Elite Pharmaceuticals Inc (ELTP)

[WeeZuhl]

Nasrat decided the bigger risk for our company was being sued for perfectly legal behavior in a highly-regulated business.

Possibly the DUMBEST business decision in the history generic drugs. The companies who were sued were either doing illegal marketing or they were sending millions of tablets to tiny rural counties. Literally, egregious, illegal behavior in a Wild West industry. For one thing, Elite doesn't advertise any of their drugs, so kind of hard to get sued for that. People seem to forget that we were selling hydromorphone since 2010, and methadone since 2012, and oxyIR since ~2015. Did we get sued? Of course not. And the opioid industry is so highly regulated now that every single tablet is accounted for from warehouse to pharmacy to prescriber to patient. It is impossible to do today what those companies did in the 1990's that caused them to be sued.


I hope Elite shareholders will take a minute to read about the opioid lawsuits. The idea that it was a legal risk to our company to sell legal products in a regulated industry is so ludicrous that it is impossible to comprehend. Selling those ANDA's for a fraction of their cost to develop was so unwarranted as to have the APPEARANCE OF IMPROPRIETY.



https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/7/15724054/opioid-epidemic-lawsuits-purdue-oxycontin

There are two major legal arguments behind these cases, one against opioid manufacturers and another mainly against opioid distributors:

1) Starting in the mid-1990s, opioid manufacturers unleashed a misleading marketing push underplaying the risks of opioid painkillers and exaggerating the drugs’ benefits. This, the lawsuits argue, adds up to false advertising with deadly consequences by encouraging doctors to overprescribe the pills and getting patients to think the pills were safe and effective.


2) Meanwhile, opioid distributors supplied a ton of these pills, even when they should have known they were going to people who were misusing the drugs. This is backed by data showing that, in some counties and states, there were more prescribed bottles of painkillers than there were people — a sign that something was going very wrong. Federal and some state laws require distributors to keep an eye on the supply chain to ensure their products aren’t falling into the wrong hands. Letting these drugs proliferate, the lawsuits say, violates those laws.