Drugmaker Raises The Price Of Vitamins By 800%, Makes Shkreli Blush

Avondale, a secretive Alabama-based drugmaker, has gained unwanted national attention after the company increased the price of a bottle of vitamins to almost $300 that can be bought on the internet for $5.

In the latest example of price-gouging in America’s lightly regulated pharmaceutical industry, records show Avondale inflated the price of Niacor, a prescription-only version of niacin, by “809 percent last month, taking a bottle of 100 tablets from $32.46 to $295”, according to the Financial Times.

Niacor is the prescription form of niacin, a type of vitamin B3 that is used to treat high cholesterol and the increased risk of a heart attack. With one easy search on Google, a generic version of Niacor can be bought for $5.75 on Jet.com - meanwhile, if the consumer wants the prescription brand, well, they might have to sell their Apple Watch.

Avondale’s development of price-gouging is certainly bad timing on management’s behalf when considering Martin Shkreli, who in the past year has become the most hated man in America after he bought the rights to a drug, then raised prices by 5,500 percent. In the world of Big Pharma, buy-and-raise schemes are not limited to just Shkreli, but it’s rampant across the industry, such as Valeant Pharmaceuticals who has been accused of raising drug prices by more than 5,000 percent.

The Financial Times said Avondale acquired the rights to Niacor from Upsher Smith, a division of Japan’s Sawai Pharmaceutical, earlier this year. The buy-and-raise scheme was immediately applied to Niacor, as management faced little or no competition among other drugmakers, along with limited government regulation.

Niacor isn’t the first time the company inflated drug prices, management “increased the price of SSKI by 2,469 percent, taking a 30ml bottle from $11.48 to $295,” according to the Financial Times.

According to the data provider Iqvia, there were almost 19,000 prescriptions written for Niacor in 2016. Niacor has been described as a drug with a fast absorption rate, making it popular with the medical community. Most people are oblivious to the sharp increase of Niacor, because of the secrecy surrounding drug prices are not usually disclosed to the public.

Michael Rea, chief executive of Rx Savings said, “this is the latest example of an inefficient US market where the consumer, payer and doctor don’t have all of the information available to make a financially sound choice, which makes software to help cut what people spend on medicine.”

He warned: “They are caught in a web of inefficiency and are being taken advantage of.”

FT could not get in contact with anyone associated with Avondale, which was started in 2016 by Mark Pugh, an executive behind several pharmaceutical companies. A spokesman from Upsher confirmed the sale of products to Avondale, but could not provide further information on the price increase.

Mr Pugh has held several executive roles in the drugmaking industry, sometimes at companies that have implemented very sharp price increases. A 2014 biography says he has “more than 20 years of industry experience” and a “documented record of success in identifying and capturing new business opportunities to build high-profit, high-growth corporations”.

 

Acrogen did not return a request for comment made through its website. Emails to the company were returned undelivered. Mr Pugh did not respond to a request for comment through LinkedIn.

 

A spokesperson for Upsher confirmed it had sold the two products to Avondale, but declined to make the terms of the deal public and did not explain why it did not announce the transaction at the time.

 

It declined to say whether it continues to manufacture the product on behalf of Avondale, or whether it was aware the new owner planned to raise the price sharply.  

Avondale only has a small window of opportunity to exploit inflated drug prices, as President Trump back in October said, “Prescription drug prices are out of control” (see: Healthcare Stocks Slide After Trump Says “Drug Prices Out Of Control.)

OxyContin Nation: Meet The Billionaire Family Who Helped Spark America"s Opiod Crisis

Via StockBoardAsset.com,

Unbeknownst to many, the Sackler Family, with assets of $13 billion, the nation’s 19th wealthiest family is one the top players in philanthropy. You can find the Sackler Gallery in the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C. or visit the Sackler wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The Sackler’s even have a museum at Harvard, Guggenheim, and dozen of universities around the country. If it’s art— the Sackler family has it.

Participating in the art game takes money and a lot of it. So, where does the Sackler money come from?

According to Forbes, the “Sacklers continue to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the businesses in 2016– some $700 million last year, by Forbes’ calculations - from an estimated $3 billion in Purdue Pharma revenues plus at least $1.5 billion in sales from their foreign companies”.

