Elite Pharmaceuticals Inc (ELTP)

[WeeZuhl]

"Actavis officials were taken aback..."

On Sept. 12, 2012, executives from the company were led into a windowless conference room on the sixth floor of the DEA’s headquarters. There, one of Boockholdt’s deputies began by talking about how Florida was having, on average, 11 fatal overdoses a day. Then the lights were dimmed, and Boockholdt ticked through 60 charts and graphs showing that Actavis had sent nearly 240 million pills to Florida during the previous 30 months — more oxycodone than the manufacturer had sent to almost all other states combined.

Actavis officials were taken aback, the court records show. Michael R. Clarke, the company’s vice president for ethics and compliance, testified in a deposition that it felt like DEA officials were treating Actavis like “street dealers.” Clarke had expected a more collegial approach like, “You know, that’s great, that’s fine, maybe you can do this better. We were looking for that sort of interchange, and it wasn’t that,” Clarke testified in December, according to the newly unsealed documents. “It was pretty clear that they believed that we were one of the manufacturers that led to whatever problem they identified related to diversion of opioids.”

https://biography.omicsonline.org/united-states-of-america/elite-laboratories/nasrat-hakim-1040847

From 2004 – 2013, Mr. Hakim was employed by Actavis, Watson and Alpharma in various senior management positions. Most recently, Mr. Hakim served as International Vice President of Quality Assurance at Actavis, overseeing 25 sites with more than 3,000 employees under his leadership. Mr. Hakim also served as Corporate Vice President of Technical Services, Quality and Regulatory Compliance for Actavis U.S., Global Vice President, Quality and Regulatory Compliance for Alpharma, as well as Executive Director of Quality Unit at TheraTech, overseeing manufacturing and research and development.

It makes one wonder who else from Actavis was in the room at DEA HQ on that day in September 2012. Did all Actavis senior management share the sentiment of VP Mr. Clarke- that the DEA seemed to consider them akin to a "street dealer" and particularly responsible for the opioid crisis in the United States? It also makes one wonder whose interests were being served a few years later when Elite Pharma's opioid ANDAs were dumped by the CEO for pennies on the dollar. Who really needed to get away from generic opioids- was it the company or was it the man? It seems to me ELTP has clean hands.

Actavis’s sales of the generic version of OxyContin and other drugs containing oxycodone grew from 559 million in 2006 to more than 1.1 billion in 2012, according to the DEA database. Its sales of hydrocodone, another opioid pain reliever, rose from 2.2 billion to nearly 3 billion.

The article makes clear the Sacklers at Purdue were a soft touch compared to the anonymous execs at Actavis, Mallinckrodt, and Endo. America got kicked in the teeth while the international conglomerates made billions and billions of dollars selling smack in the mountains and all along the I-10. Elite Pharma had nothing to do with any of it, but ELTP shareholders continue to suffer the consequences.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/little-known-generic-drug-companies-played-central-role-in-opioid-crisis-documents-reveal/2019/07/26/95e08b46-ac5c-11e9-a0c9-6d2d7818f3da_story.html

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