Big Pharma and the Opioid Epidemic | Gerald Posner

thank you very much the thank you for the introduction and thank you Trisha my wife who works with me and is also an author right here we know about Hillsdale we've read about it we have followed we've been online and over the years we've seen what this college does we understand that it's one of the last places in America where you can get a classical education what we didn't appreciate is how vibrant this community was in this college is until we actually got here so it is amazing I grew up on debate I was on debate in high school and in college it's what I always engage in it's what I thought you you had a bad idea from somebody you got rid of the idea by engaging it in the Public Square and showing why it was wrong and we have trouble doing that nowadays in the in this country and so it's fantastic to be here I think everybody at Hillsdale has made it possible and I thank you for being here me [Applause] so yes this is some of the Pharma is not here but don't worry we're talking about Pharma these are books Trisha and I have done over a period of time I'm particularly proud of why America slept because it was the story that showed how the CIA and the FBI missed all of the warnings for 9 11. and why 911 didn't have to happen and you knew that you hit a nerve when it was published and they started to come after you as they do and said no that's all wrong the Saudi book secrets of the Kingdom were proud of because we both got banned from entering the Kingdom so that was good that was a good reason not to go there um and uh God's Bankers I was I'm raised Catholic I went to Sisters of Charity for grammar school and uh and Jesuits for high school and this is the story 200 year history of the Vatican and the pope cannot tell us in enough ways no when we try to get access to the secret archives so we are still failing to do that but we we have a lot of fun we like to pick topics that we think there's something new on so when I went to my publisher and said what about a history of the American pharmaceutical industry they said you're crazy and then I said no I think I can do it and five years later we turned in a manuscript and it was and it was interesting to do what I'm going to talk about tonight is in part the opioid crisis but to get to the opioid crisis you need a little bit of background in history about what I call the DNA of Pharma what makes the American pharmaceutical industry different than just about anybody anything else that you have um one of the things by the way on Pharma when it was finally reviewed on different journals you'll notice a word came up that my publisher hated because they say nobody buys an encyclopedia people buy a page Turner but reviews would say an encyclopedic book and they would just say oh no why did we publish this book but actually for a writer that's always a good thing to see the uh now one of the things about the American drug industry it doesn't start we think of it today as this industry that's so large that uh it's always been like this but it actually starts in the middle of the 19th century around the time of the Civil War and why because there's a tremendous demand for morphing morphine's one of the few things that people know works and it ends up working to um to stop pain and there's a need for it so some people decide to get into the business so there are these two German cousins uh there they are Charles Earhart and Charles Pfizer they have 2 500 in savings and thousand dollar loan and a year into the Civil War they establish a plant in New York and they are manufacturing just high quality morphine and that's enough business to start Pfizer and its growth to what it is today Edward Robinson Squibb he was a naval wartime surgeon he threw adulterated morphine over board when it arrived that was bad when he was actually in the Civil War and later knew the demand for Quality morphine and ended up creating that company together with his two sons some of you might be familiar with two pharmacist Brothers in Philadelphia John and Frank Wyeth same thing Civil War morphine is their first initial product that they're putting out about 70 percent of their sales end up coming from that drug alone the um a chemist and a union army colonel Eli Lilly he missed he knew the importance of morphine and good quality drugs because he served in the Civil War he tried to open his company Eli Lilly um a year left on the Civil War but he didn't make it he opened up just at the end still it was a painkiller that was his seller for the first 10 years that Lily was up and running Bristol Meyer same thing John Myers and William Bristol two investors of put up five thousand dollars each to buy a drug firm they renamed as their own they did also have a good seller they had a mineral salt that was supposedly a pain reliever but morphine was still their number one seller and if you think it's not just all the names Harvey Park was a minor turned investor George Davis was a 27 year old salesman their big hit morphine carried them for about three decades in 1900 they patented a drug called adrenaline and it's an actual part of our body and other companies that oh by the way you can't you can't uh patent that and they won a court case so every other company that has an adrenaline product has to call it epinephrine so Oni Park Davis could call it actually at that time adrenaline and the last ones are Silas Burroughs a pharmacist and Henry welcome he was a promoter who claimed to have invented invisible ink it was just actually a formula of lemon juice that disappeared slowly it wasn't very good but they did much better with their firm you look at these names it's quite interesting because these aren't just names that we have forgotten about these are the names that existed and have grown over the time to be in the top 10 of the pharmaceutical industry they started in a business at a time with an addictive product granted but one of the few that worked and why do I say one of the few that worked this time doctors knew very there wasn't even an AMA doctors knew very little about what caused disease illnesses infections so it was a time that I call the Cocaine Cowboys day of the American pharmaceutical industry there goes I think the cover on the mic but it's still working um anything went you could have a uh they were called Pat and drugs so morphine was available opium was allowed mixtures with alcohol uh the a couple of these products these were the big sellers uh for a 30 and 40 year period louder than was marketed by a whole series of companies that was a tincture of opium coating and morphine well you think that oh by the way it's not enough to have opium uh we'll give them a little coating as well I still don't look like they fall asleep how about morphine on top of that all three it's amazing more people