According to The Washington Post, a number of states are currently investigating Insys for illegally paying physicians to prescribe their drug in situations in which it was inappropriate.
Insys has come under scrutiny of law enforcement.
study, opiate-related abuse and mortality is lower in jurisdictions that permit medical cannabis access, compared to those that outlaw the plant. Survey data compiled from medical marijuana patients show that subjects often reduce their use of prescription drug therapies - particularly opioids - when they have legal access to cannabis. “The CDC has implicated the drug in a ‘surge’ of overdose deaths in several states in recent years.” “Insys Therapeutics made $62 million in net revenue on Subsys fentanyl sales in the first quarter of this year, representing 100 percent of the company’s earnings,” according to The Washington Post. Insys currently markets just one product, Subsys, a sublingual fentanyl spray, a synthetic opioid far more potent than heroin (fentanyl is the drug found in Prince’s system following his death in April). Recently, we saw the first direct evidence that pharmaceutical companies are now working to defeat marijuana legalization efforts, acknowledging that their intent is to protect their market in synthetic opioid drugs.Įarlier this month, Insys Therapeutics Inc., an Arizona-based company, donated $500,000 to a group calling itself Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, a newly formed organization established to try to defeat Proposition 205, the marijuana legalization voter initiative that will appear on the ballot this November in that state. Pharmaceutical company joins the war on marijuana smokers.
These industries have lobbyists who regularly work with state and federal elected officials to keep legal marijuana off the market.īut we now see the pharmaceutical companies are also getting directly involved in political efforts to maintain marijuana prohibition, worried that legal marijuana will undermine their bottom line. Those of us involved in the marijuana legalization movement have long assumed that those companies that produce and sell competing products - especially alcohol and tobacco - were working behind the scenes to try to maintain marijuana prohibition and to protect their duopoly for legal recreational drugs.