Healthy Skepticism Library item: 361

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

Italy police probe 4,400 doctors
BBC News 2004 May 27

Full text:

Italian police are investigating 4,400 doctors over allegations of an illegal incentives scheme involving UK drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline, officials say. The doctors are said to have been offered cash and other incentives in a 228m euro (£152m) scheme to boost their use of Glaxo products. Around 300 Glaxo employees in Italy are also under investigation, police say. A Glaxo spokesman said the firm had co-operated fully with the inquiry and denied bribery and corruption. ‘Holidays’ Police said that after a two-year investigation they found that Glaxo had spent the 228m euros on the alleged scheme between 1999 and 2002. They say incentives offered to doctors included holidays, cash or free pharmaceutical drugs and personal computers.

“ GSK is committed to ensuring all of its business practices are of the highest possible standards and any breach of these is unacceptable” Glaxo spokesman

The Italian Justice Ministry is to decide whether to press charges against the suspects after considering the report by the financial investigators.

Domenico Cuzzocrea, of the Venice tax police, told the Associated Press: “Glaxo put this mechanism in place to sell as many medicines as possible.

“The investigation shows that this system was rooted and diffused throughout the country.” A Glaxo spokesman said the firm had been co-operating closely with the authorities. “This co-operation has been acknowledged by the investigating authority,” he told Reuters. “GSK is committed to ensuring all of its business practices are of the highest possible standards and any breach of these is unacceptable.” Glaxo, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, makes the HIV/Aids medicine Combivir, the asthma drug Seretide and the diabetes treatment Avandia/Avandamet.

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts

If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Announcements

PharmedOut’s annual conference: Missing The Target: When Practitioners Harm More Than Heal

No Free Lunch is merging with Healthy Skepticism

Conference program: Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge

Prescrire’s proposals for France’s national conference on medicines policy

Pharmed Out Conference ‘Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge’

More announcements

What's new on this site

Library Home

Library Search

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