some of that ol' political whining

[waider]

Since I've not bothered poking my nose into other peoples' politics for the last while, here's some fodder for the anonymous posters: Iraq goes GSM - I'm surprised at this. I thought the CDMA infrastructure was already a done deal. Props to the US for choosing "fits in with local networks" over "uses American technology & companies".

Of course, I can't just let something like that lie... talking to a friend about Formula 1 sponsorship, she brought up the fact that while most teams are fighting to retain tobacco sponsorship, BMW/Williams are proudly displaying Niquitin logos on their cars. I said that may well be the case, but it did make me wonder where the backing comes from, ultimately. Niquitin is a GSK product, but I'm not familiar enough with multinational associations to know who backs, partners or otherwise feeds GSK, but it occurs to me that there's a fairly distinctive segment of the multinational world already dedicated to sourcing nicotine, so I'm curious as to whether companies like Phillip Morris or R J Reynolds are ultimately playing both sides of the game - smoking and anti-smoking.

Now apply that sort of paranoid "reasoning" to the companies granted the Iraqi GSM deal.

Comments

[eejitalmuppet.livejournal.com]

A partial answer: Glaxo-SmithKline are pretty enormous, having made huge profits over the last 20 years from Zantac and a host of other drugs. IIRC, their current R&D budget is on the order of $1 billion per annum, and their hobby for the last 15 years has been buying other pharmaceutical companies, both before and after the merger of Glaxo-Wellcome and SmithKline.
They don't *need* backing from external organisations, and they are sufficiently paranoid about intellectual property that joint ventures are rare events.

This doesn't, of course, answer the question of where they get the nicotine from, and i don't know the answer to that question. These days, it isn't dificult to synthesise nicotine in vitro, but it may still be cheaper to extract it from tobacco plants. If they are following the latter route, however, I suspect that it wouldn't be too difficult for them to make exclusive deals with some bunch of impoverished farmers...

Please note that I'm not defending GSK. Buying out competitors either to close them down or to get their R&D data seems to be SOP in the pharmaceutical industry these days.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

GSK has probably dropped a couple thousand dollars on me every year for the past couple years. Dinners, sure, but also lectures, lunch delivered to our noon residency lecture series (which is nice because it's usually either/or, go eat or get educated); and a wonderful, wonderful gift edition of the best neuro textbooks now out there.

They're a huge megamega large cap corporation - GlaxoSmithKlineBeechamBurroughsWellcome is not their name, but they incorporate all those companies, and others.

The question is, where does GSK get the nicotine? Plant-derived compounds are almost invariably cheaper than synthesized. I'd guess they buy it from tobacco companies, but there's nothing that says they have to say so, and I'm sure that they keep this type of thing ultra-secret.

BTW, I'm very disturbed by the proliferation of OTC nicotine-containing 'smoking cessation aids'. First of all, the stuff is very addictive - it's nicotine, probably nothing more addictive short of amphetamine/cocaine - and people are using it recreationally. If even 1 person in ten who bought these quit smoking, every smoker would have quit by now. People are buying them for the same reason they buy smokeless tobacco - to obtain the pharmacologic effects of nicotine.

So you could say that RJR selling nicotine to GSK is RJR playing both sides of the fence, but I think you'd be wrong.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. It occurred to me that there's a huge conflict of interest in being a company selling a product which is supposed to have a planned weaning-off curve. How do you maximise profit while selling something that people are supposed to buy less and less of as time goes on?

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Well, drug makers have done so with antibiotics for some time. I don't think anyone would claim that the drug makers go out and try to encourage infections to be prevalent.

To my mind, the key concept here is that of reinforcement - the term used to denote a behavioral phenomenon where, after doing something, a test animal is more likely to go do it again than he was likely to do it in the first place. Reinforcement evolved, it appears, to cause animals to seek things like food, water, and mates. Nicotine, amphetamine, and cocaine all short-circuit this evolutionary mechanism by altering the properties of synaptic transmission that underly this reinforcement phenomenon.

That's why government regulates these compounds, and I tend to believe that such regulation is not a bad idea. And that's why I think OTC nicotine patches are a terrible idea.