Big Pharma Giant Sandoz, Ltd. agreed last year to pay nearly half a billion dollars to settle its lawsuit for conspiring with industry rivals to illegally fix prices of generic drugs. Sandoz will pay $275 million in this historic class action settlement to avoid charges of bilking consumers, insurers, and employee benefit plans out of inflated prices for drugs such as the antidepressants amitriptyline and clomipramine.

     Sandoz denied any wrongdoing in agreeing to settle the class action suit, but they did also agree to pay another $195 million in penalties to avoid a criminal charge trial. Pharmaceutical firms Pfizer, Teva, and Lupin are also named in the price fixing suit, but they too – so far – have denied any wrongdoing.

     Sandoz has in fact paid out nearly one billion dollars over the last five years to settle its continuing lawsuits. In addition to their price fixing settlements, Sandoz paid out $185 million in 2021 to settle a U.S. Department of Justice civil justice lawsuit under the False Claims Act. In 2024 Sandoz’s U.S. subsidiaries paid out another $265 million to settle direct purchaser claims from a class of drug wholesalers.

     Doing evil is expensive, but Sandoz’s huge profit margins easily justify it. Sandoz also has the dubious distinction of being the company that brought LSD to the planet. In 1938 Swiss chemist and Sandoz employee Albert Hoffman synthesized a lysergic acid compound as a respiratory and circulatory stimulant. It was set aside, but five years later Hoffmann accidently spilled some on himself and experienced the first psychedelic “trip.” He then began intentionally experimenting more with it by ingesting it.

     The consequent psychotic states he discovered became of interest to contemporaneous  psychiatrists such as Ronald A. Sandiison who felt that because LSD’s effect mimicked schizophrenia, it could be used productively on mental patients. He began experimenting with it as a psychotherapeutic agent at Powick Hospital in England.

     By the nineteen-fifties, the U.S. government had also taken an interest in LSD as a mind control agent that could be used against its enemies. The MKUltra program was secretly put into action and thousands of Americans were given the drug, often without their consent. Captive populations of prisoners and mentally ill were used in the experiments as well as also sex workers who lured in men and secretly dosed them with LSD while CIA agents observed from behind one way mirrors.

     In 1953 it was reported that the CIA was discussing buying a bulk supply of ten kilograms of LSD from Sandoz. That would equate to 100 million doses. Thankfully, they never used it to dose America’s enemies, but Sandoz was apparently willing to supply it.

     Judging by their recent one billion dollars of lawsuits, Sandoz is still willing to do whatever it takes to make a profit.