Grubstakers - Episode 04: Sackler Family/Pharmaceutical Drugs

Episode Date: February 26, 2018

This week we ditch the format and talk generally about the Sackler Family who own Purdue Pharma, how antibiotics in our livestock is making superbugs and the overall process to get a drug approved in the United States. Enjoy! Here's the tumblr with some of the research we did and any necessary corrections: https://grubstakers.tumblr.com/post/171327246627/research-for-episode-4-sackler?is_related_post=1

This week on Grubstakers, it's a special episode about prescription drugs. We're talking about Purdue Pharma, the billionaire Sackler family, and their role in the heroin epidemic, as well as the antibiotics in your food. Coming right up on Grubstakers. Because of my success in the private sector, I had the chance to run America's largest city for 12 years. I taught those kids lessons on product development and marketing and they taught me what it was like growing up feeling targeted for your race. And that's just not true.

You know I love having the support of real billionaires. Welcome to Grubstakers. My name's Yogi Poliwal. I'm Sean McCarthy. I'm Andy Palmer. Steve Jeffers. And on this week's episode, we will be talking about drogus. Yeah, it's a special look at uh drugs particularly the prescription drug industry in the united states uh and i think really the best way to dive into

that is to talk about the uh the sackler family before we jump into it are we on any prescription drugs are the grub stakers taking any rx oh hell yeah yeah andy palmer has a complex cocktail that makes him the man that he is today, but not the man I knew 10 years ago. He takes like four different art exes every morning and then suddenly his personality changes. Mostly it keeps me from over apologizing. That's what a fexer does is I feel less shame. He goes to sleep as Mr. Hyde and wakes up Jekyll. That's really the beauty of Andy Palmer.

I just like the idea that Andy wakes up every morning and he does 20 pull-ups and he's lifting weights and talking about the NFL games last night. And then you hear a change where he's like, no, don't make me. And his arm actually rebels and forces the pills down his throat, and then he becomes a science nerd for the rest of the day. It's quite disturbing. Well, theoretically, yes. Yeah. No, I take

Paxil for anxiety. It's helped. Yeah? How long have you been on Paxil? I don't know, a year? Maybe two years now? Maybe two years. Grubstakers is brought to you by Paxil. Ask your doctor about paxson do it today but yeah no i mean uh there's been a lot of observation about over prescription in the united states and the current heroin epidemic and i don't think you can really talk about that without

talking about the sackler family uh there have been some great profiles on them in both esquire and new yorker magazine but long and short, there's about 20 members. Forbes estimates their combined net worth at $13 billion. And they are 100% owners of Purdue Pharma, who, of course, manufacture and market at OxyContin. There's 20 members of this family? Yeah. They've got a lot of... So basically, there were three brothers originally who started it.

Now, here's a little story I got to tell about three bad brothers you know so well. Arthur Mortimer and Raymond Sackler. They're all dead now, but they have descendants, of course, and they are still collecting all the revenue. And I guess to give... Well, we could say, as far as stats go, according to the American Society of Addiction Medicine,

four out of every five people who try heroin now started out addicted to prescription pills. There's a lot of information on this, but I think it's pretty clear. One out of five are fucking hardcore. One out of five are too cool to ever have done it the legal way. Yo, I don't need no legal drugs to be addicted to heroin. I'm getting this shit on my own. I don't need to try this with a pill. Give me the needle, bitch.

Yeah, one out of five Americans are not pussies. They went straight to injection. But yeah, without belaboring the point, there's a lot of research on there that ties the marketing of prescription opiates, especially since the 1995 introduction

of OxyContin, to the heroin epidemic, where in 95 and 99, prescription drug opiate use quadrupled in the United States. So this is a huge spike we're talking about. And this is almost entirely because of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. And I guess to give a brief biography on the Sacklers, like I said, there were three brothers, and it was really Arthur Sackler who kind of made the family fortune by pioneering advertising prescription drugs in medical journals, selling directly to

doctors, hiring doctors to convince other doctors that these drugs were good, etc., etc. And he was rewarded for that in 1997 when Arthur was posthumously inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame, of course the only Hall of Fame where drug use is not a disqualifier. And in the statement where they inducted him, they said they were honoring...

You know how the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the band that's getting inducted, will play? They do the drug. Yeah yeah they do a line of instead of a heisman they've got cracky yeah the addicted uh they just like bring a bunch of homeless people on stage and have the main line whatever drug they're inducting so you can watch its effects in real time. I'm actually looking at the Medical Hall of Fame website, and it's a bunch of doughy white fellas

and the occasional white lady, the occasional doughy white lady. Now, why do you have to bring race into it, Andy? This could have been anybody. Yeah, wait, no, I'm going through this, and now I'm trying to see if there's a non-white person on here. I thought I saw some Asians. I'm not seeing any Asians.

Man, you know, I think that doctor probably really regrets creating white people in a lab now. You mean that dungeon. Steven, are you seeing any Asians on here? No, not one. No. Yeah. I don't trust your white eyes. Yeah, Yogi could find them.

I don't see race. I'll find an agent real quick. But in the statement where they posthumously inducted him into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame, they honored his achievements in, quote, bringing the full power of advertising and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing. He brought the full power of advertising and marketing. The speech says, bring that motherfucking ruckus, and everybody in the room took a pill. It's like when Don Draper met El Chapo Guzman. Wonderful things happen.

Yes, yes, yes they did. It's not a pill. It's an experience. But so as I mentioned, this family, the Sacklers, they're worth $13 billion. And, of course, they refuse all interviews and media appearance and this kind of stuff. But in the New Yorker profile that was written about them, there were a couple interesting characters. So Michael Sackler-Burner is alyn-based singer-songwriter who of course in response said he has never owned any shares in purdue uh none of the descendants of arthur sackler have ever had anything to do with or benefited from the sale of oxycon is that one of his songs you know i actually did listen to some of his music and maybe we can play

some of it at the end but it's you know think know, think your generic Brooklyn-based white singer-songwriter dude. Kind of Bob Dylan ripoff. And my grandfather started it. He birthed me. And just know that the music flows because I am responsible for the death of millions. I really think like... Mic that up, Andy. Huh? Mic it up.

