Top 14 Times Drug Companies Broke the Law for Profit

Kind: captions Language: en War crimes, phony science, killer side effects, and the dark truth about whether they even want you to get better. These are the most insane big pharma conspiracies that turned out to be true. Number 14, mainstream corporate media lies to lay the modern opioid epidemic at the feet of foreign drug cartels. But the truth is, big pharma and the American government have colluded to make money off addiction and death for almost a century. And it all started with World War II and a man named Harry J. Anslinger, the true architect of the war on drugs. But his real war was against only the drugs that he and his buddies couldn't profit off. Anslinger hated drugs with such a burning passion that he was made the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He stuck around maintaining his leadership through the presidencies of Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. [music] Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy. It was a tenure of 32 years. Clearly, he was a passionate prohibitionist. But there were deeper motivations at play. According to Norman Oer's book, Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age, Ensener closed a major deal in 1939, while World War II was raging, 2 years before America officially became involved. If recent conflicts have taught us anything, it's that war always disrupts supply chains. And that, of course, includes pharmaceuticals. in particular, one of the most valuable and dangerous kinds of pharmaceuticals out there, opiates. Anslinger, who for all his many faults, had no shortage of cunning, figured that it was only a matter of time before the war collapsed opium supply chains. So, he made a deal with the American pharmaceutical industry to invest heavily in the production and stockpiling of massive quantities of the drugs. It was enough to supply not only the US, but all of their allies in World War II. A mix of public and private American funding sent opium production in Iran, Turkey, and India into maximum overdrive, producing veritable mountains of the deadly brown gold. In 1942, the year after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States officially entering the war, [music] Enslinger collected his return on investment. Over 300 tons of opium was imported into the US, transported in 10 trucks to Fort Knox, and guarded by machine gun wielding agents of Anslinger's Federal Bureau of Narcotics. From there, it was sent to all the pharmaceutical companies, who then [music] refined it into usable opiate drugs. This foresight turned out to be an extremely profitable one. All of Americans allies ended up depending on American opiates for their frontline medical needs. US big pharma became the Allied world's drug dealer. So, how did the Nazis factor into all this? Post World War II, Anslinger's department was in charge of regulating illegal narcotics and some of the Allied portions of denazified Germany. There, he and other American officials became acquainted with Nazi policy on drug control. They were effective, at least [music] on paper, if you ignore the fact that all these laws were often used as an excuse to lock up Jewish people under false pretenses. [music] Enslinger used a lot of these policies to shape his propositions at the United Nations Narcotics Commission. After all, when your goal is to control the supply, why allow competition? And as you're about to realize with our next conspiracy, nothing much has changed. Number 13. According to the DEA, 2.2 lb of fentanyl has the potential to kill 500,000 people. [music] It reached a peak of over 73,000 deaths in 2022 alone. Ask any American politician, law enforcement, or media figure where it's [music] coming from, and they'll give you the same answer. Smuggled across every border by Mexican and Chinese drug cartels. It's a convenient excuse, especially when you're taking kickbacks from the real culprit. To borrow an old cliche, the call is coming from inside the house and it's offering you a lap dance. That last part actually wasn't a figure of speech. It really happened. A pharmaceutical executive for the company Insist Therapeutics [music] took a Chicago doctor named Paul Madison to a nightclub and they gave him a lab dance. It was all part of a wider scheme [music] to get him to prescribe more of their incredibly potent fentanyl spray subsist to his patients. And this was part of the over $70,000 exchanged between Incys and Madison through cash and gifts to [music] maintain him as one of their subsist power prescribers. But what actually is Subsist? It's an aerosolized fentanyl spray over 100 times more potent than morphine. The FDA had only officially approved the drug for treating latestage terminal cancer patients with pain so severe that nothing else brings them any relief. That's right. Subsist is something you should only be taking if you're already in the process of dying a painful death. That's why