selling
rights on it. In theory, a company’s monopoly on a drug dissolves after its
patents expire and generics flood the market. But drug companies usually file
for patents in the discovery stages as a way of staking their territory in the
field. The approval process for drugs from the US Food and Drug Administration
involves lengthy clinical trials, which usually take around 12 years—meaning
that manufacturers typically only get to actually sell their drugs exclusively
for about
eight years before generics come onto the market. So they often seek
ways to extend this exclusive period.
Perhaps the most common way is
to change a drug ever so slightly. For example, a company can file a new patent
if it makes a version of a drug with a slightly different dosage, or with a
different way it’s released in the body over time.
“Our patent system doesn’t
require something to be better, just different,” says Robin Feldman, the
director of the Institute for Innovation Law at the University of California
Hastings College of Law. “Rather than creating new medicines, pharmaceutical
companies are largely recycling and repurposing [drugs].” The manufacturer can
then hold off generic competition for a few more years. Competitors (or anyone
else) could theoretically make the case in court that these compounds aren’t
actually different, but the legal battle would likely be too costly and time
consuming to be worth it.
Feldman, together with Connie
Wang, a law student at Stanford University, meticulously went through a
decade’s worth of versions of the US Food and Drug Administration’s “Orange
Book” and US Patent and Trademark Office website listings to investigate
the relationship between patent filings, exclusivity extensions, and drug
approvals.
They found that of the 100
best-selling drugs from 2005 to 2015,about
80% (paywall) had a patent extension filed on them at least once.
About 50% of these drugs had multiple extensions.
That, Feldman argues, can
create a dangerous cycle. “The immense monopoly profits allow drug companies
like Purdue to aggressively market their drugs to doctors,” explains Feldman.
“Physicians preferentially prescribe these particular drugs. Where drugs are
addictive and problematic, that’s dangerous.”
Purdue Pharma is the company
behind one of the most popular prescription opioids. OxyContin first came on
the market in 1996 and has since brought in billions of
dollars of revenue. Purdue’s patent for OxyContin was originally
supposed to expire in 2013. But by making minor tweaks to the drug’s chemical
structure to create a slow-release pill the company markets as “abuse-proof,”
Purdue has been able to file new patents for OxyContin 13 times with the US
Patent and Trademark Office over the past decade, thereby extending its
exclusive selling rights on the drug through 2030.
Purdue did not respond
directly to Feldman’s analysis when forwarded a copy by Quartz, instead
providing a statement noting, “One potentially important step towards the goal
of creating safer opioid analgesics has been the development of opioids that
are formulated to deter abuse. FDA considers the development of these products
a high
public health priority. Purdue reformulated OxyContin with abuse-deterrent
properties recognized by FDA, and the Patent and Trademark Office granted
Purdue patents for inventions that went into the development of those
properties.”
The most prominent example is
a patent Purdue filed
in 2003 for “abuse-proof” OxyContin. It was made of materials that are
harder to crush, and forms a gel that is more viscous and harder to inject. In
theory, it would make for a safer alternative to regular OxyContin. However,
the same patent claims that “intravenous administration of such a gel would
most probably result in obstruction of blood vessels, associated with serious
embolism or even death of the abuser.” In all likelihood, people crushing these
pills to get high would still seriously harm, if not kill, themselves.
Technically, the abuse-proof
pills worked: When researchers from Washington University in St. Louis informally surveyed more
than 2,500 people taking opioids to see if this pill really was more
abuse-proof than before, they found that the number of people who admitted to using
it to get high dropped from about 35% to about 13% two years later. However,
two thirds of respondents said they had switched to other opioids instead—often
heroin, which is less expensive and easy to use.
It’s not Purdue’s fault
doctors kept prescribing (and overprescribing) these pills in an attempt to
alleviate pain, nor that the loved
ones of patients often took instead to get high. It’s also not the
company’s fault there weren’t better resources for those who found themselves
addicted—drugs like buprenorphine, methadone and naltrexone can help ease
addiction, but as recently as 2016, they
still weren’t being given to patients in two-thirds of US addiction
clinics.
That said, Purdue spent many
years and huge sums of money convincing doctors that OxyContin was non
addictive. In fact, the company has paid over $600
million (paywall) in fines to federal and state agencies, as well as
individual patients, to settle claims that it falsely marketed OxyContin as
safe from abuse. Three of the company’s executives pled guilty to
“misbranding,” which is a criminal violation.
The company is still profiting
off “abuse-deterrent” OxyContin. Though there are currently “authorized
generics” of OxyContin available, these are made by manufacturers with licenses
to use Purdue’s formula. In other words, Purdue makes money off them. And
there are currently no approved abuse-deterrent generics in the US. In
September of this year, FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said that
soon the agency plans to issue guidelines to assist companies who are trying to
file applications for these types of generics. No word on when that document
will be published, however.