Oh, yeah. You can really feel the pain of having a multi-million dollar inheritance from dumping drugs on the American market. I am the pill. He's got a good looking jag, though. You mean physically a jaguar is present during this music video? I just love the idea. It's just a picture of him holding his guitar slunk to the side.

I like the idea of him going on stage in Brooklyn cafes and singing about the blues and then going to check his $20 million account balance. This guy sucks. Yeah, Jesus Christ. He's awful. Anyways, this guy sucks. Yeah, Jesus Christ, he's awful. This guy's got dicks for mouths. The song is Keep It Easy. Which is possible when you are in a multi-billion

dollar drug fortune. Keep It Easy is in between. Can we have him tested for performance enhancing drugs? I'm pretty sure he's got some juice that we don't know about. He's the first singer-songwriter where instead of doing heroin, he just is financed by it. You know, I think, ironically enough, I will bet we could find at least one of the 200,000 Americans who have died, died listening to this song. He gets booked to go on tours, but only because he brings the best drugs

i like the idea of like him going on tour and you just see all these pharmacy ads in the background sponsored by bear oh yeah so so like one of the one of the big things about this opioid epidemic is that in the in the last two uh last two years the uh life expectancy in the united states has gone down for the first time since maybe it was the 90s and that's solely because of the opioid epidemic is like and in the 90s it was because people just got so shocked when Ross cheated on Rachel. They were on a break. Thousands of heart effects. They were on a break, Sean. We were on a break!

I'm not going to do a podcast with Ross defenders, and I'm walking out now. Part of that decrease is from the perennial heart disease. Right. But, yeah, opioid crisis is obviously killing hundreds of thousands of people i think 135 a day is the estimate because that so we could have those uh smooth blues tones also by the way uh this is just a side note david swimmer uh is apparently recording some videos to help raise awareness about sexual harassment. It's just sort of like, didn't you already cover that with Ross? The biggest creep on sitcoms in the 90s.

No, I thought Gunther was the creep. Anyways, he was a side character. No, Gunther was misunderstood. That's true. All Gunther wanted was a piece of Rachel. He gave her a job. That does entitle him to sex. If we've learned anything,

it's that employing someone at a coffee shop. But anyways, so another prodigy of progeny of the Sackler fortune is Marissa Sackler. And again, this is from the New Yorker profile. She is the 36-year-old daughter of Mortimer.

She hot? I don't know. I haven't seen any pictures, but listeners. What's her name? First name? Marissa Sackler. Look at this hoe up. But important thing, she founded B-Space,

a nonprofit, quote, incubator that supports organizations like the Malala Fund. Marissa Sackler recently told W Magazine that she finds the word philanthropy old-fashioned. She prefers to consider herself a, quote, social entrepreneur. She's not bad looking, but she's got a bum-ass face. It's like a face that says,

I know I'm responsible for many deaths to date. Yeah, but the advantage is that you don't have to wear a condom when you're hitting that, because you nut up and get her pregnant, then you get some of that Oxycontin money. She does have a face that's very like, I've had several abortions that no one

will ever know about. I'm not gonna take part in this. Come on, Andy. Andy, denigrate this woman Come on Andy you hate women Exactly That's what I've learned Is that as long as they've killed

Hundreds of thousands of people You're allowed to be misogynistic Yeah also she's just like I mean that thing you said about her Where she's like I think Philanthropy is an outdated word It's like Social entrepreneur

Shut the fuck up She's disrupting the Malala fund with her fucking drug money to atone for the blood on her hands like she's got fucking I think she's gunning for another spot in the medical advertising for being a social entrepreneur god like that's all

that happens in this country is people make fortunes by like murdering thousands and then they invent useless buzzwords to justify their existence as why what they're doing is somehow different apparently she had a twitter and her tweets are still like within some of the zeitgeist but all of them have been deleted at this point yeah like marissa sackler on twitter always enjoy talking impact with you at ubuntu jakes but then you click on the link and it's just sorry that page doesn't exist so something happened between her tweeting and now that

made her lawyers be like delete all the shit you put on the internet you idiot yeah I guess like if you look at when the New Yorker article was published and when the tweets started getting deleted I think you'll find that once journalists started trying to write articles about this,

Sackler public comments increased markedly. So what's this New Yorker article? It's just a New Yorker article about the secret family behind the heroin epidemic, and it's the same with the Esquire. We can link to both of them in the comments, but they're both great reads, and they talk about the Sacklers. Sorry, I gotta

talk about this. I'm so sorry, but there's an article written in People, and it's titled, Marcia Sackler. Sorry, I gotta talk about this. I'm so sorry, but there's an article written in People, and it's titled, Marcia Sackler, colon, busy bee. And it just opens with, Marcia Sackler's family name is synonymous with philanthropy on a grand scale. Go fuck yourself.

I like, what if the busy bee just had her, like, pollinating different people with painkillers? She looks at human souls as the pollen for her busy penis oh god so one more sackler is uh elizabeth a sackler and she's arthur's daughter and again this is quoting from the new yorker article arthur's daughter elizabeth is on the board of board of the Brooklyn museum where she endowed the Elizabeth a Sackler center for feminist art. And,

uh, you know, nothing is more feminist than, making hundreds of thousands of people prostitute themselves to get more drugs. But, um, yeah,

so these, uh, I guess the history of the Sacklers, as we mentioned, there was the original family. They, uh, Arthur in particular pioneered, uh, pioneered advertising, medical advertising.

And with OxyContin, eventually they brought Purdue Pharma. And in the 90s, in 95 to be specific, deployed OxyContin, which was this time-release version of OxyContin that they marketed as if it were kind of a cure-all for chronic pain. The Guardian did a report. And was it not? Well, believe it or not, actually, just last year, the CDC offered non-binding recommendations saying that, no, opiates are actually not to be used for treating chronic pain.

