Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel
By James Ridgeway
January 17, 2010
There really should be a special place in hell for pharmaceutical manufacturers who make money by exploiting the weakest and most vulnerable of patients: old people with dementia. I wrote about one such case back in April of last year:
Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly recently agreed to pay a record $1.4 billion dollars to settle charges that it illegally marketed the anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa as a treatment for Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia in elderly patients. This despite the fact that the drug was not only unapproved for this “off-label” use, but had also been shown to cause obesity and diabetes.
Now, $1.4 billion might sound like a tough punishment, until you find out that Lilly’s total sales of Zyprexa have topped $37 billion. And at least some of those sales were thanks to doctors who, with guidance from Lilly drug reps, wrote thousands of prescriptions for patients with virtually no ability to defend themselves.
The steep fine against Lilly apparently didn’t discourage another drugmaker, Johnson & Johnson, from using even sleazier tactics to promote its own lucrative antipsychotic for use on nursing home residents. As the New York Times reported on Friday:
Johnson & Johnson paid kickbacks to the nation’s largest nursing home pharmacy to increase the number of elderly patients taking the antipsychotic Risperdal and several other medications, according to a complaint filed Friday by the office of the United States attorney in Boston.
Read entire article: http://baltimorechronicle.com/2010/011810Ridgeway.shtml
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Tags: antipsychotics, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Risperdal, Zyprexa
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I’m 58 years old. Last year I was kidnapped by local cops and dragged away from my business and out of my city to a mental ward based on the flagrant, malacious, premeditated lies and perjury of two senile 80+ year old senile old people, my own parents. Mom wanted her adult son to love her like he did when he was a “little boy”, and dad ordered permanent brain damage from a “ring” of unethical Risperidone pushing quack pshchiatrists in NW Indiana. Dad lost his entire estate, a million bucks at local casinos, and by ordering the brain damage from the quacks, his “motive” was what else, MONEY for his gambling habit, hi stakes blackjack. The plan was to create a retard of an intelligent, independent businessman, a brain dead vegatable who would be eligible for state “care”, and U.S. Government disability benefits. The quacks, cops, and politicians love liars and perjurers, I’m guessin’ because they were all gonna’ get big time “kickbacks” from the risperdone prescriptions and all the dough that would be generated by lian quacks from creating a chronically ill person with those toxic poisens. Risperdone, Risperdal, whatever is nothin’ but poisen and a “weapon of mass murder” for the NEW WORLD ORDER.