Who has the Number One U.S. Ranking in Criminal Fraud Cases? BigPharma of Course

This is a portion of the New York Times article Oct. 2nd 2010 by Duff Wilson “Side Effect may include Lawsuits”.

The new generation of antipsychotics has also become the single biggest target of the False Claims Act, a federal law once largely aimed at fraud among military contractors. Every major company selling the drugs Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson has either settled recent government cases for hundreds of millions of dollars or is currently under investigation for possible health care fraud.
Two of the settlements, involving charges of illegal marketing, set records last year for the largest criminal fines ever imposed on corporations. One involved Eli Lilly’s antipsychotic, Zyprexa; the other involved a guilty plea for Pfizer’s marketing of a pain pill, Bextra. In the Bextra case, the government also charged Pfizer with illegally marketing another antipsychotic, Geodon; Pfizer settled that part of the claim for $301 million, without admitting any wrongdoing.
The companies all say their antipsychotics are safe and effective in treating the conditions for which the Food and Drug Administration has approved them — mostly, schizophrenia and bipolar mania and say they adhere to tight ethical guidelines in sales practices. The drug makers also say that there is a large population of patients who still haven’t taken the drugs but could benefit from them.
AstraZeneca, which markets Seroquel, the top-selling antipsychotic since 2005, says it developed such drugs because they have fewer side effects than older versions.
“It’s a drug that’s been studied in multiple clinical trials in various indications,” says Dr. Howard Hutchinson, AstraZeneca’s chief medical officer. “Getting these patients to be functioning members of society has a tremendous benefit in terms of their overall well-being and how they look at themselves, and to get that benefit, the patients are willing to accept some level of side effects.”
The industry continues to market antipsychotics aggressively, leading analysts to question how drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration for about 1 percent of the population have become the pharmaceutical industry’s biggest sellers despite recent crackdowns.

“It’s the money,” says Dr. Jerome L. Avorn, a Harvard medical professor and researcher. “When you’re selling $1 billion a year or more of a drug, it’s very tempting for a company to just ignore the traffic ticket and keep speeding.”

Contentions that the new drugs are superior have been “greatly exaggerated,” says Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, chairman of the psychiatry department at Columbia University. Such assertions, he says, “may have been encouraged by an overly expectant community of clinicians and patients eager to believe in the power of new medications.”
“At the same time,” he adds, “the aggressive marketing of these drugs may have contributed to this enhanced perception of their effectiveness in the absence of empirical evidence.”
Others agree. “They sold the story they’re more safe, when they aren’t,” says Robert Whitaker, a journalist who has written two books about psychiatric medicines. “They had to cover up the problems. Right from the start, we got this false story.” End of NYTimes exerpt.

The antidepressant pharmaceutical industry takes in $14.6 Billion in revenue selling these drugs that don’t work. If a firm is taking in this type of money it is easy to settle multi-million dollar fraud lawsuits. The media, government, and medical industry are all working together to cover up the facts that antidepressants don’t work at all so the public is just dumbed down and uninformed on the subject. We commend the NYTimes for doing the research for this article. A truely ethical and independent FDA could stop this madness.