What? Yeah. What could you use to treat chronic pain? Well, we can get into that a little bit. But basically, the Trump commission on opiates that Chris Christie headed up, Vice magazine reported that about half of all public comments to that were suggesting marijuana. Oh, really? As an alternative.

So the commission had to address that. And in their report, they had some boilerplate thing. I'm saying quote the commission acknowledges that there is an active movement to produce the promote the use of marijuana as an alternative medication for chronic pain and as a treatment for opioid addiction and then they go blah blah blah there's a lack of research which of course has nothing to do with a federal ban on marijuana research um you know so basically they just kind of brush it off. But it's just sort of funny because at the beginning of the report they're like,

we need to focus on other non-opiate pain treatment sources. And then later they're like, but not that one. Yeah. Right. No, no, no, no, no. Right. No. And other funny thing about the –

I'll judge if it's funny. Yeah. Well, the president's recommendations, again, which were released in November 2017, Chris Christie was at the head of this, at no point in the document, I control left it, do they mention Purdue Pharma. There is absolutely no mention. There are nine mentions of OxyContin exclusively in the context, and the only damning thing they say is that the FDA messed up in labeling it, which they did.

But essentially there's no attempt to hold the drug industry accountable anywhere in that document. Well, no, they're part of the solution. I went to the – this is true. If you go to the Purdue Pharma website, they'll have a pop-up screen or a little pop-up box. Pop-ups, the way the best information is shared. Hell, yeah. And they'll say the prescription. If there's one thing I have learned from visiting porn websites, it is that pop-ups are the way the best information is shared. Hell yeah. And they'll say the prescription. If there's one thing I've learned from visiting porn websites, it is that pop-ups are the

way the best information is shared. Yeah, this is where you see like the watch a cartoon dick choke a cartoon anime girl. Andy, I found ugly girls in my area who were looking to fuck. Really? And now I don't watch porn anymore. So this is Purdue's ugly girls in your area. It says the prescription and illicit opioid abuse crisis is a multi-faceted public health challenge and as a manufacturer of prescription opioids we have a responsibility to join the fight uh there's more to come we

continue to work with partners and experts to deliver solutions below you'll find additional information about our efforts so basically i assume not long after that New Yorker article came out, they stuck this on the... Excuse me. Just retake that entire sentence. So I assume before that New Yorker article came out, they just stuck this on their website being like, we're here to join the fight.

If any of our listeners are good at looking up when IP addresses were slightly changed, let's find out when this pop-up was added to the website. Oh, yeah. If you click on the Contact Us button, the pop-up comes up again. It's like, have you read this first? Before you send us any messages, have you read about how committed we are to fighting? But, yeah, so in the marketing, The Guardian mentioned that between 1996 and 2001, there were at least 40 different junkets paid for by Purdue Pharma

to pain management seminars where they flew out doctors and nurses on all expenses paid trips to places like Boca Raton to essentially learn about why they should be prescribing OxyContin. And internal Purdue documents have shown that doctors who went on these trips were twice as likely to prescribe OxyContin. So they were drugged. Right. And, you know, there was like a real effort to market this as non-addictive. And as mentioned in the FDA, they approved a sentence, despite no clinical trials being done, to show that OxyContin was less addictive, there was a sentence from 95 to

2001 on OxyContin approved by the FDA that said, quote, delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug. And that, of course, allowed them to market it as non-addicted. Did they test that? Well, eventually in 99, they did. And that was, of course, not true. Something like 13% of patients who were giving it for headache treatment became addicted. Hey, I have headaches. Should I be taking heroin?

Talk to your doctor. They'll possibly say yes if they went to this junk. And it's like another weird thing is like people know oxycodone mainly mainly because of percocet which is a mix of oxycodone and tylenol um so doctors assume that oxycodone was less powerful than morphine when in fact it's more powerful so oxycontin was almost entirely um oxycodone with this delayed release mechanism that doctors and of course purdue pharma for some reason did not dissuade them from this idea assumed was you, you know, less powerful. So you wouldn't, like, give someone with a headache morphine, but suddenly they were giving people with headaches OxyContin and stuff.

I need an opioid that works hard for me for 10 hours. We should make a trailer for these opioids. Hi. Do you ever have headaches or pain anywhere in your body or are just irritated by other people in your life? Do you have a doctor that will do anything to get rid of you during a checkup? If you've said yes to any of these, we recommend heroin? No. FDA examiner who oversaw that label that was put on Oxycontin two years afterwards joined Purdue Pharma to continue the fight against opiates from the inside.

Oh, man. But, yeah. Wait, wait. So you were talking off mic earlier about Purdue handed out some. Right. Yeah. earlier about um purdue handed out some uh right yeah so they created a program which i believe they discontinued in 90 99 or 2000 um but basically when they first introduced oxycontin they created uh these free coupons that they give to doctors who would give a free initial

prescription for one month's worth of oxycontin 30 days. By the time they discontinued the program, 34,000 coupons had been redeemed. So they gave out 34,000 free doses. Does it specify what the dose for a day is? Or can you crank that all the way up? I injured my shoulder, so I'm going to need the 50 milligrams. I just love that. I'm going to need the 50 milligrams. I just love that.

I'm going to need the one that comes with one of those Pulp Fiction stab in the heart needles. I love that it's not like vouchers or like trial basis passes. It's coupons. Like, oh, you know that thing you use to buy milk at a cheaper price? Well, how about some drugs for the same reason? But you have to do the coupons so that people don't feel like they're doing something illegal. Yes, yes, of course.

By giving out free samples. But, you know, it's like I always say, like I said when I was introduced to the Pharmaceutical Marketing Hall of Fame, you know, we really have a lot to learn from the Sinaloa cartel the juarez and the crips and the bloods it's sad that they will never be a part of that hall of fame and they've done so much work you know i mean it's like you know what it's another example of like the brown and black

candidates never being nominated for awards this is why i'm boycotting the oscars again this year well it's like yeah you know rich white people ripping off uh things that were already developed by uh poor black and brown people and uh doing it legally and then being celebrated for it and making millions of dollars not even celebrate for it celebrated for you after death like oh you're dead now but we still want to let you know that you meant so much to us that are living off the profits of the terrible things that you did.