Forbes outlines a brief history lesson of how the Sackler family got started in the world of medicine-

The family fortune began in 1952 when three doctors — Arthur (d. 1987), Mortimer (d. 2010) and Raymond Sackler — purchased Purdue, then a small and struggling New York drug manufacturer. The company spent decades selling products like earwax remover and laxatives before moving into pain medications by the late 1980s. To create OxyContin, Purdue married oxycodone, a generic painkiller, with a time-release mechanism to combat abuse by spreading the drug’s effects over a half-day.

 

The FDA approved the medication in 1995 and it soon took off. By 2003 OxyContin sales hit $1.6 billion as the drug helped drive a huge nationwide spike in opioid prescribing. At its peak in 2012, doctors wrote more than 282 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers, including OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet  — nearly enough for every American to have a bottle.

 

Now opioid prescriptions are declining amid increased scrutiny over drug addiction, down 12% since 2012 according to data from healthcare information firm IMS Health. OxyContin (which is also beginning to face competition from authorized generics while fighting to protect its patents over tamper-proof, extended-release oxycodone) saw prescriptions fall 17%.  

It wasn’t until the 1980’s, as explained by Forbes, the Sackler family through their family-owned drug company called Purdue Pharma created OxyContin. Then in 1995, the FDA approved the medication and sales exploded. Sales hit $1.6 billion in 2003, as a nationwide spike in opioids was seen. By the peak in 2012, doctors wrote more than 282 million prescription for opioid painkillers, such as OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet. Good times for the Sacklers from 1996- 2012, as the family drug business exploded.

According to The New Yorker, Oxycontin ” has reportedly generated some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue for Purdue” since 1995. OxyContin’s sole active ingredient is oxycodone, a chemical cousin of heroin, which makes it highly addictive.

The New Yorker further says Purdue used marketing techniques to deceive the American public of the drug’s true addictive characteristics.

Purdue launched OxyContin with a marketing campaign that attempted to counter this attitude and change the prescribing habits of doctors. The company funded research and paid doctors to make the case that concerns about opioid addiction were overblown, and that OxyContin could safely treat an ever-wider range of maladies. Sales representatives marketed OxyContin as a product “to start with and to stay with.” Millions of patients found the drug to be a vital salve for excruciating pain. But many others grew so hooked on it that, between doses, they experienced debilitating withdrawal.

Oddly enough, around the time OxyContin was approved, prescription opioid deaths across the United States surged. Fast forward to more relevant times, where heroin and fentanyl deaths are exploding.

Diving into the opioid crisis onto the streets of Baltimore. It’s very common to see local citizens shooting up heroin on city streets. In this video, I asked a man how did this addiction start? Guess what he said?... It all started with legal painkillers, such as OxyContin. 

As a few parasitical elites make billions flooding America’s streets with opioids. We the every day American citizen have to deal with the consequences, as President Trump outlined in yesterday’s opioid crisis speech:

• In 2016, more than two million Americans had an addiction to prescription or illicit opioids.


• Since 2000, over 300,000 Americans have died from overdoses involving opioids.


• Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of injury death in the United States, outnumbering both traffic crashes and gun-related deaths.


• In 2015, there were 52,404 drug overdose deaths — 33,091 of those deaths, almost two-thirds, involved the use of opioids.


• The situation has only gotten worse, with drug overdose deaths in 2016 expected to exceed 64,000.


• This represents a rate of 175 deaths a day.

Bottomline: It’s time for the American people to learn the truth about the opioid crisis and the very few elites who have profited. The question You should ask: why did our government allow this to happen?

"It's Raining Needles" Locals Frustrated As Opioid Addicts Litter Ground With Syringes

Drug-overdose deaths rose 19% in 2016 to 52,000, making drugs the leading killer of American adults under 50. And all evidence suggests these totals have continued to climb in 2017, propelled by the worsening opioid epidemic or the fact that more dangerous opioid analogues like fentanyl and carfentanil are findng their way into the drug supply.

Indeed, the US has a higher rate of drug related deaths than any other developed country in the world. As we’ve reported previously, the epidemic is straining public resources like hospitals, local police departments, and child services which in many states have seen a surge in cases where the parents are addicted to opioids. To that list, we can now add local public health department in areas hit hard by the epidemic, which are struggling to clean up a flood of used and possibly infected needles discarded by addicts. 

“They hide in weeds along hiking trails and in playground grass. They wash into rivers and float downstream to land on beaches. They pepper baseball dugouts, sidewalks and streets. Syringes left by drug users amid the heroin crisis are turning up everywhere.

