Tag Archives: Schering-Plough

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.”

Shrinks for sale: Psychiatrist makes $22,500 in 3 months doing “educational” drug speeches for Eli Lilly

Lilly last month disclosed its $22 million in payments in the first quarter of this year to the 3,400 doctors who are called the Lilly faculty. The company paid a $1.4 billion penalty as part of its January settlement with the government. That amount was dwarfed by Pfizer’s $2.3 billion settlement on Sept. 2 for similar violations, which also requires disclosing physician speaking fees. Both cases centered on company actions that illegally promoted drugs for “off-label” uses, those not approved by federal officials.