The two biggest drug settlements in U.S. history occur in 2009—Eli Lilly’s $1.42 billion for mismarketing Zyprexa and Pfizer’s $2.3 billion for the Bextra, Geodon, Lyrica, and Zyvox frauds. And the Supreme Court ruled people can sue if they’re harmed by a prescription drug even if it had FDA approval.
No wonder Wyeth, Pfizer, Merck, and Schering-Plough formed defensive mergers in 2009, the former timed to knock out headlines about the Bextra settlement.
High-profile suicides also occurred in 2009 prompting the FDA to add black-box warnings to the asthma drugs Singulair, Accolate, and Zyflo and to the antismoking drugs Chantix and Zyban. Authorities also questioned the use of antidepressants given to 80 percent of Iraq war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
The open secret of industry-subsidized journal articles and continuing marketing—sorry, medical-education courses (CMEs)—also came under congressional investigation in 2009, as did the drug industry ties to faux grassroots groups like the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and researchers like Harvard’s Joseph Biederman, M.D.
Clearly the drug industry needs New Year’s resolutions—and to honor them better than the corporate-integrity agreements with the government that it keeps breaking.
1. Our reps will wait their turn in medical offices and refrain from waltzing in front of ailing patients because they think their time is more valuable. They will NOT get their own room in medical offices with laptop stations, ice water, and swivel chairs or chatter about the stress of sales quotas on their cells in the waiting room.
Female reps will not sell with cleavage and spike heels. Male reps will not high five each other or call the doctor “dude.” Reps who sold drugs that were later withdrawn will be banished from doctors’ offices.
2. In addition to admitting to the Justice Department we mismarketed Seroquel, Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Geodon and looted Medicaid budgets, we will cease selling the actual drugs. We admit that even though forgiveness is cheaper than permission for us, it isn’t for the millions of children, poor, and institutionalized people who develop lifelong diabetes and metabolic disorders from the drugs.
3. We will stop upgrading anxiety to depression, depression to bipolar disorder, and bipolar disorder to “treatment-resistant depression” in order 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.
We will admit that our cocktails of depression/bipolar/mood brightener/mood stabilizer drugs occlude the fact that they do not work individually, they raise insurance rates, and they create withdrawal symptoms in patients who might have been fine before taking the drugs.
4. We will admit that hormone therapy increases the risk of breast cancer by 26 percent, heart attacks by 29 percent, stroke by 41 percent, and doubles the risk of blood clots and dementia. We will further admit that hormone therapy is associated with lung, ovarian, endometrial, and gall bladder cancers, malignant melanoma, asthma, lupus, scleroderma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, urinary incontinence, and hearing loss—and the only researchers promoting it are making money off it.
5. We will stop trying to replace the hormone market with a thinning-bones market through an osteoporosis-scare campaign and admit that we made up the term “osteopenia” at the same time we planted bone density measuring machines in medical offices. Nor will we keep recommending seizure drugs for fibromyalgia pain in women who don’t know they have yet to make up for shrinking hormone and antidepressant markets.
6. We will stop replacing $600-a-month blockbuster drugs that insurers no longer wave through with vaccines and biologics no one wants or needs. We will give up the attempt to vaccinate boys with Gardasil when it didn’t even work with girls or ship it to poor countries plagued with HIV, malaria, or dengue fever. We will stop selling biologics like Humira, which cause cancer and infections like TB, to perfectly healthy college kids with Crohn’s disease-scare campaigns.
7. We will buy every child under 12 in America a bicycle or skate board as reparations for our reign of terror in treating them for depression, bipolar disorder, ADD, ADHD, mixed manias, oppositional and conduct disorders, sleep and mood disorders, schizophrenia, agitation, anxiety, and other “psychopathologies” they may not have even had.
8. Instead of storming Capitol Hill when the government threatens to cut off our livestock antibiotics gravy train, we promise to develop safe antibiotics for people. And speaking of safe, we will renounce the hormones, growth enhancers, and pesticides we dump on factory farms, which sicken animals, the environment, farm workers, and food consumers.
9. We will stop insulting the public’s intelligence by claiming that everyone, including people without high cholesterol, should take Crestor because we want to sell statins. We will stop implying Vytorin works just because some have forgotten we sat on studies that show it doesn’t work.
10.We will stop rolling out celebrities like Sally Field and Brooke Shield to hawk drugs and acknowledge the celebrity drug-spokespersons the public remembers most are Michael Jackson, Anna Nicole Smith, and Brittany Murphy.
Martha Rosenberg is a writer who lives in Chicago.