But yeah, I don't know. So some listeners might wonder maybe why I'm so adamant and hard on the Sackler family and their disgustingly ugly daughters. But some listeners might wonder that, and I will confess that my younger brother is a heroin addict.

He was living with my mom and dad, and he had to move out because he was stealing things from them and pawning those things. Put a sound drop for a sad trombone. Petite and persuasive, Sackler has a low-maintenance vibe that bellies her Tony upbringing. This is People magazine. Born in London, she attended boarding school in Wiltshire

and spent holidays at her family homes in Gastad and Antibes. Those are names I don't even know how to pronounce. I'm like a surprisingly well-talented voiceover actor, and G-S-T-A-A-D and A-N-T-I-B these are places I don't even know how to pronounce. That's how fancy they are.

Just imagine, like, People Magazine doing this profile for, like, Frank Lucas. leaving the site of his latest murder he's dapper dressed from head to stone in the latest armani fashions he's headed off to a vacation in boca raton anyway so uh my brother is uh he lives in seattle Seattle. I haven't talked to him in a little while. He's been in and out of rehab, and I hope he'll get back there. But I know essentially what I know with my brother, and this is something that a lot of people have gone through tragedy. A lot of people have their parents die, or most people do eventually.

They'll have a heart attack or something, and that's tragic. But, you know, it happens. It's life. What happened to my brother and, again, 200,000 some Americans who have died of overdose and the many hundreds of thousands, millions possibly, who are addicted today. What happened to them was not an unavoidable tragedy. This was created and marketed and deliberately designed to get people addicted. And, of course, even today we are feeling the consequences of it. Wait, I thought it was time release, though. Yes, the time is now.

I don't know. When we can't trust the FDA, who can we trust? The DEA? Well, funny you should say the DEA, Yogi. Oh! Because there is another saga in this chapter. 60 Minutes and the Washington Post did a story on this. But basically, in 2016, Ensuring Patient Access, an effective drug enforcement act of 2016 was signed into law by President Barack Obama. And what this did

was it basically made it extremely difficult for the DEA to shut down abusive pill mills. And just as a quick explanation, what would happen is various medical doctors or whatever in Florida or West Virginia would start overprescribing or they would open these pain clinics where anybody could walk in and get a prescription. And of course this was all drug addiction stuff. And so what happened, according to the Washington post, the newly proposed language required the DEA to show that a company's conduct posed a quote,

substantial likelihood of immediate threat or substantial likelihood of an immediate threat of death, serious bodily harm or drug abuse before the agency could seek a suspension order. That is, shut down a distributor or a pill mill. And, of course, this was the major distributors, just to note, are McKesson, Cardinal Health and Amerisource Bergen. They control around 90% of the market. These distributors buy the drugs from Purdue and among others. They redistribute them to individual pain clinics and pharmacies and this kind of stuff. And just to make a quick note here, the original version of this was introduced by Congressman Tom Marino in the House in 2015,

and he, of course, had to withdraw as Trump's nominee for drug czar because it came out that he had written this language specifically to shield pill mills and other people helping get people addicted to prescription opiates from the consequences of the law. And look, you know, I know we have maybe a leftist audience. Whatever you think about the DEA, I think it's kind of interesting that, you know, we'll send fucking child-killing death squads to go after Pablo Escobar. But, you know, if you're a upstanding white-collar businessman, we will protect you with every element of the law.

And, you know, quick shout-out, one more thing on this. Actually, Pablo Escobar's son had a little change of, he went into the public spotlight and did a little, like, you know, I'm sad about what my father did, but I'm trying to make it better. Well, he should meet Elizabeth A. Sackler. She lights up when talking about shooting aerial footage of the Nairobi slum of Kiberia from a prop plane or visiting wealth sites in Ethiopia's far north with the group's founder, Scott Harrison, and a bunch of Silicon Valley whiz kids.

Though today she's wearing a moss-green Jay Mendel dress over a cozy elder statesman sweater, the dress Sackler says pointedly is a bit of a departure from her generally understated wardrobe. We have an event here tonight, she explains. I like how when this thing says she lights up when talking about shooting aerial footage, in my head I'm like, you know, just straight murdering, right?

She lights up when she talks about hunting the poor in the slums of Calcutta. Why's it gotta be India? You should go easy on her. One of her partners and allies at B-Space is Yogi Tees. Oh, well, sorry. Never mind. I didn't realize Sackler was a part of my tea empire.

We could talk about the family. Well, I know I don't want to cut off your antibiotics, Andy. I know you're going to talk about it. So we're going to talk about a bunch of other aspects of the drug market. I guess I could do the next thing. So basically you've heard about when drug companies manufacture essentially a narcotic and create a narcotics problem. Now let's take a look at when they manufacture what they're supposed to, which is medicine, useful medicine.

Ah. Yeah. So I looked into antibiotics and the drug company's roles in antibiotics, and what's kind of interesting about the current situation right now is that antibiotics have essentially a shelf life they'll after a few years basically of continued use of a certain antibiotic for treatment of a certain disease bacteria will develop a resistance to that disease basically evolutionarily where not all the bacteria get killed in like a patient

and the ones that survive have a mutation that allows them to resist an antibiotic. And it's an ongoing problem in the use of antibiotics, like going all the way back to Arthur Fleming, who invented penicillin. He said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, like he warned about over-the-counter antibiotics because they could create what are now known as superbugs, bugs that are resistant to antibiotics. Oh, so when the label says it kills 99.9% of germs and everyone logically worries about the 0.1%.

