Pharma Giants Supplying Cartels With Tons of Ingredients to make meth...

[St. Theresa (OP)]

Fat-Pharma And The "War On Drugs"
Pharmaceutical Giants Caught Supplying Cartels With Tons of Bulk Ingredients to Produce Meth

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/executives-pharmaceutical-companies-charged-supplying-drug-cartels/
John Vibes March 11, 2016



Prosecutors in Belgium have recently announced that executives with pharmaceutical companies based in the country will be charged with knowingly providing drug cartels with prescription drugs that were used to manufacture methamphetamine.

The companies are accused of providing the Mexican drug kingpin Ezio Figueroa Vazquez with several tons of ephedrine, knowing that it would be used in the production of methamphetamine.

Prosecutors have said that there are seven executives who were charged with crimes, but they have not named these executives or the companies that they represent. However, Reuters uncovered that Sterop and Andacon are two of the three companies involved in the charges.

The companies claim that they had no clue who was buying the drugs, but prosecutors say that they have evidence proving that the executives had full knowledge of what they were involved in. The evidence reportedly includes email and phone surveillance.

“The company made two shipments of two million pills containing pseudoephedrine in 2006. These medicines were freely available then. My clients delivered to a reliable commercial partner and had no idea of the inappropriate use of the drugs,”  a representative of Andacon said.

Prosecutors spokesman Eric Van Der Sypt said that Ezio Figueroa Vazquez received large shipments of ephedrine from these companies between 2006 and 2011, which cost an estimated 360 million euros.

As we reported last month, according to neuroscientist Dr. Carl Hart, the top big pharma drug Adderall is nearly identical to crystal meth. Not only are these drugs similar, but it also seems that big pharma is the source of the cartel’s needed supply.

This arrangement makes sense because the only place to get massive quantities of a substance like ephedrine would be a pharmaceutical company, and most of these companies don’t really care who their customers are, especially if they are making millions of dollars on the deal.

Wonder if Lydia was involved in this lol

[Jega]

Belgium to Mexico (if i heard that right) is surprising. I would have thought another South American country not somewhere across the pond but alright

...2 million pills of Pseudoephedrine... "My clients delivered to a reliable commercial partner and had no idea of the inappropriate use of the drugs". Damn this stuffy nose just will not go away!

[Griffin]

The only thing surprising about this is that they might actually charge a rich person with a crime. I highly doubt they do unless this gets national media attention and there is a big push for it, but even then they will probably get off of it or get probation. I would be surprised if any of the people they know are doing this see the inside of prison cell.

I have always wondered if I could start a pharmaceutical company and get boatloads of opiates to "test, research, and look for new drugs". I mean that would be awesome I have always thought about that ever since people I knew stole trash bags worth of pills from a van that takes meds to people and pharmacies. Does anyone know of what would have to be done to start a company or be able to do research where you could get a life time like supply?

I always knew the problem wouldn't be getting it from the pharm companies or anything like that, the challenge would be the government and them allowing it. I wonder if you could goto a different country and it would be easier to do. I would most definitely be doing research, a lot of clinical trials on myself, and have a super chemist like robojunkie in the lab finding and making new drugs in the hopes that we could get something fda approved and become billionaires with a life time supply of opiates for testing and some r&d.

I used to think what would it take to have someone hack a database and get a dea number to prescribe stuff, or into a pharmacy to put in tons of legit scripts for you and the homies every month, or build a company or pharmacy to get drug shipments in like walgreens. It makes me giddy just thinking about what it would be like to work at a place that was making opana that I could produce my own bottles at a time, or get 100 kilograms of pure oxym at a time. Does anyone know how the companies go about making the pills? Do they synthesize all the stuff and put it all together like a wizard, or buy the ingredients and mix it up and press em out?

[Roman Totale]

@Jega Re: Belgium to Mexico, I thought it was the Chinese supplying most of the (psuedo)ephedrine to the Mexican cartels, so I am a little surprised to see Europeans involved.

Precursor chemicals are interesting.  I'm obviously no drug warrior, but clamping down on the precursors (or just the chems themselves) can be a lot more effective than trying to clamp down on the finished product.  P2P was the main meth precursor in the 70s and 80s (at least on the East Coast: the Philly mob smuggled it in olive oil barrels then gave it to the biker gangs, mainly Pagans and Outlaws, to cook up in remote areas of the Poconos and bring back down to Phila.), and as far as I know it's a non-entity these days.

It was kind of the same story with bootleg Quaaludes after they were out of the formulary in 1982 IIRC and Schedule I in 1984.  Though the political economy of the time was very different, and we hadn't quite produced the "anything for a buck" world yet. 

The East Germans and Hungarians were selling a lot of methaqualone to Colombia, but since the communist world was just as anti-drug if not more so than the capitalist world, the DEA and friends were actually able to convince their "enemies" to collaborate in cutting off methaqualone shipments to Latin America. 

And thus 'ludes died, the by the turn of the 90s the boots were more like 100mg diazepam and 50mg diphenhydramine rather than any methaqualone, and then they stopped even being made.  I wasn't taking conscious of drugs during this timeframe, so anybody who remembers differently please chime in, I'm just riffing off things I've read.