Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18917

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: Journal Article

Hopkins Tanne J
GSK lawyer is indicted on charges of obstructing FDA proceeding
BMJ 2010 Nov 17; 341:
http://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c6570.extract

Abstract:

The US Department of Justice has charged Lauren Stevens, a retired GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) lawyer, in relation to alleged off-label marketing of a drug. She faces one count of obstructing an official proceeding, one count of concealing and falsifying documents to influence a federal agency, and four counts of making false statements to the Food and Drug Administration.

Although drug companies have in the past been charged with off-label marketing of drugs, and several have paid large fines, it is thought that this is the first time an individual has been charged. GSK has not been charged and is not identified in the indictment.

The charges relate to the alleged off-label marketing of the antidepressant bupropion (marketed by GSK as Wellbutrin) for weight loss, and each carries a possible …

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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