Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17818

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

Anstett P
Women get $3M each for unveiling drug firm's shady sales practices
Free Press Medical Writer 2010 May 22
http://www.freep.com/article/20100522/NEWS06/5220428/Women-get-3M-each-for-unveiling-drug-firm-s-shady-sales-practices

Full text:

Ordered by their employer, two metro Detroit
women spent years wooing Michigan doctors
with lavish dinners, tickets and trips to prescribe
an epilepsy drug for problems it wasn’t approved
to treat.

Angela Maher, 39, of Walled Lake and Anastasia
Savka-Klovski, 52, of Chelsea finally blew the
whistle to the U.S. Department of Justice. On
Friday, they walked away with $3 million each,
part of an $81-million settlement against a
subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. The pair also
will receive a yet-undetermined amount from
state Medicaid plans.

The women say they and an army of sales reps in
other states were trained, prodded and
micromanaged by their supervisors at Ortho-
McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals to promote
Topamax for symptoms other than seizures and
migraine headaches, for which it was approved.

The case highlights a national problem — drug
industry spending on doctors, practices that
many say continue today, despite new ethics
policies to stop them.

State Medicaid programs, including Michigan’s,
will split $24.6 million in the settlement; most of
the rest goes to the federal government.