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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18694

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: Electronic Source

Edwards J
$1,000 a Pop: How Forest Labs Bribed Doctors to Prescribe Antidepressants to Kids
BNet 2010 Sep 15
http://www.bnet.com/blog/drug-business/1000-a-pop-how-forest-labs-bribed-doctors-to-prescribe-antidepressants-to-kids/5753


Full text:

Forest Labs (FRX) appears to have initially underestimated how much it needed to pay the feds to go away: In 2009, the company said it had set aside $170 million in case it needed to settle a Department of Justice investigation of the kickbacks it paid in its marketing of Celexa and Lexapro, two antidepressants. Today, the company paid $313 million to wrap up the probes.

Forest’s management is used to lavish spending, however, as the whistleblower complaints behind the settlement allege.

The meat of Forest’s wrongdoing is that the company promoted Celexa for children even though the FDA had specifically rejected the drug for kids, and even though European data showed it was not useful in youths. The company did something similar with Lexapro – one pharmaceutical sales rep recommended crushing up Lexapro into apple sauce in order to make it more palatable to children.

Forest overcame resistance to the pediatric use of its antidepressants by bribing doctors with cash and gifts, the lawsuits alleged. Among the goodies Forest handed out were:

Tickets to St. Louis Cardinals games.
A $1,000 certificate to Alain Ducasse, one of the best (and most expensive) restaurants in New York, according to this suit.
A trip to see a George Carlin concert. (They’re antidepressants and he’s funny, geddit?).
$1,000 in cash to attend dinner at the Doral Park Country Club in Miami.
A trip to the Great Escape amusement park in New York.
Tickets to The Nutcracker at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., according to this suit.
The settlement, in which Forest pleads guilty to the accusations against it, also implies that one unnamed Forest executive lied to Congress in September 2004 – which is in itself a crime.

This is about the quality of Forest management’s decision-making. Given that Forest’s marketing plan required making false statements to a Congressional inquiry, it is perhaps not surprising that it also underestimated the size of its legal liabilities.

 

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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