Explore Business Standard
Opioids
Maharashtra's Food and Drug Administration has issued a show cause notice to a pharmaceutical company here for alleged illegal export of opioids, an official said on Sunday. As per an official release of the FDA, the action was taken after the BBC's investigative report highlighted that Tapentadol and Carisoprodol manufactured in India were illegally exported to African countries, where they are misused for recreational purposes. Following the Central government's directives on Friday, a joint team of drug inspectors from the Centre and state government raided Aveo Pharmaceuticals, a Palghar-based company allegedly involved in exporting these drugs, the release stated. Authorities seized all existing stock, prohibited further production, and initiated stringent legal action against the company, the FDA said. The company has been served a show cause notice under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940, and officials have assured that all necessary legal measures will be taken without any .
McKinsey & Company consulting firm has agreed to pay USD 650 million to settle a federal investigation into its work to help opioids manufacturer Purdue Pharma boost the sales of the highly addictive drug OxyContin, according to court papers filed in Virginia on Friday. As part of the deal with the US Justice Department, McKinsey will avoid prosecution on criminal charges if it pays the sum and follows certain conditions for five years, including ceasing any work on the sale, marketing or promotion of controlled substances. A former McKinsey senior partner, Martin Elling, has also agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice for deleting documents from his laptop after he became aware of investigations into Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin that was then a client, according to the filings. A lawyer for Elling declined to comment Friday. McKinsey said in a statement on Friday that it's deeply sorry for its work for Purdue Pharma. We should have appreciated the harm opioids .
Myanmar, already wracked by a brutal civil war, has regained the unenviable title of the world's biggest opium producer, according to a UN agency report released on Tuesday. The Southeast Asian country's opium output has topped that of Afghanistan, where the ruling Taliban imposed a ban on its production, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in its Southeast Asia Opium Survey 2023." The Taliban's ban has led to a 95 per cent drop in the cultivation of opium poppies, UNODC said last month. Opium, the base from which morphine and heroin are produced, is harvested from poppy flowers. From 2022 to 2023, Myanmar saw the estimated amount of land used to grow the illicit crop increase 18 per cent to 47,100 hectares (116,400 acres), the new UNODC report said. Although the area under cultivation has not returned to historic peaks of nearly 58,000 ha (143,300 acres) cultivated in 2013, after three consecutive years of increases, poppy cultivation in Myanmar is expanding and ...