More Data Regarding Suicide and Chantix

The Food and Drug Administration has received information about numerous serious problems with Chantix, including suicidal thoughts and ideation, homicidal ideations, and hallucinations. The FDA received reports of 37 suicides and 491 cases in which people had suicidal thoughts. If history is any guide, the actual incidences are often more than 10 times what the FDA reports. In other words, these numbers are probably just the tip of the iceberg. Still, there is no indication from Pfizer that there will be a recall of Chantix.
Pfizer released the drug without any warning regarding these potential side effects. By January of 2008, the reports of psychological side effects, most notably suicidal actions and ideations, reached a critical mass and Pfizer added a warning to the label of Chantix about the potential risks of suicidal behavior and depression. This warning followed a November 2007 update to Chantix's "post-marketing experience" section which stated that there had been reports of depression, agitation, and suicidal behavior and ideation in patients on Chantix. The FDA now says it is "increasingly likely" that there is an association between Chantix and suicidal thoughts, actual suicide, depression and other psychiatric symptoms.

Love (Sex) and Other Drugs The Movie and Medicaid Fraud

The new movie Love & Other Drugs depics the unethical and illegal marketing activities of BigPharma. It shows mainly how Pfizer and Lilly pharmacuetical agents bribe doctors and medical practices with trips, money, alcohol and orgies all for thier products that don't work. It should be more of an eye opener to the general populace about fraud and pharma drug pushing for increased quotas and pharma agent perks. It is sick to see that Zoloft and Prozac have been marketed just like soup, or telecom services. It is all marketing for shelf space and personal income. This goes along with massive prescriptions by doctors across the US in an ongoing medicaid fraud investigation.

The following is a recent article from Lincoln Journal Star regarding massive prescriptions from doctors in Nebraska
The Cost of Mental Health? Pricey
November 24, 2010
By Mark Andersen
Lincoln Journal Star

Excerpt:
One Lincoln psychiatrist. Six mental health medications prescribed to Medicaid patients over two years. Cost to taxpayers: $2,927,872.
Newspapers around the country have picked up on the lists of Medicaid providers requested last April by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who suggested large numbers should spark official inquiries… In May, state Medicaid Director Vivianne Chaumont reported which Nebraska Medicaid providers wrote the most prescriptions for 11 types of medications during 2008 and 2009. Six of the drugs -- Abilify, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Geodon, Risperdal and Risperidone -- accounted for the bulk of the costs on Nebraska's lists.

Four Lincoln mental health providers were among the top 10 for those six drugs:

* Dr. Walter Duffy, a Lincoln psychiatrist, $2,927,872 (9,010 prescriptions), including more than $1.5 million for Abilify alone.

* Dr. Rafael Tatay, a Lincoln psychiatrist, $1,503,998 (3,998 prescriptions), including $473,700 for Abilify.

* Dr. Stephen Paden, a Lincoln psychiatrist, $587,917 (1,695 prescriptions), including $426,257 for Abilify.

* Dr. Pratap Pothuloori, a Lincoln psychiatrist, $545,487 (1,751 prescriptions), including $192,277 for Abilify.

In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Grassley cited the example of a Florida doctor who wrote 96,685 prescriptions for mental health drugs in 21 months.

"This trend is found again and again across the states," Grassley wrote, "suggesting that top prescribers stand out not only against other providers in their state, but against the very top prescribers in those states."

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.