Tag Archives: pharmaceutical

Johnny Got His Pills

The military-pharmaceutical complex is making a killing or, more specifically, making a fortune off the folks we’ve asked to do the killing — and off the rest of us. They dope our unruly kids, they dope the young men and women fighting in and returning home from the war, and they dope the rest of us right here at home for being sick of wars overseas and fearful of war on the middle and lower classes and dreading the reckonings to come and being ashamed of our own sad national shadow.

When Big Pharma Breaks the Law—Prosecute the CEO

Since 2004, pharma has paid over $7 billion in fines and penalties, but even these figures barely dent profits. The $2.3 billion fine Pfizer paid in September 2009 for the way one of its subsidiaries marketed Bextra, the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, and three other drugs, was the biggest ever paid by a corporation in the US. Yet the fine was just 14 per cent of $16.8 billion revenue from the drugs from 2001 to 2008, little more than the price of doing business.

Prescription for prestige—Drug firms’ speaking fees flow to Harvard doctors; concerns about influence prompt new restrictions

Dr. Brent Forester, a geriatric psychiatrist at McLean, was one of the Massachusetts physicians paid the most last year, when he made $73,100 for giving nearly 40 talks for Eli Lilly to colleagues about the antipsychotic Zyprexa and the antidepressant Cymbalta over dinners in restaurants and in doctors offices. He has resigned from speakers bureaus to comply with the new rules, but said he “never felt like a spokesperson for the company at all.’’

Public ‘misled’ by drug trial claims

Doctors and patients are being misled about the effectiveness of some drugs because negative trial results are not published, experts have warned. Writing in the British Medical Journal, they say that pharmaceutical companies should be forced to publish all data, not just positive findings. The German team give the example of the antidepressant reboxetine, saying publications have failed to show the drug in a true light. Pfizer maintains its drug is effective. Reboxetine (Edronax), made by Pfizer, is used in many European countries, including the UK. But its rejection by US drug regulators raised doubts about its effectiveness, and led some to hunt for missing data. This is not the first time a large drug company has come under fire about its published drug trial data.