Yeah. That's sort of... That's precisely what, yeah, right. Because they're out for revenge. Yeah, and you just slaughtered their... Yeah, you slaughtered their family so and everyone knows the 0 0.01 percent's always the strongest yeah the rambo bugs first blood okay then that's that's how you get your your MRSA infection in the hospital and whatnot yes that's

how that's basically how you um overuse of antibiotics will create, or even just regular use. It's kind of a natural cycle of antibiotics where a type of antibiotic goes out, the bugs develop a resistance to it, and they have to manufacture a new type of antibiotics that can actually kill those bugs that they don't have a resistance to. Right. can actually kill those bugs that they don't have a resistance to. And so it's a natural process that this happens that just falls from the use of antibiotics. But overprescription of them has led to an increased rate of antibiotic resistance. Is that what we're facing now? Yeah. And so what we're facing now is not just an increased amount of antibiotic resistance, but also because all pill companies are privatized, they have less of an incentive.

Antibiotics are very costly to make. The FDA approval process is lengthy. Apparently they don't have to prove as many things as if they were distributing a narcotic. And so there's also a low rate of return on antibiotics because ultimately they're sold for cheap. They quickly become generics. And so antibiotic companies are essentially incentivized not to produce antibiotics and so they had actually a forum in davos where uh two years ago were uh drug companies would brainstorm like ideas for how to uh incentivize themselves to

create more antibiotics and one of the ideas they came up with was that the government would give them a lump sum of money when they came up with an antibiotic it's like oh so maybe we could just nationalize this process it sounds like you guys can't do it from your own uh from your own i like how they literally think hey maybe if we got more money we would do the right thing yeah yeah it's basically like blackmail it's like oh you don't want to die of MRSA i mean we could do something about that, but it'll cost you. I love their solution leaves absolutely no role for themselves in the process. Yeah, yeah.

I mean. Well, here's what's most interesting. Where it gets, you go kind of down the rabbit hole, is that 80% of antibiotics are not used on humans. They're used on livestock and the they're not even given to livestock necessarily when they get sick though they use it for that but mostly they just put it in livestock feed at least in the united states to fatten up livestock because antibiotics like have that effect where it just helps animals gain weight. And essentially one of the former FDA commissioners, David Kessler wrote an op-ed in the New York times saying like,

and this is kind of well established. It's like, it's very likely that this is a big part of antibiotic resistance because we're just feeding them to livestock with like in small doses, which enhances antibiotic resistance. And the agriculture business is saying, well, no, animal pathogens are different from human pathogens, so it's not actually causing antibiotic resistance to human diseases. But also they're lobbying to block any kind of research by the FDA into whether it increases antibiotic resistance.

Fucking crooks. Yeah, yeah. And on top of that, the people who are making these antibiotics are also drug companies. Right, right. And so, like, on one hand, you've got drug companies going and saying, like, we're doing everything we can to stop the misuse of antibiotics. And, you know, it starts with all of us. We can't take antibiotics for the common cold. And on the other hand, it's like, yeah, but we'll feed them to pigs to make them, you

know, to get 20% more meat. Yeah. Like, if you're broke and you have no money and you're sick, in theory, you could go steal livestock feed to get better. Like, think about that for a minute. Yeah, there's some non-prescription, I think, livestock antibiotics you can buy. Essentially, the drug companies are saying, hey, we're out there to stop antibiotics. And it's funny if you go to – I mentioned that if you go to the Purdue Pharma website, they have a little page that tells you that we're working to fight antibiotics.

So I tried to look into what companies are selling antibiotics for livestock. And it's surprisingly hard to find a company that lists its ability to sell antibiotics for livestock like their fda in 2008 there was a law that was passed that mandated that the fda would um keep track of what antibiotics are used on livestock and i went to one of these reports and repeatedly in the report they're like in in keeping in mind uh business confidentiality we're not going to release the names of the companies yeah yeah so they're protecting they're protecting companies and they wouldn't give company names for like the manufacture of antibiotics for livestock and then like the best i could find was eventually i found bear who uh interesting interesting subnote uh they were part of ig farman during world war ii and involved in the creation of Zyklon B

what is that? it was a pesticide that was exclusively used as a pesticide and the holocaust and there was never any gas chambers in Auschwitz and that's all a lie and they're an upstanding company that had an executive that

ran part of the Auschwitz Birkenau work camp along with the Zyklon B thing. And then he was tried for war crimes, prosecuted, served some time. And became the president of West Germany. No, no, no. That would be ridiculous. He was then rehired as the executive of Bayer after the war. Oh, okay.

So wait, they are the only one that was in a deep, deep report outed as putting antibiotics into their livestock feed? No, they're the only one I could find. And also, they had a Nazi background, so I had to bring that up. Right, of course. I like the idea they have an internal meeting.

It's like, you know, we need to move away from our barbaric past and just kill people much more slowly. Yes. Hey, technically, it's not illegal to kill animals, so why don't we just kill them to kill humans no they're keeping the animals alive uh to kill us yes what if it was like like long-term genocide when they're like you know we tried it directly and that didn't work so what if we just eliminate the human capacity to resist all diseases and we could just commit large-scale genocide of the entire population omnicide omnicide it was i so i

went to their website on livestock antibiotics and immediately there are all these pictures of people playing with their dogs where they're like these are to keep your pets healthy and then just like on the purdue pharma page with a disclaimer about the opioid crisis and how they're doing everything they can to stop it the bayer page is like we take antibiotic resistance very seriously and are working to research deeper into this problem so it's in our livestock feed where else are these antibiotics is in our food uh no they're not putting them directly in our food uh though part of i mean unless you eat meat if you eat meat yeah you're gonna get antibiotics and then another thing is that uh livestock shit uh has antibiotics and that's often used as a fertilizer.

So it's going to, even if you're not eating meat or even if you're vegan, it still might make its way into your daily diet. Yeah, take that you insufferable motherfuckers. You spray crops with antibiotics and it winds up in your diet? Do they? I'm asking. I don't know about, I don't

think. Have you seen anything about like vegetarian diets getting affected? I haven't seen anything about that beyond livestock. I'm more concerned about the vegetarian diets. The meat eater's diet is not really a concern. I would just love to read that kale shakes are like a vector of MRSA or something. A vector of MRSA is what this episode should be called. That's crazy. Yeah. So that's when drug companies are manufacturing

what they were created to manufacture and not just, you know, party. Not party drugs, but, you know, good time drugs. What else does Bayer make? They make all kinds. Well, they used to be involved in pesticides, as Sean mentioned. But they're mostly

pharmaceutical, and I think they also make pesticides. They actually still do pesticides, I think. Andy is, of course, referring to the Jews as pests right now. Andy went through a breakup with a Jewish girl, and his views have changed since that time.

