Concerning the history of Bayer AG and other companies
Some of the great pharmaceutical companies of today owe their existence to profits from the trade of heroin and morphine in an era which laid the foundations for the self-perpetuating cycles of addiction to these drugs in modern society.
At the turn of the century Bayer were applying the same mass-marketing tactics to heroin as it had used so successfully with aspirin. Bayer's international advertising campaign promoted heroin as a panacea for infant respiratory ailments. (page 207)
During World War II and its aftermath:
The 'collective evil' of many pharmaceutical companies is manifest even though so many 'nice people' work for them. Hoechst and Bayer, the largest and third largest companies in world pharmaceutical sales respectively (in 1984 and before mega-mergers of the 90's), are descended from Germany's I.G. Farben company. Farben ranks with the Standard Oil Trust as one of the two greatest cartels in world history. After the Second World War, the Allies broke up I.G. into effectively three companies: Hoechst, BASF, and Bayer.
Twelve top I.G. Farben executives were sentenced to terms of imprisonment for slavery and mistreatment offences at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. I.G. built and operated a massive chemical plant at Auschwitz with slave labour; the I.G. facilities at Auschwitz were so enormous that they used more electricity than the entire city of Berlin. Approximately 300,000 concentration-camp workers passed through I.G. Auschwitz. At least 25,000 of them were worked to death (Borkin, 1978: 127). Others died in I.G.'s drug testing program.
SNIP
http://www.healthwatcher.net/Bayer/bayercrimes.html
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