3-26-20 One kilogram of fentanyl bought in China for $3,000 to $5,000 can generate over $1.5 million, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Fentanyl is also at least 30 times more potent, which can make it hard for users to return to heroin after getting used to the punch of synthetics.
“What happens after fentanyl is heroin doesn’t work anymore,” said Jaan Vaart, who used to use drugs and now runs a mobile outreach bus for Convictus, a harm reduction center in Tallinn. “Nobody wants to spend their money on water. Heroin was like injecting water after that.”…
“This is a new dawn,” said Bryce Pardo, a lead author of RAND’s report. “It’s no longer plant-based. China has been doing this for the last ten years,” Pardo said. “The synthetic opioid phenomenon is one chapter in the new psychoactive substances saga.”…
“We are seeing less coming directly from China, and more fentanyl and precursors being routed through Mexico,” Mary Brandenberger, a DEA spokeswoman, said in an email….
the new fentanyl derivatives mainly originate in China,” according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction’s 2019 report on Estonian drug markets. https://apnews.com/be15d6289f39b45742d598f6f65185ce
……………..
3-26-20 Johnson & Johnson’s supply chain began in Tasmania, an island 150 miles south of mainland Australia, where scientists in the mid-1990s altered the genetics of thousands of plants to engineer a “super poppy” that was particularly rich in opiates.Tasmanian farmers grew the novel plants, enticed by flashy incentive prizes — a Mercedes, a Jaguar, a BMW — that a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary awarded for growing the best crop.
The poppies were then exported to the United States where another Johnson & Johnson subsidiary refined them into oxycodone and hydrocodone, and the narcotics were shipped as white crystalline powders to the nation’s pillmakers.
Critical to the globe-spanning effort were years of company lobbying to help persuade the U.S. government to loosen a key rule on narcotics imports, allowing the U.S. subsidiary to produce rising amounts of opioids out of Tasmanian poppies, according to records and interviews reviewed by The Washington Post….
So while Purdue Pharma, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals and other manufacturers are often linked to the opioid crisis, it was two subsidiaries of Johnson & Johnson, a brand better known for baby powder and Band-Aids, that were producing the narcotics in many of the abused pills.
One was Tasmanian Alkaloids, the poppy-processing outfit that worked with farmers in Australia, and the other was Noramco, a U.S. company that processed the Australian poppy materials into drugs such as oxycodone and hydrocodone. As a crackdown on opioid production was underway in 2016, Johnson & Johnson sold off both companies….
through an outside counsel, Sabrina Strong of the law firm O’Melveny.
“Every gram of raw material and active pharmaceutical ingredient that [the subsidiaries] sold was expressly authorized and strictly supervised by the federal government to fulfill quotas based on the DEA’s evaluation of national medical needs,” Strong wrote.
But what Johnson & Johnson viewed as a business that eased the pain of countless patients looked to critics more like a big company ignoring the rising number of fatal overdoses to ramp up production and profits.
As far back as 2011, advocates and victims were calling on the Drug Enforcement Administration to lower the quota of drugs that may be produced in the United States by Noramco and other narcotics suppliers.
By that time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, enough prescription painkillers were being prescribed annually “to medicate every American adult around-the-clock for a month.”…
Like other farmers here, he rejected questions about whether Tasmanians should reconsider growing poppies for drug companies. Any problems with the crop, he noted, occurred long after the plants left his field. “If anyone wants to know, the problem was not the farmers,” French said….
in the mid-90s, an invention by Tasmanian Alkaloids, the Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, helped reduce the costs: Scientists created a new poppy.
By treating thousands of seeds with chemicals to randomly change their genetic information, the scientists made a poppy that had two special properties. First, the new poppy had ample amounts of an opiate known as thebaine — a substance from which oxycodone and hydrocodone could be readily manufactured. Second, unlike traditional opium poppies, this poppy had no morphine, meaning that the purification process was simpler.
“It was a ‘super poppy’ from the point of view that it produces a heck of a lot more thebaine,” said Peter Facchini, a biochemistry professor at the University of Calgary whose lab specializes in studying the poppies. “The cost of thebaine — and the cost of all pharmaceutical ingredients that come from it — dropped. These prescription medicines became much more accessible, and then you had a series of cascading effects, including addiction.”
The man credited with the discovery, Anthony J. Fist, an agricultural scientist, was given Johnson & Johnson’s highest award for scientific research and innovation, the Johnson Medal, in 2000….