didn't die Dr Seth's Arnold's cough killer that's fantastic it was about 30 percent morphine that'll stop your cough um then Mariana about that noise better all right sorry um Vin Mariana is a was done by a French chemist it was a number one seller for a while in the 1870s uh it was restored energy and vitality turned out that that was red wine with 7.2 milligrams per ounce of cocaine I kid you not this was the pharmaceutical Industries Mrs Winslow 65 milligrams of morphine and a fluid mixed with alcohol and a little bit of ammonia water now the biggest seller this was the one that everybody wanted to get was cups baby's friend this was what you gave to your child so it wouldn't be colic it wouldn't cry at night it would just be a good baby it turns out that it and what they did they were very very smart they went ahead and checked the birth announcements and newspapers to find out when mothers had new babies and then they sent them a sample and then they would sell them the product in fact it was opium it did cause deaths and eventually their business went down the middle is one of my personal favorites the Amazon of its day was of course the Sears and Roebuck catalog and they sold for a dollar fifty a small vial of cocaine and a hypodermic so that you could be able to buy that so it's pretty remarkable to me the now my Trisha's personal favorite is bear the the reason I say that is Bayer was a real pharmaceutical company was selling more prescriptions and more drugs than anybody else in the world and over a five-year period their scientists invented found four different class of drugs they found acetaminophen that was the first in 1897 pretty interesting so Tylenol and then they discovered Bayer Aspirin a couple of years later true wonder drug aspirin can be fantastic and then in 1900 they actually had discovered before that heroin which they patented after the German name hirosh for and they called it heroin and that's how it was sold in the U.S as any of you guess a cure for morphine addiction the that's pretty good that's true true I kid you not and they invented an entire new class of drugs with barbiturates luminol was their first product and then when they marketed in the United States they marketed as phenobarbital all without prescriptions because you didn't need a prescription you're 18 years of age you can walk into any pharmacy you could walk out with any of these drugs however Bayer scientist said one of these drugs is too dangerous to Market we've done tests on animals of that and it looks like it has a high toxicity level so they didn't put one of them out you know which one Tylenol acetaminophen was never marketed because they thought that was too dangerous but no problem with the heroin and the barbiturates I mean the and this is a just a quick side note even Bayers drug companies can sometimes hide things they don't like Arthur eichengroon who's the top of the picture there he was the chief of pharmaceutical science he was responsible for the discovery of acetaminophen and aspirin 47 patents to his credit Bayer did this massive 2 000 page Tome the official history of Bayer in 1934 a year after Hitler had become the chancellor in Germany and they had already aryanized their company and kicked all the Jews out so they didn't give credit to eichengroon they gave it instead to his assistant the man in the lower part a good Aryan Dr Hoffman well eichengroon complained about that and said I was the person responsible for discovering those two drugs and they sent him to a concentration camp he lived he got out in 1948 he died he got out on 45 but he died in 48. it took until 1999 for a Scottish pharmacologist to actually track down the story and be able to publish it and give him the credit that he was due after all those years it's a little side story that I happen to like justice comes but sometimes is delayed the uh now these are the fellows the new sheriff is in town Who start to change the way things happen in the drug industry this is Harvey Washington Wiley and his bureau of chemistry and Wiley is the person here if this works you might see him if I can get this to work possibly right there that is Harvey Washington Wiley he's the son of an itinerant preacher he goes to Washington that is the entire 1900 Bureau of chemistry doesn't look like a typical government bureaucracy we see today huh the uh and that he was from the very beginning interested in going ahead and regulating additives to food there was no regulations on it he thought he could do something about it and he was also interested in what he might be able to do on drugs but food was his major design he has a thing he he calls for volunteers and he sets up a group called the poison Squad by the the Press and they are volunteers that dress up in evening wear and he cooks them dinners with his staff every night in the basement of the chemistry the Department of Chemistry and he puts additives like Boron and formaldehyde and other things into the food and he sees how sick they get one of them eventually dies but he learns a lot in that process and he keeps going back to Congress trying to get a bill passed and they say no no no no no and everything as you know in Congress is a bit of timing and so finally we are sharing what I call the progressive error in 1906 he gets his law and it's the Pure Food and Drug Act the uh and that's why these uh that he's the driving force on it also helps uh by the way that at that point you you had a book done um in in which for the first time you really understand in the jungle um you know how the meat packing was done in Chicago and how terrible it was people were outraged by that and it gave some impetus to finally make the changes in Congress all the 1906 law did First Federal Law regarding Food and Drugs was to say that you have to put on the label what's inside it doesn't have to be safe doesn't have to be therapeutic doesn't have to cure anything even if you claim it does but you have to tell us what's on the front and so the first major lawsuit that Wiley brings after 1906 Act is against Coca-Cola of all people he says that's because you have caffeine in the drink and you don't disclose that on the label and you don't have Coca in the drink and you say Coca-Cola government lost that suit the um it wasn't his finest moment unfortunately in 1914 long after you know another eight years later government passes the Harrison Act and that bans all narcotics in the country so all of a sudden the morphine the Opium the codeine the heroin or the the Cannabis the cocaines used in thousands of patent drugs are out the window

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 22,409

Keywords: hillsdale, politics, constitution, equality, liberty, freedom, free speech, lecture, learn, america

Id: tpkGQ1iAknw

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 16 2023