Reason, Big Pharma, and Patents

Related:

• Pharmaceutical Shills and Think Tank Corruption: Sally Pipes’s The World’s Medicine Chest: How America Achieved Pharmaceutical Supremacy―and How to Keep It
• Intellectual Property and Think Tank Corruption

I’ve pointed out before how many allegedly free market groups are pro-patent (and pro-IP in general), e.g. the Federalist Society, Cato, Independent Institute, and others.¹ As I wrote previously,

I’ve learned from reliable sources connected with various free market think tanks around the world that various important companies, in particular pharmaceutical, have become “supporters” of such think tanks–provided, of course, that the think tank supports intellectual property rights. Could this be one reason many free market think tanks are supportive of IP despite a mounting case against it?

I wonder if this is one reason for some of Cato’s pro-patent positions.²

A friend suggested Reason is also influenced by pharmaceutical donors, send me a Grok report that says

Based on available funding data from public disclosures, tax filings, and transparency reports, the largest known donor to the Reason Foundation (cumulatively) is the Searle Freedom Trust, with contributions exceeding $9.3 million across multiple years. Other significant donors include various Koch family foundations (over $2.9 million cumulatively) and DonorsTrust (over $4.1 million from 2010–2021), but Searle stands out as the top identified contributor.

The Searle Freedom Trust was established with wealth from Daniel C. Searle, the former CEO of G.D. Searle & Co., a major pharmaceutical company (developer of products like NutraSweet and various drugs). The company was acquired by Monsanto in 1985 and later integrated into Pfizer. While the foundation itself focuses on funding conservative and libertarian policy initiatives and closed operations in 2025, its endowment originated directly from pharmaceutical industry profits, establishing clear ties to big pharma.

The theory is that Pfizer, Monsanto, et al. spend this money to reduce criticism from free market groups, e.g. to have a tame response to the covid vaccine mandates and so on. Now if Big Pharma financial support might explain Cato’s vacillations on patents, what about Reason? It is true that they have not been as hard-hitting on IP as I might like but some Grok-assisted searching found many pieces skeptical of patents and IP and pharmaceuticals, such as:

1. Pharmaceutical Shills and Think Tank Corruption: Sally Pipes’s The World’s Medicine Chest: How America Achieved Pharmaceutical Supremacy―and How to Keep It.  [↩]
2. Intellectual Property and Think Tank Corruption. [↩]