No sympathy from Tauzin—a cancer survivor himself—for those sickly elders compelled to hobble onto buses to Canada to buy affordable medicines, either: according to Tauzin, these unfortunates are no better than Al-Quaeda conspirators “opening our borders…to future terrorist attacks.” (And for those concerned about the potential for abuse in tens of thousands of secretive clinical trials conducted on the untreated poor of the world, Tauzin points to PhRMA’s toothless “principles” on ethical research as indicative of the industry’s “more responsible role” in “clinical trial transparency and openness.”

As another legislator-turned-lobbyist J. Bennett Johnston observed, “everybody should have a job where they use the knowledge, talents and skills they have.”Quite. Nexium, anyone?