it's killed over 900 people since 2012. That was the drug that Incys was pushing for more doctors to shill through off label prescriptions. Because it's so addictive, even one new patient makes for long-term revenue of six figures for incis. If the lap dance wasn't tacky enough for you, the criminal trial into the shady dealings of incis revealed something even more craven. A rap music video that they'd created to persuade doctors to [music] prescribe more subsist. The video called Great by Choice features two incis executives rapping about their deadly drug. Meanwhile, a third performer dances around dressed up as a giant bottle [music] of substance. Interestingly, the 1600 micrograms bottle, the highest legal dose. Incis is definitely one of the loudest and most obnoxious with their doctor corrupting tactics, but they're just doing what everyone else in the industry is doing. A 2019 ProPublica analysis even found that doctors do prescribe more drugs from certain pharma [music] companies after being given consulting fees. Given those six-f figureure numbers, conducting conspiracies with doctors is clearly a profit-making move, even if it does result in doctors selling out their patients. But in an industry rife with secret corruption, there is more than one way to turn sickness into a gold mine. Number 12. While everyone else was suffering through the CO 19 pandemic, Fizer was having a bumper few years, making $ 37 billion on their vaccine in 2021. It's officially one of the most successful products in human history. 2022 was even more of a barntormer. Not only was there increased proliferation of the vaccine, but it also added a boost from their CO 19 pill, Paxlovid. It had a 90% success rate in treating severe symptoms for otherwise vulnerable adults infected with the virus. It all sounds great on the surface, given that all of these were undeniably extremely helpful in getting the pandemic under control and likely saved millions of lives. But as with anything in the corporate world, there's always some fine print there that they're really hoping you just won't look at. When it comes to that fine print, almost nobody gets the worst part of the deal more than the impoverished populuses of developing nations. The organization Global Justice Now [music] was quick to point out that Fiser's vaccine was made with the help of Biointech. The German firm had a nice little boost of 100 million in debt financing from the publiclyowned European investment bank and a €375 million euro grant from the German government. It's the rationale behind an old and depressingly true joke about the pharmaceutical industry. We pay for all our drugs twice. First, when our tax money helps develop them through lucrative government contracts, and then again when we need to pay through the nose to get the medicine that our tax dollars help develop. [music] And this is a financial minefield for even middle class Americans. Not to mention the poorest of the poor in the global south. A representative of Global Justice Now put it best when he [music] said, "The development of mRNA vaccines should have revolutionized the global COVID response. But we've let Fiser withhold this essential medical information from much of the world, all while ripping off public health systems with an eyewatering markup. Astroenica provided its vaccine for considerably cheaper, and Maderna, to its credit, said it wouldn't enforce patent protection on its own vaccine. That meant people in disadvantaged areas could produce a cheaper generic version to meet the needs of their patients. Fizer didn't do anything like that because why would it? [music] Now when there's so much money on the table for them to just vacuum up. It's pandemic profitering in its most blatant form agreeing to help save someone from a burning building but only if they agree to turn out their pockets too. We saw some even more blatant takes on this throughout the CO 19 crisis. There were incidents where big pharma companies explicitly kept the profits of prepaid vaccines that were later cancelled. It's the kind of shamelessness that you only cultivate when you are rich and connected enough to know that you're not ever going to face any meaningful consequences. The worst part of this particular profit before patient conspiracy is that it's not even the only time Fizer's done this. And for an even more horrific and deadly disease than CO 19, they pulled the exact same shady tricks with medications for people suffering from AIDS, like the drug rescriptor. Back in 2003, Fizer reneged on a deal that would have made the drug substantially more affordable for people in poorer countries being ravaged by HIV and AIDS. All because the profit margins just weren't there. But unlike the parties involved in our next true pharma conspiracy, at least you can say they weren't in bed with genocidal mass murderers. Number 11. The Tonab Pharma Corporation is one of the most powerful pharmaceutical entities in Japan, tracing its