©ISTOCK.COM/KATARZYNABIALASIEWICZIn early 2015, the price of the insomnia drug Seconal doubled overnight to around $30 per 100 mg capsule. The drug’s active ingredient, a barbiturate called secobarbital, was widely prescribed in the mid-20th century as a sleeping pill, before falling out of favor due to abuse, accidental overdoses, and the emergence of benzodiazepines as a safer alternative. Despite declining numbers of prescriptions, Seconal’s price has soared in recent years; costing just $2 per capsule in 2009, the drug retailed around $15 by the time its previous owner, Marathon Pharmaceuticals, sold the rights to Seconal in February 2015 to its current supplier, Canada-based Valeant Pharmaceuticals, which quickly raised the price to $30.
So why the rise? Just one month prior to Seconal’s price hike, California had proposed legislation that would make it the fifth state to allow medical-aid-in-dying, in which terminally ill patients given less than six months to live could choose to end their own lives with a physician’s prescription for a lethal quantity of a drug—Seconal being the drug of choice. Valeant denied ulterior motives for the decision. But some health-care practitioners called the move exploitative, whether or not the timing was deliberate. With Seconal’s climbing cost, the standard lethal-dose protocol—emptying 100 capsules into a beverage—has a price tag of $3,000 or more. “‘Shocked’ is one word you could use,” says David Grube, a family doctor in Oregon and national medical director of the nonprofit ...