Very, very much. You think about dating a Vietnamese girl next, but we're telling them not to. You know that famous pesticide, Agent Orange. The link has not been proven to birth defects. Napalm's a pesticide in many ways.

It really is. It does kill pests, and that is the only requirement to be a pesticide. Once you just have a broad enough definition of pest... Just like a 2x4 with nails on it is a pesticide.

I mean, why wouldn't you consider that a pesticide? Anything that murders is a pesticide. I mean, why wouldn't you consider that a pesticide? Anything that murders is a pesticide. Even enough water is a pesticide, technically. But yeah, no, that's good to know that superbugs will be taking over our hospitals soon. Oh, there's been like a 100% drop in the last year in the number of new antibiotics being produced. 100% drop in the last year in the number of new antibiotics being produced.

100% drop? Basically, it's been halved. That's 50. That's, I guess, 50% drop. Andy has a physics degree. Well, 100% gain is doubling. Shut up. Shut the fuck up, Sean.

Yeah, it dropped from 33 between 1985 and 1999 to 13 between 2000 and 2014. I like how Andy has a physics degree and I didn't graduate college, and yet I caught this. You guys can all shut the fuck up right now. Antibiotic drug production has ceased in the United States. I was like, 100%.

I feel like this should be a bigger news story. No way Cuff F.E. squeezed by on top of 100% of antibiotics not being manufactured in this country. This is not the Roast Andy podcast. Yes, it is. Jeffries, I gather that you researched the

production of these prescription dogs and how much it costs. Yeah, so I did some research on the overall process of the big pharmaceutical companies go through to get a drug approved in the U.S. So they go through the FDA, and Sean and Andy touched on part of that process already but they have gone through like a lot of sort of technological changes in order to basically make it more profitable and to um a lot of the rhetoric is like about the fda's obviously it's going to be that their regulation like stifles innovation and um makes the overall process more expensive and it's debatable whether or not that's true but then again these are national medications that you want to work really well.

So it's probably going to be pretty expensive regardless. Yeah, you don't necessarily want a drug where it's like, well, you know, it cures your pneumonia and you'll lose a leg. Although that is coming out next year. That's a leg loss pneumonia cure. Yeah. But anyway, just to give a breakdown it's basically four steps and it starts with drug discovery which is typically the most expensive part and that these days it's heavily automated it used to be a very manual process with um

like a team of like 10 or 20 scientists in a lab manually going and testing like they just squirting things yeah it's a couple assholes just kind of combining chemicals and that's how it went no uh they they have like the overall process they just throw their clothes and petri dishes and see what what they got it started it started as like a primitive mad science operation no but they it was it used to be a manual process but now it's like a really automated thing where they have like a huge database of hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds that they already have identified have some sort of um healing properties healing properties and they test those against what they believe to be targeted uses against proteins and enzymes.

And that used to be very manual, but now it's heavily automated, like I said. Or like computer modeling of how different molecules would interact with various... Even better, it's huge robots that actually can test a tray's worth of hundreds of thousands of compounds every day. Really? Yeah. It used to be like the team of scientists would get through a couple thousand. But now it's like easily 100,000 a day. And they actually do use, sometimes they don't even use actual compounds and it's just a computer model.

Of like the molecule. Of how they believe the chemicals react. Damn. And then from there they can extrapolate what would actually be useful, what would be commercially viable. I'm going to say molecule one more time. Molecule. So wait, the entire process is automated from a mixing standpoint? There's still, actually, there's kind of a jobs crisis now because of this.

Like biology. Run that pharma back. Like biology and chemistry majors, they can still find jobs at roughly the same rate as the average BA holder or something. But the jobs that they find are much more sort of menial and they can't really use what their degree program was intended to do. Only those select lucky ones who get to go into Bayer's secret lab

and test the new pesticides. If you're committed to creating superbugs, then I guess you don't have a problem. But if you want to work on making, let's say, an antidepressant or something, you're probably going to be one of the guys who builds and maintains the machines that that combine all these chemicals you're not going to be actually in there like pipetting shit so that that's the most expensive part and then it moves on to pre-clinical trials

where they might do like an animal test or something or they might have like the this is all controlled by the fda what are they testing on rats and shit yeah if you go typically rats um like monkeys and stuff like that yeah they get they start with like probably easiest to attain which is probably rats and then work their way up to more like humans right but there are some independent studies that were done on twins and also bear I don't know what like China has in store, but mainly it's if it gets to testing on organism, it's like rats and stuff. And,

but normally they just move through that stage pretty quickly to just the regular clinical trials with human beings. And that's the most link, the lengthiest process. And from there, you know, the FDA has approval at every single step. And they have since 1962. That's when sort of the modern process started. So the whole process, I looked up a meta-analysis on a couple different studies of the costs and the overall time.

And it typically takes around like 12 to 15 years and about two billion dollars like i've seen some estimates are higher 2.4 billion or something and i don't know i was thinking it would be much more expensive than it was well it's interesting that that two billion number i mean that's for a private company to develop and take a drug to market right yeah and like despite these companies being publicly traded so you think you would get an idea of these costs um it's it's very guarded yeah um but i guess that makes a lot of sense actually like they say have contracts with some contracts with the government and university systems that will allow them to use

research and their technology to help develop the drugs and so you can find out a lot about their costs in those areas because they're required to report them yeah that's the thing i was going to ask is like you know two you know that that number you gave that two billion seems reasonable but then it's like since it's so under wraps it feels like it's so over inflated like it feels like they might be like a 1.2 1.3 billion type of thing and they're like attack on 700 million because we all want bonuses this year because why wouldn't they you can't look it up yeah and so like the the overall process of you15 million, $2 billion divided by $15 million, that's a lot less than they make it sound like when they're railing against the FDA. It's a couple hundred million a year.

