Healthy Skepticism Library item: 10051

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Goldstein J.
Ex-J&J Salesmen Fault Anemia Drug Marketing
The Wall Street Journal Health Blog 2007 May 10
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2007/05/10/ex-jj-salesmen-fault-anemia-drug-marketing/?mod=yahoo_hs

Full text:

A lawsuit suggests Johnson & Johnson sold its anemia drug Procrit by offering fat rebates to increase doctors’ profits to use the drug and by “urging its sales people to push higher-than-approved doses,” the WSJ reports this morning.

Procrit, used primarily in cancer patients, has faced stiff competition from Amgen’s Aranesp in recent years, and sales of the medicine (and Eprex, the brand J&J sells overseas) have fallen from over $4 billion in 2002 to just over $3 billion last year.

According to one memo, a doctor who bought almost $1 million worth of Procrit over 15 months would get a rebate check worth $237,885. There’s a debate over whether those sorts of rebates violate federal anti-kickback laws, and Congress reformed Medicare reimbursement in 2005 in an effort to curtail the practice. But drug companies “continue to offer large buyers big rebates, which they say are legal,” the article says.

The lawsuit was filed by two former Procrit salesmen, one of whom “saved 15,000 pages of company memos, contracts and other work-related documents in a storage unit and shed he built off his garage.” He says he was forced to retire in 2004. The other salesman was fired in 1998. The company says his firing was for racial and sexual harassment, but the salesman says his termination was because he told the truth about the company’s sales practices.

Their suit also alleges that the company in the mid 1990s encouraged doctors to prescribe a dose of Procrit higher than the maximum dose approved by FDA. The higher dosing later received FDA approval.

Anemia drugs, given to patients with cancer and kidney disease to reduce the need for transfusions, have come under increasing scrutiny recently, with allegations that economic incentives have spurred doctors to give higher-than-recommended doses. An FDA panel is meeting today to discuss safety risks when the drugs are used in cancer patients.