Tag Archives: Merck

US Department of Justice Probes Corruption in Big Pharma; Glaxo, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly & Merck

The US Department of Justice is scrutinising payments by leading pharmaceuticals companies for hospitality, consultants, licensing agreements and charitable donations in markets around the world as part of a wide-ranging corruption probe. GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly, among others, have disclosed being contacted by the DoJ and Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with the investigation.

Pharmaceutical Industry and Psychiatry—Conjoined Twins Joined at the Wallet, by former Pharma rep turned whistleblower

“Unlimited spending! Schedule all the programs you can.” That was the management directive announced at the regional business meeting I attended when I first became a pharmaceutical rep. When I heard the announcement I felt like I was on an Enron train that was roaring down the tracks, and the company expected everyone to be on board. The company was giving its sales force unlimited funds to hire physicians as paid speakers, sometimes to influence other physicians to prescribe the company’s drugs, at other times to simply financially reward physicians who wrote high volumes of prescriptions every month for the company’s drugs.

Op Ed: New Year’s Resolutions for the Drug Industry for 2010

Clearly the drug industry needs New Year’s Resolutions–and to honor them better than the Corporate Integrity Agreements with the government it keeps breaking. How about: “We will stop upgrading anxiety to depression, depression to bipolar disorder and bipolar disorder to ‘treatment resistant depression’ to sell drugs. We will admit that studies are beginning to show that the reason depression is sometimes treatment resistant is because it wasn’t depression to begin with but consumer advertising.”

The Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex: A Deadly Fairy Tale

The country is pacified by a blind belief that the drugs being prescribed to them have been proven safe because our government health agencies have our physical health and well-being in their best intentions. This is a lie, an extraordinarily deadly lie. Iatrogenesis, medically induced injury and death, is the number one cause of death in American medicine annually, since only a small percentage of these deaths are actually reported. Each year more Americans die from preventable deaths due to our medical system than all military causalities in the two world wars combined. This is tantamount to medical genocide. One of the major causes of these deaths is the overmedication of Americans in all ages. The constant need for profits has created an environment that allows the pharmaceutical industrial complex to use their enormous financial and political clout to literally make normal life experiences into new diseases, such as social anxiety disorder, in order to sell its drugs.