That's just one drug, though. How many are they working on at any point? Yeah. But when you consider that some of these drugs, once they are approved and you've already secured a patent early on in the drug discovery phase, if it was deemed viable, they could generate $30 billion in revenue. Yeah, you said that OxyContin generated around $35 billion? $35 billion, yeah, for Purdue Pharma. And that's the thing, too, with the price incentives. It's like drugs like Oxycontin or apparently cancer treatment drugs

have a big return on investment like cancer treatment drugs uh there's a lot of drugs you gotta um the treatment yeah requires a lot of stuff and so they can make a ton of money off of that um but then antibiotics there's not a lot of return on investment so they just kind of cut it out of their some some companies just dropped antibiotic research because like it's not worth paying for it's sad that these numbers make me just remind me of like indie movie numbers like we spent two million on uh juno and we got 30 million out of it like it's like it just feels like that same type of like yeah you know we got this little small drug we're working on but but we think it could be pretty big. Yeah, I mean... Got a couple of awards coming our way.

So actually only fewer than some 2% of drugs that are identified in the drug discovery process actually go on to get approved. So it's a very arduous process for safety reasons. But, you know, GlaxoSmithKline and all those guys are hoping that they come across like the to your analogy like the equivalent of like the blair witch version of a drug and and that was oxycontin where and that was yeah apparently in all of these arduous like animal to human tests they never got around to uh addiction potential well actually like

again purdue pharma's internal documents actually showed some of this stuff but of course they ignored it um but like in the yeah how is that legal i'm sorry to cut you off but like how is it that i mean it's it's not but they because of this 2007 settlement uh they shielded themselves from further prosecution oh really hell yeah um lawyers if you don't have one you'll probably get sued hell yeah and actually like the you're talking about off-label uses for oxycontin and whatnot yeah and like plenty of other that yeah that's an industry-wide phenomenon and so like a patent can be secured early on in the drug discovery phase for specific uses. But then later after it's already cleared all those hurdles and it might have already made a few billion.

Like they can, the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies can subtly influence doctors to prescribe it for off-label uses. Like, to pick one drug that I have no personal connection to and I just chose randomly, Bupropion. It's an antidepressant. I know nothing about that one. That is not part of my morning routine. It's used to treat depression, but it's also

used to treat loss of appetite. Well, Andy definitely doesn't know about that then. Shut the fuck up, Sean. GlaxoSmithKline actually faced a $3 billion fine for a criminal fraud case for marketing those drugs for off-label uses that led to like negative health impacts let's claim to help with adhd which most people i know who've tried it for that like never found any response from it uh it also is supposed to help with smoking cessation um which i've kind of uh used it for but it's apparently doesn't keep you off of them. This is all just from things I've read.

Yes. No personal experience. No personal experience. No, yeah. I mean, we just chose random topics to cover. When Andy was smoking that cigarette on the way over here, I could tell the drug was working. I was like, this is not hitting my nicotine receptors.

I don't like doing this because of the drugs I'm taking. It is just like kind of a thing, though. It's like we were saying, these private companies say, you know, the FDA adds all this burdenous government regulation and waste and all this shit. But it's like nobody ever really gets around to it. It's like, aren't, you know, the people trying to profit off this? Isn't there a lot of waste there? You know, and the entire idea of having these parasites and these drugs who are supposed to be for the public interest? But of course, their

incentives are all fucked up, so they're not developing antibiotics. Or in the case of Purdue and OxyContin, they're deliberately trying to get people addicted instead of trying to manage pain. So it's like there is so much waste and evil and crap that goes on in a private drug system. And, of course, the prices, which are out of control in the United States. But what about the drug marketing innovations? That's true. There's so many awards for those these days. That's really what we've got to focus on.

You know, you talk about the prices. So my parents have some, they take some prescription medicines, and they started buying them from India because it's so much cheaper. At first, my dad was like, I feel like my doctor's going to be like, what the fuck are you doing? But he told his doctor, hey, I'm taking these from India. And then she was like, oh, that's great. These medicines are perfect. Feel free to keep doing that and um there's uh there's this like um crisis law which says that if your

country is in crisis you can manufacture any medicine without having to deal with the copyright law of all medicines right and so india has declared that we're always in crisis and because of that they've just been manufacturing whatever medicine they want and so since there's low regulation for that they don't give a fuck and uh when american lawyers tried to stop that they said you can stop it but you'll kill millions of people in africa so if you want to be responsible for that then uh you'd be fucked and then the response of that american lawyer said yes, but the shareholders. Have you seen the Dow Industrial Average?

It could go up 0.03% if we murdered all these people. There's that famous picture of a starving shareholder with a vulture standing over him. And that vulture is labeled government regulation. I mean, that's the thing that's interesting. There's this article that was posted about it, and it said that drugs that cost $750 a pill in the U.S. call $13.50 in India. And so that's one for...

This is the Martin Shkreli HIV AIDS pill that they're talking about. Oh, did our friend... What's his name? Shkreli? Shkreli, yeah. Was that the one that he jacked up? Nice. Yes, that is. I said those words moments before you asked that question.

Wow, Andy, this podcast could be improved if you listened to what Yogi was saying before speaking into your microphone. It doesn't last all day, Sean. Well, Purdue Pharma is working on a solution called a time release. I can't afford the time release, Sean. I'm on generics. I mean, it's just crazy that like how, you know, we talk about conditions in third world countries being so terrible. And yet in these strange small ways, it's a thousand percent better. Oh, yeah.

Literally, financially, a thousand percent better. Yeah. And it's crazy so i i i've my dad told me about this and so i've known about this for a while and then i was talking to a guy who um uh he was driving uh the car i was in i think it was a lift anyway he was telling me about like yes that's true but also what has happened is that uh illegal drug smugglers in India to Pakistan will take illicit fake drugs. So basically, within the corruption, people are now trying to profit on top of the corruption by chopping up this already cheap medicine to sell for even cheaper to fuck over the poorest of the poor.