Saturday, February 23, 2019
Chicago Police Credit Their Extensive Experience Falsifying Evidence For Helping Solve Smollett Case
CHICAGO—Easily spotting what they described as a textbook
example of a fabricated crime, members of the Chicago Police Department on
Friday credited their own extensive experience falsifying evidence with helping
them solve the case of actor Jussie Smollett’s staged attack.
“We’ve been doing this sort of thing for decades, so we
were really able to bring a lot of expertise to bear on this matter,” said CPD
superintendent Eddie Johnson, adding that his officers—many of whom have built
their careers on falsifying evidence to further their personal interests—were
quick to notice similarities between Smollett’s letter containing crushed
aspirin and their own tried-and-true method of planting cocaine on drivers
during traffic stops.
“One look at that letter, and our detectives, who have
forged hundreds of documents themselves, knew it was a fake. And of course, the
supposed attack was immediately suspicious because nearly all violent crimes in
this city end with a dead black man at the scene. So this was very much an
open-and-shut case.”
Johnson went on to state that it was a shame Smollett had
taken on too much too soon and wasted his potential talent for covering up
unlawful, self-serving behavior, as the young man could have had a bright
future with the force.
Putin rattles sabre as nuclear pact collapses
Russian President warns West
that deploying missile launchers in Europe could ignite ‘tit for tat’ response
By PEPE ESCOBAR, MOSCOW
President Putin’s state
of the nation address to the Federal Assembly in Moscow this week was
an extraordinary affair. While heavily focused on domestic social and
economic development, Putin noted, predictably, the US decision to pull out of
the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty and clearly outlined
the red lines in regard to possible consequences of the move.
It would be naïve to believe
that there would not be a serious counterpunch to the possibility of the US
deploying launchers “suitable for using Tomahawk missiles” in Poland and Romania,
only a 12-minute flight away from Russian territory.
Putin cut to the chase: “This
is a very serious threat to us. In this case, we will be forced – I want
to emphasize this – forced to take tit-for-tat steps.”
Later that night, many hours
after his address, Putin detailed what was construed in the US, once again, as
a threat.
“Is there some hard
ideological confrontation now similar to what was [going on] during the Cold
War? There is none. We surely have mutual complaints, conflicting approaches to
some issues, but that is no reason to escalate things to a stand-off on the
level of the Caribbean crisis of the early 1960s”.
This was a direct reference to
the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 when President Kennedy confronted USSR’s
Nikita Khrushchev over missiles deployed off the US mainland.
The Russian Defense Ministry,
meanwhile, has discreetly assured that conference calls with the Pentagon are
proceeding as scheduled, every week, and that this bilateral dialogue is
“working”.
In parallel, tests of
state-of-the-art Russian weaponry such as the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic
missile and the hypersonic Khinzal also proceed, alongside mass production of
the hypersonic Avangard. The first regiment of the Russian Strategic
Missile Forces will get the Avangard before the end of this year.
And then there’s the Tsircon, a hypersonic missile
capable of reaching US command centers in a mere five minutes – leaving the
whole range of NATO military assets exposed.
What Putin meant in his
address about Russia targeting “centers for decision-making” was
fundamentally related to NATO, not the American mainland.
And once again, it’s crucial
to underline that none of these disturbing developments mean that Russia would
engage in a pre-emptive strike against the deployment of US missiles in Eastern
Europe. Putin was adamant that there’s no need for it. Moreover, Russian
nuclear doctrine forbids any sort of pre-emptive strikes, not to mention a nuclear
first strike.
House of the Rising (Nuclear)
Sun
To allow this new paradigm to
sink in, I went on a long walk across Zamoskvorechye – “behind the Moskva
river” – stopping on the way back in front of the Biblioteka Lenina to pay my
respects to the Grandmaster Dostoevsky. And then it hit me; this was entirely
connected to what had happened the day before.
The day before Putin’s state
of the union address, I went to visit Alexander Dugin at his office in the
deliciously Soviet, art nouveau building of the former Central Post Office.
Dugin, a political analyst and strategist with a refined philosophical mind, is
vilified in Washington as Putin’s ideologue. He has also been targeted by US
sanctions.
I was greeted in the lobby by
his multi-talented daughter Daria – active in everything from philosophy and
music to geopolitics. Dugin was being interviewed by RAI correspondent Sergio
Paini. After the wrap-up, the three of us immediately engaged in a discussion
on populism, Salvini, the Italian politician, and the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow
Vests in France), in Italian. (Dugin is fluent in many languages).
Then we picked up on what we
had left behind, when I was in Moscow last December and talked extensively with
Daria. Dugin was in Shanghai teaching an international relations course at
Fudan University (see here and here), and gave lectures
at Tsinghua and Peking University. He returned quite impressed by Chinese
academia’s interest in populism, plus German philosopher Martin Heidegger and
the Gilets Jaunes, as well as the evolving paths of Russia and China’s
strategic partnership.