earliest progenitors to 1678. That's right. It's almost a 350-year-old company. Due to its age, mergers, rebrands, and the fact that pharmaceutical companies seem to attract bad reputations, it has changed its name many times. Until 2025, it was the Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corporation. Before that, it went under many different guises, including the Mitsubishi Tokyo Pharmaceuticals and Welli Corporation, which merged in 2001. The real object of interest here is [music] the Welli Corporation. That company was a product of two other entities that merged in 1998. Yoshi Pharmaceutical Industries Limited and the Green Cross Corporation. Of course, the Green Cross Corporation wasn't without scandal. In the late 1980s, they caused around 3,000 people using their blood products to contract HIV through contamination. The technology was known to be unsafe, but it was put out to market anyway. Though, can you really expect anything different when one of your founders is one of the most brutal and sadistic war criminals in living memory? That's right. One of the founders was Masaji Kitano, the second commander of Unit 731, a chemical and biological warfare research division. Their crimes against the Chinese people are some of the most horrific ever recorded. They intentionally gave people frostbite to see how it ravaged their bodies. They used living people as test dummies for rifles and bayonets. They amputated and vivisected conscious [music] patients. They intentionally infected people with syphilis and the plague. They forced pregnancy. People were starved, crushed, mangled, injected with animal blood. If we tried to list every awful thing they did at Unit 731, it would consume this entire video. and one of the top guys behind it all got away scot-free, consulted on American warfare programs, and then helped start Green Cross. We know for a fact there wasn't even just one member of the monstrous unit on the team. Rioshi Naito was also intimately involved in Green Cross. Not only was he involved in the Unit 731 atrocities, but also he took part in the post-war government drive to cover up the worst of their shared crimes. And the scariest part is it worked. Imagine it like this. It'd be like finding out that Hinrich Himmler and Ikeman both died of old age and they were on the board of directors at Fizer. And as you're about to learn, big pharma and unethical human experiments are anything but an anomaly. Number 10, we return again to Fizer who have a considerable wrap sheet when it comes to extremely sinister pharmaceutical conspiracies. [music] This one has a legally confirmed body count. In 1996, a horrific menitis epidemic was tearing its way across Nigeria with almost 110,000 [music] cases and nearly 11,700 deaths. The global community, both public and private, pulled their resources in order to meet the needs [music] of the crisis. One of those entities was, of course, Fizer, who noticed an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. [music] Sadly, they ended up killing far more than that. Fizer decided that the menitis outbreak was the perfect time for a new clinical trial for one of their drugs, Troan. It had been cleared by the FDA to treat adults, but the tests had [music] not been conducted on children in the West for well obvious reasons. Nigerian children with no other option seemed like they would be safer guinea pigs. Maybe some of them would even be cured in the process as well. A win-win theoretically, but everything about the way Fizer conducted these tests was extremely unethical and some would say outright evil. They didn't give the parents of the children who took Troan informed consent. They never told them that the drugs being used on them were experimental. They even performed these experiments in hospitals where personnel from Doctors Without Borders were treating patients with proven and legitimate methods. 200 children were given Troan. 11 died as a result. Many others dealt with debilitating side effects, speech and hearing impediments, blindness, liver failure, paralysis, and neurological disorders. Parents were told that they had hope of a cure and instead they had their children disabled in an American big pharma company's drug trial. This was seen by many Nigerians as a direct political attack against the country's majority Muslim population from the West. And if this horrifying incident wasn't bad enough on its own, it's left a lasting and extremely dangerous legacy of vaccine skepticism across multiple African countries. As of 2022, only 23% of people were vaccinated across the entire continent. Incidents like Fizer's deadly trials have been huge driving forces in keeping these numbers lower than the herd immunity threshold. All Fizer suffered for this was some bad press as well as an alleged outofc court settlement of $75 million to the local state and $175,000 to four families of dead [music] children in 2009. That amounts to a rounding error on their yearly profit