So basically what I'm trying to say is there's no winning in the pharmaceutical industry everyone's a snake and everyone's a crook grub stickers out no it's a good summary but like it is so frustrating because like you know throughout this entire conversation at one point i want to be like hey are there any companies that are just trying to do good and the sad truth is not really no but it's i mean i was just gonna say it's like it's not so much that people are evil but they are but it's also the entire incentives of money making on medicine or pharmacy uh pharmaceutical products in this case it's all fucked up because as we have mentioned you know uh antibiotics or these ecological pharmacological

it's all fucked up so antibiotics are not profit making so they're not prioritized by private companies uh getting people addicted is extremely profit making so that becomes the incentive or you know as in the case of uh screlly and many other companies he's just the public face but uh they get these essential life-saving drugs, and then once they control the patents, they jack up the price, you know, X thousand percent. So, again, the entire incentive of making money off of this is crooked, and instead we should be looking at alternatives. There's the idea to have the government essentially give rewards to people who invent these drugs. The pharmacy companies accidentally came up with this idea that should actually just exclude them entirely. So there's lots of ways of delivering generic life-saving drugs that don't involve these very complex, wasteful, and parasitic pharmaceutical companies. Insert Gordon Gekko, greed is good drop.

Yeah, that's all true, but boy, that shit's probably not happening in our lifetime. Not with that attitude. President Bernie's going to fix it, man. You know, Jeffries and I were talking about it a little earlier that if we took, in theory, the military budget and put it into that pharmaceutical manufacturing you could manufacture like i don't know a couple hundred new medicines for the amount of money that we spent on killing oh man imagine like the oxy that we could make yeah we could go up to 500 milligrams yeah yeah drop that light We could really coast.

I mean, we talk about how many people the US is killing, but we're worried about superbugs because of antibiotics, but it's like, oh, we could murder the fuck out of those bugs if we really put our minds to it. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the average number of 2 billion might seem like a lot, but not, like you said, in the scope of what we spend on the military or what individual medical research schools have in their endowments. I mean, it's really not that much.

Does medical research project strength across the world and ensure a strong grip on telling anyone to do whatever we want. I mean, Canada holds some sway over us in terms of people go there to get affordable medication. They have that over us, I guess. Oh, yeah. voted against importing drugs from Canada for cheaper prices as opposed to American drugs that are more expensive because he said they're untested, even though the drugs are typically made in the same factories. Right, right.

It's like when the drum cymbals are all made by one Turkish company. And so whenever I used to hear people be like, yeah, I only use Zildjian I used to hear people be like, yeah, I only use Zildjian or Sabians. I'm like, they're literally the same. It's literally the same room that they're making these goddamn drum cymbals. Why are they so expensive?

Cause there's literally one factory that makes all of them. It's kind of like diamonds. You know how diamonds, Oh, blood cymbals. Yes, precisely. But instead of blood,

it's a banging brass against a hot steel. Well, I guess if we had one message for the pharmaceutical companies, it would be please keep doing whatever you're doing to Andy Palmer's mind. We've really enjoyed it so far, and we look forward to new advances in Andy Palmer's personality. If you cut off my effects, sir, I will kill everyone around me. I'm kidding. I will only kill myself.

Yeah, I wonder how many, like if all pharmaceuticals got cut in one day, how many people would just start going slowly insane? Oh, I would. Andy is certainly, I guess, you know, one in every four people in this country is a pretty good estimate. Yeah, if you've had SSRI withdrawals. Oh, boy, that's a headache. Yeah.

Oh, it's more than a headache. It's a headache that tells you you'll never amount to anything. Anytime someone says SSRI, I always think they're talking about RSS feeds. And I'm like, what's the internet got to do with what you're talking about? I don't see why Wi-Fi codes are affecting your personality. You see the Verit code on that. We've got an IP address for this SSR. Anyways, I think the conclusions here are nationalize the pharmaceutical industry, vote Bernie Sanders 2020, and hang the executives.

And also, check out the Sackler Crossing in Kew Gardens or the Sackler Wing at the Met or MoMA or the Louvre or the endowment at Harvard or Tufts that the Sackler sponsors. And if you got any good OxyConnects, hit me up. If you got any of those coupons, feel free. We will accept coupons for free Oycontin doses in lieu of patreon subscription i did the math but i got cut off but that 34 000 coupons times 30 just depending on the month it was a million and 20 000 days worth of oxy like like prescription and i was just like man of course there's a fucking heroin crisis right now. They gave people a million days worth of free oxy.

A million days of bliss. They gave out a million days worth of happiness. That sounds like philanthropy. With no regard for their own profit. No regard for their bottom line. They knew going in that it's not that addictive. They gave it out with full knowledge that this is a less addictive version. We're doing this as a charity.

It's not to get people hooked. That's what that movie 500 Days of Summer was about. Yes, yes, yes. He spent the entire time on Free Ox. That scene in America Gangster where he's giving out samples of the blue heroin. That's really about the heroin epidemic. That's really mirroring. He was a businessman.

He was a businessman. Jay-Z made that album. Frank Lucas. That's really about the heroin epidemic. That's really mirroring. He was a businessman. He was a businessman. Jay-Z made that album. Frank Lucas. That's right. All right. Thank you for listening. The most important thing in business is honesty, integrity, hard work, family, never forgetting where we came from.

Thank you, Sean. See, you are what you are in this world. That's either one of two things. Either you're somebody... or you're nobody. Be right back. I need these fresh. If I come back here and get you, you know what it is. Yes, sir. You won't have to come back.

It won't be no problem. What about you, Frank? You need anything? Where's my money? The red top gave you the package. He spoke to handing me come back. There won't be no problem. What about you, Frank? You need anything? Where's my money? Red Top gave you the package. He spoke behind me, my money. Here's a jar right here, 20%. Oh, you got the jar?

That's right. Get the fuck out of here, Frank. Oh, what you gonna do? What the fuck you gonna do, Frank? Huh? What you doing? You gonna shoot me in front of everybody? Huh? Come on.

Oh, shit! Oh, shit. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on.

There you go. 20%.