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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14976

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.
Former Purdue Execs Excluded from Doing Business With Feds
The Wall Street Journal Blog 2009 Jan 23
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/01/23/former-purdue-execs-excluded-from-doing-business-with-feds/#more-4752


Full text:

Three former Purdue Frederick execs who pleaded guilty to misdemeanors tied to the marketing of the painkiller OxyContin can’t do business with Medicare or Medicaid for 15 years, the Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General said.

The exclusions initially came down last year; they were upheld by an administrative law judge earlier this month. The three former executives are Michael Friedman, who was CEO; Paul Goldenheim, who was chief scientific officer; and Howard Udell, who was general counsel.

Mary Jo White, an attorney representing the former execs, said in a statement that the decision was a “miscarriage of justice” and was “based on unfair and unsupported allegations OIG has made against these three upstanding, well-respected men.” White said the guilty pleas were based on “no-fault, no-intent strict liability misdemeanors,” and there was no evidence the men personally engaged in any wrongdoing. They’re in the process of appealing the exclusions, White said.

The case is somewhat unusual because it’s rather uncommon for individual executives to face penalties when companies get in trouble. “It’s important that we send a message to corporate America that we are going to hold not just the corporate entity but their leaders responsible for the acts of the corporation,” Lewis Morris, general counsel for the HHS inspector general, told the Health Blog.

Udell still consults for Purdue on “matters that do not relate to federal healthcare programs,” the company said in a statement. The company added that the exclusions are “unwarranted and unjustified” and said the men have “acted with integrity” throughout their careers.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909