Liberal Forum

Pharmaceutical Companies Hiked Price on Aid in Dying Drug

When California’s aid-in-dying law takes effect this June, terminally ill patients who decide to end their lives could be faced with a hefty bill for the lethal medication. It retails for more than $3,000.

Valeant Pharmaceuticals, the company that makes the drug most commonly used in physician-assisted suicide, doubled the drug’s price last year, one month after California lawmakers proposed legalizing the practice.

“It’s just pharmaceutical company greed,” said David Grube, a family doctor in Oregon, where physician-assisted death has been legal for 20 years.

The drug is Seconal, or secobarbital, its generic name. Originally developed in the 1930s as a sleeping pill, it fell out of favor when people died from taking too much, or from taking it in combination with alcohol. But when intended as a lethal medication to hasten the death of someone suffering from a terminal disease, Seconal is the drug of choice.

“It works very quickly and very gently,” Grube says. “People fall asleep with no complications. It’s a very gentle passing.”

In 2009, Grube remembers the price of a lethal dose of Seconal — 100 capsules — was less than $200.
Over the next six years, it shot up to $1,500, according to drug price databases Medi-Span and First Databank.
Then Valeant bought Seconal last February and immediately doubled the price to $3,000.

Most drug companies justify such hikes by pointing to high research costs. But Grube says that’s not the case with Seconal. It’s been around for 80 years.
“It’s not a complicated thing to make, there’s no research being done on it, there’s no development,” he says. “That to me is unconscionable.”