Marty Sullivan of Tax Notes magazine has documented the location of profits of U.S. pharmaceutical companies for years. Each article he writes contains eye-popping figures. Last week’s was no different. In the March 8 issue, Marty used annual reports to chart the before-tax profits of seven large U.S. drug companies over the last decade or so. Here’s the story: between 1997 and 2008, foreign profits of Abbot Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, and Scherling-Plough quadrupled from about $9 billion to $37 billion. Over the same period, their U.S. profits fell by a third from $17 billion to $11 billion. Bottom line: the share of U.S. pharmaceuticals’ profits earned abroad has grown dramatically—from about one-third in the late 1990s to nearly four-fifths in 2008.