Healthy Skepticism Library item: 91

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

Japsen B.
Ex-TAP sales manager found guilty: 1st to go to trial in Lupron probe
Chicago Tribune 2004 Jan 27
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2004-01-27/business/0401270256_1_astrazeneca-plc-lupron-lahey-clinic

Full text:

A former sales manager at TAP Pharmaceutical Products Inc. has been found guilty of lying to a federal grand jury about the drugmaker’s gift-giving practices in the marketing of its lucrative prostate cancer drug, the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston said Monday.

A jury convicted Joanne Richardson, 37, of Tyngsboro, Mass., on Friday after a seven-day trial in U.S. District Court in Boston. She was found not guilty on a charge of obstruction of justice.

The verdict against Richardson is the latest success for federal prosecutors in the sweeping probe of TAP employees’ marketing practices for the drug Lupron. In 2001, Lake Forest-based TAP paid a record fine of $885 million and pleaded guilty to a criminal charge of conspiring with doctors to bill government insurers for free samples of Lupron.

Prosecutors are pressing ahead with a trial of 11 other current or former TAP employees and a Massachusetts physician who have been charged in the investigation. The trial is scheduled to start April 5. Richardson’s conviction was the third of a current or former TAP employee in the case, but she was the first who went to trial.

Prosecutors say Richardson concealed that she and other TAP employees had provided “educational” and “research” grants of up to $50,000 a year to physicians at the Lahey Clinic in Massachusetts. Prosecutors said TAP employees hoped the doctors would continue to purchase Lupron instead of a cheaper rival drug, Zoladex, made by AstraZeneca PLC.

Richardson lied during grand jury testimony in 2000 when asked about whether any “off-contract price reductions had been given to the Lahey Clinic,” the U.S. attorney’s office said in a statement.

Neither Richardson nor her attorney could be reached Monday for comment.

Richardson, who will be sentenced in April, faces five years in prison.

TAP had no comment on the individual cases of current or former employees.

In December, former TAP district sales manager Kimberlee Chase pleaded guilty to conspiring to give inducements to physicians in order to defraud the Medicare health insurance program for the elderly. Chase, who testified at Richardson’s trial, is to be sentenced in March.

In 2002, former sales representative Jennifer Krebsbach was sentenced to nine months’ probation and fined $500 for illegally giving free drug samples to a doctor.

Four physicians have pleaded guilty in the case and await sentencing.

TAP is a joint venture of North Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories and Takeda Chemical Industries Ltd. of Japan. Neither Abbott nor Takeda has been accused of wrongdoing.