Not many people would be surprised to find that drug abuse is on the increase, but they may be surprised to find that the increase is not in illegal drug abuse but pharmaceutical drug abuse. Emergency room visits have increased 110% over the last 5 years, due to prescription drug abuse.
A lawsuit filed last week accuses Johnson & Johnson of conspiring with pharmaceutical consultant Omnicare in an effort to push J&J drugs on nursing home residents, and violating federal Medicaid laws in the process. As a result of the scheme, “residents were overcharged for their medications, had additional medications administered and were unlawfully switched to Johnson & Johnson drugs,” all in the name of increasing revenue, according to the lawsuit.
Study patients took the anti-seizure drug Neurontin, and researchers measured tons of possible outcomes (like pain with touch, pain with cold, excessive pain with pinpricks, more than a dozen different scales for psychiatric symptoms, and so on). By random chance, if you measure enough outcomes, at least some of them will appear better after drug treatment. When the time came to report the findings, however, the researchers systematically omitted the outcomes on which the drug had no effect—and presented only the data showing benefit. That’s like dealing dozens of hands of poker to yourself but showing only the hand with good cards.
The Australian Government has been forced to stop the release of the ADHD draft guidelines and may have to rewrite them following the embarrassing scandal. A cloud had been cast over the draft’s validity after one of the psychiatrists, Dr. Joseph Biederman, whose research into anti-psychotic drugs helped form the guidelines, was accused of failing to reveal $1.6 million in payments from drug companies.
Our elected officials persist in pretending that the drug companies can be their “partners” in health care reform, rather recognizing them as their adversaries. The rest of the industrialized world seems to have grasped the notion that it’s the government’s job to make sure the private health care industry doesn’t gouge the public. These governments do their job by imposing stiff regulation on these companies, far beyond anything that we will see in the current health reform here.