America has a love affair with Bayer Aspirin.  In advertisements, mothers are shown soothing feverish children with an aspirin at the bedside. Older folks use an aspirin to ward off heart attacks and strokes. Bayer Aspirin is an American icon, residing in the medicine cabinet in tens of thousands of households. However, upon closer examination, this seemingly benign pharmaceutical giant reveals a truly horrendous past:

Bayer AG was founded in Barmen, Germany in 1863 by Friedrich Bayer and his partner, Johann Friedrich Weskott.  It trademarked acetylsalicylic acid as aspirin in 1899. It also trademarked heroin a year earlier, then marketed it world-wide for decades as a cough medicine for children “without side-effects”, despite the well known dangers of addiction.

During the First World War, Bayer turned its attention to the manufacture of chemical weapons including chlorine gas, which was used in the trenches. It also built up a “School for Chemical Warfare”. During this time Bayer formed a close relationship with other German chemical firms, including BASF and Hoechst. In 1925 Bayer was one of the chemical companies that merged to form the massive German conglomerate, IG Farben. It was the largest single company in Germany and became the single largest donor to Hitler’s election campaign. After Hitler came to power, IG Farben worked in close collaboration with the Nazis, becoming the largest profiteer from the Second World War. IG Farben produced all the explosives for the German military and systematically looted the chemical industries of occupied Europe.

The Bayer company was directly involved with some of the infamous experiments that were conducted by Dr. Mengele and others. A former Auschwitz prisoner testified:

 “There was a large ward of tuberculars on block 20. The Bayer Company sent medications in unmarked and unnamed ampoules. The tuberculars were injected with this. These unfortunate people were never killed in the gas chambers. One only had to wait for them to die, which did not take long (…) 150 Jewish women that had been bought from the camp attendant by Bayer, (…) served for experiments with unknown hormonal preparations.”

Wilhelm Mann, whose father had headed Bayer’s pharmaceutical department, wrote as head of IG’s powerful pharmaceutical committee to an SS contact at Auschwitz: “I have enclosed the first cheque. Dr Mengele’s experiments should, as we both agreed, be pursued. Heil Hitler.” IG employee SS major Dr Helmuth Vetter, stationed at Auschwitz, participated in human medical experiments by order of Bayer.

Bayer executive Fritz ter Meer, a senior scientist became a Nazi Party member in 1937. Meer was responsible for the construction of the IG Farben factory in Auschwitz, in which tens of thousands of slave labourers died. ter Meer was found guilty of plunder, slavery and mass murder by the Neurenberg War Crimes Tribunal after World War II. However, he was released in 1952 and became the chairman of the supervisory board of Bayer, a post which he held until 1964.

Bayer refused to pay compensation to the surviving slave labourers. International protests finally forced Bayer to pay damages in 1995.

Here are some more facts:

• In the mid 1980’s Bayer sold a product called Factor VIII to treat haemophilia. However, Factor VIII was infected with HIV and killed thousands of haemophiliacs in the United States alone.
• In 2003, The New York Times revealed that Bayer continued producing and selling this infected product to Asia and Latin America when a safe product was available in order “to save money”.
• 2001 Bayer had to recall its anti-cholesterol drug Baycol/Lipobay, which was subsequently linked to over 100 deaths and 1,600 injuries. Germany’s health minister accused Bayer of sitting on research documenting Baycol’s lethal side-effects for nearly two months before the government in Berlin was informed.
• Bayer is the world’s leading pesticide manufacturer and the world’s seventh largest seed company.
• Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company pleaded guilty to marketing a drug for unapproved uses in 2004.
• In May 2004, Pfizer, Eli Lilly & Co., Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and four other drug companies have paid a total of $7 billion in fines and penalties. Six of the companies admitted in court that they marketed medicines for unapproved uses.
• In January 2009, Indianapolis-based Lilly, the largest U.S. psychiatric drug maker, pleaded guilty and paid $1.42 billion in fines and penalties to settle charges that it had for at least four years illegally marketed Zyprexa, a drug approved for the treatment of schizophrenia, as a remedy for dementia in elderly patients

“Marketing departments of many drug companies don’t respect any boundaries of professionalism or the law,” says Jerry Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston and author of “Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs” (Random House, 2004). “The Pfizer and Lilly cases involved the illegal promotion of drugs that have been shown to cause substantial harm and death to patients.”

[Photo by: Isasser, via CC License]