Eurasia debate
So inevitably we delved into
Eurasianism – and strategies towards Eurasian integration. Dugin sees China
applying a sort of remixed Spykman outlook to the “Road” component of the Belt
and Road Initiative (BRI), which is maritime, along the rimland. He privileges
the “Belt” component, which is overland, with one of the main corridors going
through Russia via the upgraded Trans-Siberian railway. I tend to view it as a
mix of Halford Mackinder, the famed English academic, and the influential
American political scientist Nicholas Spykman; China advancing on the West,
simultaneously in the heartland and the rimland.
Dugin’s office has the
atmosphere of a revolving think tank. I was trying to inform him on how Brazil
– under the ‘leadership’ of Steve Bannon, who walks and talks like he runs the
Bolsonaro presidential clan – has been dragged to the frontline in the US in
contrast to the Eurasian integration chessboard. Suddenly, none other
than Alastair
Crooke drops in. Serendipity or synchronicity?
Alastair, with his consummate
diplomatic flair, is, of course, one of the world’s foremost experts in
the Middle East and Europe – and much else. He’s in Moscow as a guest for one
of the Valdai Club’s famed discussions, on the Middle
East, along with key figures from Syria and Iran.
Soon the three of us are
engaged in an absorbing conversation on the soul of Islam, the purity of
Sufism, the Muslim Brotherhood (those fabled friends of the Clinton machine),
what President Erdogan and the Qataris are really up to, and the sterility –
intellectual and spiritual – of the Wahhabi House of Saud and the Emirates.
We tend to agree that
discussions like this, going on in Moscow – and in Tehran, Istanbul, Shanghai –
would greatly profit from the presence of a progressive Steve Bannon, capable
of organizing and promoting a running, non-ideological debate on multipolarity.
A day before Putin’s stark
reminder against any slip towards nuclear Armageddon, we were also discussing
the post-INF world, but with emphasis on post-Mackinder (and post-Brzezinski)
Eurasian integration. And that includes Russian and Chinese intellectual elites
acutely aware that they can’t afford to be isolated by American hyperpower.
I walked Alastair to his
hotel, past a gloriously illuminated Bolshoi. I kept going, and as Lubyanka
disappeared from view, a sidewalk busker was playing ‘House of the Rising Sun’,
the Animals version. In Russian.
Hopefully, it will not feature
a rising nuclear sun.
Message from Srećko Horvat
Next week all roads lead to…
Graz, Austria!
As part of the Elevate Festival opening on February 27 in Graz I’ll
be joined by actress and activist Pamela Anderson to promote our Green New Deal for Europe – the flagship policy
proposal in our Progressive Agenda for Europe we’re taking to ballot boxes
everywhere next May.
Our collaboration started last
year, when Pamela and I published a conversation for the American magazine Jacobin. In
it, we discussed various topics, from climate change to Gilets Jaunes, and
from activism to… Baywatch!
Among other things we both
agreed on what DiEM25 has been saying since its launch back in February 2016:
"Look at leaders such as
Trump, Bolsonaro, and Salvini and you will see exactly these properties (of
"ur-fascism"). They are destroying the Amazon, the Arctic, the whole
planet in “real time.” And there is no planet B," said Pamela.
"Retreating to
nationalistic tendencies is not an alternative”, she elaborated, adding that,
“The only road to freedom is via a joint fight of the unprivileged. This means
foreign workers included."
From my part, I stressed that,
" unless the deep crisis of the European Union is solved, which is not
only internal but also concerns its foreign policy, I am afraid we will see the
situation deteriorating even more. So instead of the simple “Lexit” solution, I
think we need more trans-national politics, not just an inter-national politics
(between nations), but a trans-national one. We need to go beyond the nation
state."
Among the activities in Graz
next week, Pamela and I will discuss the role of activism today
and the current situation in Europe - and the world.
Also, Daniela Platsch (our MEP
candidate in Germany) will join us on February 27 at 3pm CET in a press
conference at Forum Stadtpark, where the three of us will speak about our
Green New Deal for Europe, and our transnational bid to enter the European
Parliament.
Supporting progressive
priorities such as our Green New Deal for Europe, having a true international
mentality and understanding about what's happening in the world today, from the
US to France, from Turkey to Brazil, is rare nowadays. The dominant discourse
is a retreat to toxic nationalisms and xenophobia. That an actress and
activist from the other side of the Atlantic like Pamela steps up to join and
support our struggle is outstanding – a courageous act we cherish and
appreciate.
The press conference will be
livestreamed, so stay tuned, keep an eye on our social media for links to the
stream and more info!
There is no culture without
popular culture! There is no resistance without imagination!
Carpe DiEM!
Srećko Horvat
DiEM25 co-founder
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