margins. Medicine is expensive, but it's necessary. But what if one of the biggest reasons that medicine is so expensive was actually it's just a big lie? Number nine. If you wanted to find a living symbol for everything that the general public despises about big pharma, you could not do much better than the infamous so-called pharma bro Martin Skrey. He made headlines in 2015 after acquiring the life-saving toxoplasmosis drug Derapim with his company Touring Pharmaceuticals. He then jacked up the price from $13.50 50 cents per tablet to $750. It was one of the most shameless acts of corporate greed, even by an industry that is full of them. To rebuke Skrettley, a bunch of teenage boys in Australia made the active ingredient in the drug for a fraction of the price. Their classroom experiment produced 0.13 o of pyromethamine for $20. In the US, that same quantity would cost up to 110,000. But that didn't dissuade Skrettley from continuing to represent all of his chosen industry's worst instincts. The higher costs that he was employing were necessary for innovation, he said, owing to the high costs of research and development or R&D. That was a lie because that's what's at the heart of this conspiracy. Pharma companies absolutely love exaggerating the costs of R&D. It gives them an opportunity to increase the price of their drugs on the other end. Not only is R&D much lower than they say it is, they generally spend about a third as much on R&D for each drug [music] as they do for that same drug's marketing. According to the report R&D Myths, the case against the drug industry's R&D scarecard by pro-consumer watchdog nonprofit Public Citizen, big pharma actually only spends a fifth of what it claims to spend on drug R&D. A lot of this cost is actually also funded by the taxpayer. In 1995, US taxpayer funded scientists conducted at least 55% of the research projects that led to the discovery and development of the five top selling drugs as per data from the National Institute of Health. Big Pharma likes to say that it takes $2.6 billion to take a drug from the laboratory to the market, which is an insane exaggeration. It's based on an extremely flawed study by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, which has been anything but transparent about its sample size and research methods. Independent research has shown that median [music] costs for one successful clinical trial phase are probably closer to around $19 million. It's barely a fraction of the total capitalized pipeline number that big pharma [music] loves to tout and is just hoping that you will not look too closely at. Lying about your own costs to artificially inflate your prices and your profits [music] is an absolutely reprehensible tactic. But when it gets really dangerous is when big pharma lies to persuade you into taking a drug that you really shouldn't be taking. Number eight, everyone knows drugs have side effects. With the more severe ailments typically adding up to more severe potential after effects of treatment, anyone on medication is taking an informed risk, choosing whether they would rather suffer the symptoms of their illness or face the potential risk of relieving those symptoms, at least when pharma companies are actually being honest about those risks. That's exactly what happened with Merc and Vio, an anti-inflammation drug. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, quote, Merk used flawed methodologies biased toward predetermined results to exaggerate the drug's positive effects. Not exactly the kind of secret tactics you want to see when real human lives are on the line. Merc violated a major tenant of how these drug trials are supposed to work. After [music] testing the effectiveness of Vio against the effectiveness of neproxin, a competing drug, executives falsely claimed neproxin possessed a unique cardioprotective [music] effect. What kind of data were they trying to hide with this kind of corporate slight of hand? Well, it could be the fact that Vio was proven to increase the risk of heart attacks in patients by around 400%. And then there's the antiarthritis drug Celre from our friends over at Fizer. It probably felt like a godsend to the people receiving it. And for a time, it was actually one of the company's most profitable drugs. That was until 2012 revealed that Fizer was cherry-picking test data to make the drug seem a lot safer than it actually was. While there were Celre related deaths from both stomach ulcers and heart attacks as early as 1999, these were falsely portrayed as freak outliers not worthy of much attention. Execs were shown colluding over email to ensure that the data was manipulated into the best possible light. They needed to shell out more than $164 million to settle an investor class action lawsuit in the aftermath. They were also forced by the FDA to stop promoting Celre in all of its forms to the public, even though it was technically still allowed to stay on the market. You might not