In Portland, Maine, officials have collected more than 700 needles so far this year, putting them on track to handily exceed the nearly 900 gathered in all of 2016. In March alone, San Francisco collected more than 13,000 syringes, compared with only about 2,900 the same month in 2016.”

People, often children, risk getting stuck by discarded needles, raising the prospect they could contract blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis or HIV or be exposed to remnants of heroin or other drugs. It"s unclear whether anyone has gotten sick, but the reports of children finding the needles can be sickening in their own right. One 6-year-old girl in California mistook a discarded syringe for a thermometer and put it in her mouth; she was unharmed, according to NBC Boston.

“‘I just want more awareness that this is happening,’ said Nancy Holmes, whose 11-year-old daughter stepped on a needle in Santa Cruz, California, while swimming. ‘You would hear stories about finding needles at the beach or being poked at the beach. But you think that it wouldn"t happen to you. Sure enough.’

They are a growing problem in New Hampshire and Massachusetts — two states that have seen many overdose deaths in recent years.

‘We would certainly characterize this as a health hazard,’ said Tim Soucy, health director in Manchester, New Hampshire"s largest city, which collected 570 needles in 2016, the first year it began tracking the problem. It has found 247 needles so far this year.”

Needles turn up in places like parks, baseball diamonds, trails and beaches, places where drug users can gather and attract little attention. They toss the needles out of carelessness, or the fear of being prosecuted for possessing them.  One child was poked by a needle left on the grounds of a Utah elementary school. Another youngster stepped on one while playing on a beach in New Hampshire. Even if these children did"t get sick, they still had to endure a battery of tests to make sure they didn"t catch anything. The girl who put a syringe in her mouth was not poked but had to be tested for hepatitis B and C, her mother said.

Some community advocates have started helping out, organizing patrols to dispose of illegally discarded needles. 

"Rocky Morrison leads a cleanup effort along the Merrimack River, which winds through the old milling city of Lowell, and has recovered hundreds of needles in abandoned homeless camps that dot the banks, as well as in piles of debris that collect in floating booms he recently started setting.

He has a collection of several hundred needles in a fishbowl, a prop he uses to illustrate that the problem is real and that towns must do more to combat it.

"We started seeing it last year here and there. But now, it"s just raining needles everywhere we go," said Morrison, a burly, tattooed construction worker whose Clean River Project has six boats working parts of the 117-mile (188-kilometer) river."

Still, children continue to find, and sometimes accidentally stick themselves with, the discarded needles – it’s another way in which the worsening public-health crisis that is the opioid epidemic disproportionately impacts the young. Some parents in Santa Cruz, Calif. even talk about the first time children find a needle as a rite of passage.

Among the oldest tracking programs is in Santa Cruz, California, where the community group Take Back Santa Cruz has reported finding more than 14,500 needles in the county over the past 4 1/2 years. It says it has gotten reports of 12 people getting stuck, half of them children.

"It"s become pretty commonplace to find them. We call it a rite of passage for a child to find their first needle," said Gabrielle Korte, a member of the group"s needle team. "It"s very depressing. It"s infuriating. It"s just gross."

Along the Merrimack, nearly three dozen riverfront towns are debating how to stem the flow of needles. Two regional planning commissions are drafting a request for proposals for a cleanup plan. They hope to have it ready by the end of July.

"We are all trying to get a grip on the problem," said Haverhill Mayor James Fiorentini. "The stuff comes from somewhere. If we can work together to stop it at the source, I am all for it."

While the crisis’s epicenter is in Ohio and the Rust - opioid-related deaths in Ohio jumped from 296 in 2003 to 2,590 in 2015 - Northeastern states like Massachusetts, New Jersey and even Vermont and New Hampshire have been especially hard hit.

In Ohio, resources have been spread so thin that one city council member has proposed a controversial solution: When people who dial 911 seeking help for someone who"s overdosing on opioids, they may start hearing something new from dispatchers: “No.” Dan Picard, a city councilman in Middletown, Ohio, population 50,000, floated the idea.

Picard and others have described his proposal as a cry of frustration.

“It’s not a proposal to solve the drug problem,” Picard said this week. “My proposal is in regard to the financial survivability of our city. If we’re spending $2 million this year and $4 million next year and $6 million after that, we’re in trouble. We’re going to have to start laying off. We"re going to have to raise taxes,” he told the Washington Post.

But as death tolls rise, and local morgues run out of room for more bodies, Picard"s proposal begs the question: What, exactly is our plan for dealing with this crisis?