5/17/14

Jackley: cannabis illegal because prison lobby, Big Pharma and Big Booze making me rich

As South Dakota leads the US in teen binge drinking, growth of violent crime and the sex trade, Attorney General Marty Jackley is up to his areolae:
Once Colorado opened the door for legalizing marijuana, the Attorney General's office started taking calls and emails about South Dakota's laws. Now that Minnesota is about to do the same, only restricted to just medical marijuana, the calls and emails are coming again. Jackley also adds that even though Minnesota has moved forward with their new medical marijuana deal, he doesn't expect any South Dakota laws to be changed. [Jared Ransom, KELO teevee]
And:
In a major departure from industry practice, GlaxoSmithKline, the sixth-largest global drug maker, announced Tuesday that it will no longer hire doctors to promote its drugs. It also makes the diabetes drug Avandia, which was subjected to tough restrictions from the FDA in 2010 because of concerns about heart risks. The FDA recently eased those restrictions after reconsidering the risks. In July 2012, Glaxo agreed to pay $3 billion, a record, to settle criminal and civil claims “arising from the company’s unlawful promotion of certain prescription drugs, its failure to report certain safety data, and its civil liability for alleged false price reporting practices,” the U.S. Justice Department announced. Glaxo also agreed to plead guilty to two counts of introducing misbranded drugs, Paxil and Wellbutrin, into interstate commerce and one count of failing to report safety data about Avandia to the Food and Drug Administration. [Charles Ornstein, ProPublica]
But, South Dakota's top cop is too busy covering up the misdeeds of his political party to intervene in the offal from his donors.
Utah will get $8.5 million from GlaxoSmithKline for defrauding the state’s Medicaid program through allegedly false and misleading marketing of Avandia. [Paul Sakuma, Associated Press, Deseret News]
So, Marty negotiated behind closed doors with GSK to lower its settlement to South Dakota? How conservative.

From the Guardian:
Chinese newspapers said travel agencies working for GSK would invent meetings that required travel but use the money to bribe doctors to prescribe GSK drugs. "Each doctor had a credit card from the company. The kickbacks were transferred to the cards the day after the drugs were prescribed," one newspaper alleged. [Rupert Neate, GlaxoSmithKline 'the big boss' in £300m bribery scandal, China says]

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