More Taxation Via Ski Mask

Borepatch takes a walk down memory lane regarding the Tobacco Settlement.

Governments love to tax. It's one of the few things they do well. Taxing cigarettes and booze is a historical specialty of governments local, state, and federal.  

Those taxes are collected for doing nothing. The government doesn't grow anything. It doesn't have a factory. It takes no business risks. It just collects money from the sale of tobacco on a state and federal average of $2.70 a pack. I know the tobacco companies are making a lot of money. I think smoking is terrible. It's the governments that are profiting the most off tobacco sales.

RTWT.

And now OK and others want to transfer that model to Big Pharma, because reasons.

Again, this isn't The War On (Some) Drugs.
They never even used that as a pretext.

It's a War On Business, with the real aim being solely to fund bigger government. Any pubic benefit is and was no part of either equation, except by way of excuse-making and straw-grasping.

Nota bene the aim of Okiehoma statists is to use the J&J settlement to fund government treatment programs, and local government entities, from the state down, not to actually compensate or make whole the alleged victims, let alone not being addressed from any rationale that the effect was caused by the defendants.

It's a naked tax grab from innocent parties, being shaken down solely because they had a fat wallet.
This differs from daylight armed robbery...how, exactly?

This is simply taxation (in fact, a bill of attainder specifically against J&J via judiciary, which is doubly illegal) without requiring a bill for it to go through the state legislature. Instead of requiring a bill that garnered the support of 99 members of the OK legislature (67 reps and 32 senators) and was then signed by the governor, all of them responsible directly to the people, they only had to bamboozle one lackwit judge (with which clearly Okiehoma, like every state, is oversupplied) and presto! they get a windfall with none of that icky public accountability.
It should be overturned for a host of reasons, but on that ground alone would be sufficient cause to do so.

The Clinton administration and 50 states' legislature did the same thing with tobacco, and got away with it because every hog had his nose in that trough. But cigarettes aren't the same thing at all, morally or financially, as prescription medication, except that costs for the latter will be passed on directly, and forever, exactly as cigarette taxes are, but this time on everyone.

And BTW, if you don't think those cigarette taxes got tacked on to your Chips Ahoy and Oreos from RJR/Nabisco too back then (eventually forcing the conglomerate to break apart because of that tobacco settlement), just like J&J's hit will go onto the price of every box of Band-Aids forever, I've got a bridge to sell you.