Oxycodone and hydrocodone have been the most abused prescription opioids in the United States, according to federal statistics on emergency room visits involving nonmedical use of pharmaceuticals.
While Johnson & Johnson officials declined to disclose how much their subsidiaries produced, documents that surfaced in the Oklahoma trial indicate that the companies dominated the bulk opioids business: By 2015, Noramco supplied 65 percent of the oxycodone, 54 percent of the hydrocodone and 60 percent of the morphine and codeine used by drugmakers in the U.S. market, according to an October 2015 sales presentation introduced in the Oklahoma trial….
An affiliate of Purdue, PF Laboratories, became one of the first major customers of the new product from Johnson & Johnson’s subsidiary.
“Noramco will work with PF Laboratories to secure its entire worldwide requirements,” a Noramco executive, Michael B. Kindergan, wrote to PF Laboratories in October 1998 as the pillmaker was ramping up production….
Tasmanian Alkaloids had accountants study the question, recalled Rick Rockliff, one of the first employees of Tasmanian Alkaloids. Getting more poppies from farmers, it turned out, would be worth much more than a luxury car. “The accountant said if you could fill the factory up [with poppies], we could give them a 747, you know,” Rockliff recalled, grinning….“Potatoes are the most profitable crop that we grow, followed by cauliflower, and then carrots,” Loane said. “The bottom line is, it doesn’t matter what crop you’re growing. They’re not going to pay you any more than what they have to.”…
in November 2000, came a breakthrough, according to local press accounts and interviews. After lobbying by Glaxo, Tasmanian Alkaloids and Australian government officials, U.S. officials said that they would not count thebaine under the import rule.
“Tasmania’s $200 million poppy industry has been given unlimited access to the huge United States market for thebaine, the strongest alkaloid extracted from the narcotic plant,” it reported. “The export coup follows a U.S. Department of Justice decision to relax its rules for thebaine following pressure from pharmaceutical companies and lobbying by the industry and Tasmanian and Australian governments.” -Hobart Mercury…
In part, according to DEA officials, they felt compelled to allow more opioid production in order to keep pace with the rising demand for opioids, which was spurred by massive marketing efforts by pharmaceutical firms, including Johnson & Johnson companies, to encourage doctors to prescribe opioids, and for patients to take them….A rough estimate in a 2017 study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine offered that as much as a quarter of all opioids may be diverted to nonmedical uses….
“There was no reason for making more — the drugs were winding up in the wrong hands, and everyone knew it,” Jackson said in an interview. “But the companies wanted more and the government let them.”
At a House hearing in April 2011, then-Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) told then-DEA chief Michele Leonhart that the agency seemed too concerned with potential shortages of the drugs for patients.
“I just wish I would hear you focus more on the people who are dying from these narcotics and painkillers than worrying about getting more out there,” Bono said. “To me the problem is there’s 30,000 a year dying.”
“We at the DEA were out there banging the drum about the dangers of the epidemic,” Cote said. But by raising the quotas as the death toll climbed, “DEA actually became complicit in the problem.”…
Johnson & Johnson officials put Noramco and Tasmanian Alkaloids up for sale.
They were sold the next year to SK Capital, a private-equity firm. The proceeds from the sale amounted to $650 million. Johnson & Johnson had also sold off the rights to another opioid drug, known as Nucynta, for $1 billion.
In March 2016, two officials at Johnson & Johnson companies who had been involved in the Nucynta sale traded emails about news of government restrictions on opioids.
“Looks like we sold at the right time,” one wrote in an email presented during the Oklahoma trial. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/business/opioid-crisis-johnson-and-johnson-tasmania-poppy/
………………..........................
4-16 Indonesia 297/3924= 8% new cases/current cases https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/indonesia
…..
Peru 17% https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/peru
…..
Poland 380/6248= 6% https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/poland
…….
Switz. 400/9297= 4% https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/switzerland
…………
South Africa 91/2324= 4% https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-africa
………………..
Argentina 294/1561= 19% https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/argentina
………………..
Colombia 126/2396= 5% https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/colombia
……………….
Ireland 1068/10958= 10% https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/Ireland
…………..
Japan 741/6806= 11% https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/Japan/
………
Russia 3388/18918= 18% https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/russia/
…………
Sweden 482/9861= 5% https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/Sweden
………
USA 27637/556210= 5% https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us
…………
Egypt 155/1578= 10% https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/egypt
………………………………….
No comments:
Post a Comment