INDIANAPOLIS, IN — Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly announced Tuesday that it has successfully acquired "the remaining economically relevant quantity" of the world's iboga supply fresh on the heels of their purchase of Psychedelic biotech firm and billionaire pet project AtaiBeckley.
The landmark deal reportedly includes several tonnes of wild-harvested iboga, cultivated iboga, iboga seeds, herbarium specimens, several botanical illustrations from the 1800s, and exclusive commercialization rights to any iboga plants not yet discovered.
According to Lilly executives, the acquisition is part of the company's commitment to "expanding patient access through carefully managed scarcity."
"Nature has simply been too decentralized for too long," said a company spokesperson. "We're excited to bring the efficiency of patent protection and scale no one asked for to a plant that unfortunately spent millions of years developing without any real go-to-market strategy."
Within hours of the announcement, the wholesale price of iboga reportedly increased 4,800%, while venture capital firms began referring to shrubs as "high-growth biological assets."
Meanwhile, members of the Bwiti spiritual tradition expressed confusion after receiving cease-and-desist letters alleging unauthorized interaction with Lilly-owned vegetation.
“AtaiBeckley was a smokescreen for this power play, and it worked,” said Lilly spokesman John Paul Johnson Jr. lll.
Industry stenographer Psychedelic Alfalfa speculated whether the new asset might be called Iboga™ XR, a proprietary formulation expected to cost approximately $42,000 per treatment before insurance, which no one has any more anyways.
“The ultimate goal here is to fuse our newly acquired assets from the AtaiBeckley pipeline with the supernatural power of Iboga to create a super drug capable of making our shareholders immortal — or at least slightly richer,” said a company spokesperson.
"We're not trying to actually cure addiction or anything like that," the spokesperson clarified. "We're trying to cure market saturation."