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After it waged a veritable war against cannabis legalization in Arizona, coughing up half a million dollars for the campaign, Insys Therapeutics recently announced the ultimate victory has finally come to fruition: the DEA approved one of the company’s groundbreaking pharmaceuticals — synthetic marijuana — to be listed as a Schedule II substance.

“Insys gave $500,000 last summer to Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, the group opposing marijuana legalization in Arizona,” the Washington Post reported. “The donation amounted to roughly 10 percent of all money raised by the group in an ultimately successful campaign against legalization. Insys was the only pharmaceutical company known to be giving money to oppose legalization last year, according to a Washington Post analysis of campaign finance records.”

That flood of cash from the pharmaceutical company with a vested interest in killing legalization probably did just that.

Now, the equally profit-motivated government has bestowed on Insys Therapeutics what is tantamount to skirting federal cannabis prohibition — despite that synthetic Syndros contains the equivalent ingredient, THC, nature provided in the first place.

This coordinated effort between a profiteering, private entity and the U.S. government to not only crush, but scoff at personal liberties sounds a quiet but resounding alarm for America’s legal cannabis industry.

The fact the cannabis plant, itself still languishes as a supposedly dangerous Schedule I substance, while Big Pharma can profit from its imitation, did not occur by happenstance — in fact, Insys’ history should have flatly nullified this government-granted windfall.

Syndros garnered approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last summer for the treatment of the nausea, vomiting, and weight loss suffered by AIDS and cancer patients.

Now, Insys has received the green light from the Drug Enforcement Agency, which categorized the synthetic substance and its generic formulations as Schedule II — a classification placing it alongside substances from cocaine and methamphetamines, to Adderall, OxyContin, and even methadone.

Cannabis remains on the DEA’s hitlist of Schedule I dangerous substances the State vilipends as devoid of redeeming medical value, on par with heroin, LSD, ecstasy, and peyote — largely due to pressure from, if not surreptitious coordination with, Big Pharma.

Insys’ stupefyingly brash endeavor to crush cannabis legalization while attempting approval of a fabricated concoction that mimics the vilified plant must be the most astonishingly pretentious example of callous corporate profiteering in years — indeed, this loathsome hypocrisy has not escaped the cannabis advocacy microscope.

“It appears they are trying to kill a non-pharmaceutical market for marijuana in order to line their own pockets,” J.P. Holyoak, chairman of the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol in Arizona, asserted last year.

Even a cursory examination of Insys Therapeutics’ anti-pot propaganda — imbued with all the patronizing semantics characteristic of an industry too experienced in cozying up to the U.S. government — belies the inanity in Big Pharma’s naked profiteering.

In short, it doesn’t matter to Insys and the federal government that scores of patients suffering a startlingly wide spectrum of ailments find relief from a plant, cannabis, in its natural state — together with loosening laws nationwide — cannot profit Insys.

But a fabricated version of the plant — and its oh-so-helpful categorization as less dangerous than what nature managed to produce — can.

During its shameless anti-pot campaign, Insys bloviated of legalization, “it fails to protect the safety of Arizona’s citizens, and particularly its children.”

Perhaps targeting the heartstrings of family members whose loved ones use cannabis to treat childhood epilepsy and seizures, cancer, post-traumatic stress disorder, Crohn’s disease, addiction, depression, ADHD, or one of myriad other conditions, Insys deigned itself a shield between customers and the villain plant, adding it “firmly believes in the potential clinical benefits of cannabinoids,” and “we hope that patients will have the opportunity to benefit from these potential products once clinical trials demonstrate their safe and effective use.”

That socially-awkward attempt to seem compassionate fools no one — and hasn’t yet — considering Insys Therapeutics began seeking the boundless profits of synthesized cannabis more than a decade ago.

Insys predicted current staggering support for the medical and recreational use of cannabis years ago, as the company postured on the need to maintain the non-synthetic plant’s Schedule I status in a 2011 letter to the DEA, noting the “longstanding policy of the United States to disfavor domestic cultivation of narcotic raw materials because of concerns about the abuse potential from farming of this material.”

But evidence the pharmaceutical company’s hostility toward the cannabis plant pertained to profit deprived it, in actuality, came years earlier — Insys’ own words from nearly a decade ago substantiate fully the financial motivation.

As state-run RT pointed out, a disclosure filed by Insys on August 17, 2007, with the Securities and Exchange Commission proves beyond a doubt the profit-robbing factor would motivate killing legalization ten years later. Forgoing pretense, Insys asserted,

“If marijuana or non-synthetic cannabinoids were legalized in the United States, the market for dronabinol [Syndros] product sales would likely be significantly reduced and our ability to generate revenue and our business prospects would be materially adversely affected.”

Of course, given Insys Therapeutics’ penchant for flying fast and loose with the law when profits are at stake aligns perfectly with the company’s insultingly-hypocritical, patently-fictitious moralizing on public health concerns.

Insys is now under investigation for off-brand marketing of fentanyl — an opioid painkiller 50 times stronger than Schedule I-listed heroin, and one of the most addictive substances available — a route pharmaceutical companies take when a drug is either found efficacious in treating an additional condition, or when sales for the approved purpose slump.

Worse, and lending further credence to the company’s profit-no-matter-the-cost modus operandi, several Insys executives were just arrested in December for conspiring to pay off healthcare workers to recklessly prescribe the medication — even when the dangerous opioid wasn’t needed.

“Several pharmaceutical executives and managers, formerly employed by Insys Therapeutics, Inc., were arrested today on charges that they led a nationwide conspiracy to bribe medical practitioners to unnecessarily prescribe a fentanyl-based pain medication and defraud healthcare insurers,” wrote the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts in an announcement on December 8, 2016.

“As alleged, top executives of Insys Therapeutics, Inc. paid kickbacks and committed fraud to sell a highly potent and addictive opioid that can lead to abuse and life threatening respiratory depression,” stated Harold H. Shaw, Special Agent in Charge of the Boston Field Division of the FBI, after the arrests. “In doing so, they contributed to the growing opioid epidemic and placed profit before patient safety. These indictments reflect the steadfast commitment of the FBI and our law enforcement partners to confront the opioid epidemic impacting our communities, while bringing to justice those who seek to profit from fraud or other criminal acts.”

Yet, the duplicitous nature of the U.S. government’s prohibition on cannabis now has the DEA, putatively Drug Warrior Number One, transparently forking over legal protections for synthetic THC, allowing the company to profit handily, while the plant’s scheduling makes criminals out of patients legitimately using cannabis for medical reasons.

It is this skirting of legality, deceptive marketing, duplicitous propaganda, offensively direct assistance from the government, and flagrant criminality that make Insys Therapeutics the exact corporate thug paragon of a monied-interest, authoritarian Police State.

If you need a case to abolish the State, look no further than its dealings with the cannabis plant — whether or not you are a user, the miraculously beneficial weed has flourished for centuries unmolested by self-important empires, until fiat currency made it a threat to unscrupulous profiteers.

The State’s farcical war on cannabis has effectively ended for most Americans — and it’s well overdue the government catch up with the rest of us.

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