Johnson & Johnson created a powerful drug, promoted it illegally & covered up side effects [View all]

[nationalize the fed]

America's Most Admired Lawbreaker



Huffington Post Highline: Over the course of 20 years, Johnson & Johnson created a powerful drug, promoted it illegally to children and the elderly, covered up the side effects and made billions of dollars. This is the inside story

A 15 Chapter expose by Steven Brill

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/miracleindustry/americas-most-admired-lawbreaker/



Letter From the Editors

At some point over the course of this massive, magisterial 15-chapter story, you will get angry, and you will stay angry. It may happen when you learn that Johnson & Johnson handed out promotional Legos to pediatricians so that they’d be more likely to prescribe a drug called Risperdal to children with behavioral problems, although the FDA had repeatedly told the company not to market it to children. It may happen when you read that a team of scientists and company executives decided to massage the numbers on a study showing that Risperdal puts little boys at risk of developing large breasts—46DD breasts in the case of Austin Pledger, whom you can see in this video. Or it may happen at one of a few dozen other points in this 20-year history of the drug, which ended up being a blockbuster for J&J even if you account for $3 billion and counting in legal claims.

And that’s what's so impressive about this project by Steven Brill, one of our era’s best reporters. We all either take prescription drugs or love someone who does. Many of us depend on them to live. We may be aware that drug companies occasionally release bad products or take pains to get around government regulations. But we still know far too little about the culture of the industry that produced the Risperdal scandal, and who the people are behind these life-and-death decisions. Steven has made all of that clear. You read the damning emails, you examine the internal documents, you see the close relationship between J&J salespeople and their hired scientists and feel as if you’re inside the room when plaintiffs’ attorneys figure out a way to fight back.

Rarely are systems—giant, seemingly impenetrable bureaucracies—laid this bare and made this human. It’s thrilling.

Then, there’s the presentation aspect of it. In order to show you why people made the choices they did, and what incentives they were operating under, we’re telling the story in Dickensian detail—one chapter a day, for 15 days. You need to get to know the people involved, to see how they were shaped by the system over the course of years, and to understand how hard it is for even modest victories to be achieved on behalf of those who were hurt by Johnson & Johnson. We also want this project to be as democratic as possible. We’re providing dozens of critical documents so you can take in the full context and decide for yourself how fair we’re being. The hope is that we’re creating a new kind of experience for readers: one that combines the comprehensiveness of a book with the interactivity and immediacy of the web.

Anyway, you can tell we’re proud of this one. The pharmaceutical industry deserves this kind of scrutiny. Now, let’s see what comes of it.

Thanks for reading,
Greg Veis and Rachel Morris

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Chapter One of Fifteen

Backstage at Johnson & Johnson

On May 20, about 100 stock analysts gathered in the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to hear good news from top executives at Johnson & Johnson: The company had 10 new drugs in the pipeline that might achieve more than a billion dollars in annual sales.

For 129 years, New Brunswick has served as the headquarters of J&J, America’s seventh most valuable public company. With consumer products from Band-Aids to baby powder, Neutrogena to Rogaine, Listerine to Visine, Aveeno to Tylenol and Sudafed to Splenda, Johnson & Johnson is the biggest and, according to multiple surveys, most admired
corporation in the world’s most prosperous industry—healthcare.

But the real money—about 80 percent of its revenue and 91 percent of its profit—comes not from those consumer favorites, but from Johnson & Johnson’s high-margin medical devices: artificial hips and knees, heart stents, surgical tools and monitoring devices; and from still higher-margin prescription drugs targeting Crohn’s disease (Remicade), cancer (Zytiga, Velcade), schizophrenia (Risperdal), diabetes (Invokana), psoriasis (Stelara), migraines (Topamax), heart disease (Xarelto) and attention deficit disorder (Concerta).

How J&J Makes Its Money...snip


...The Cost of Doing Business

Johnson & Johnson has already settled thousands of cases involving illicit promotion of Risperdal, including Department of Justice civil and criminal complaints, for a total fast approaching $3 billion.

But on the morning of the analysts’ meeting, the company was still manning the battle stations with squadrons of lawyers fighting off another 4,200 cases, snip More>
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/miracleindustry/americas-most-admired-lawbreaker/


Steven Brill

Steven is a veteran journalist and media entrepreneur. He has won two National Magazine Awards and his last book, America’s Bitter Pill, was a New York Times bestseller.


See also: Johnson and Johnson- Illegal Marketing of Risperdal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_%26_Johnson#Illegal_Marketing_of_Risperdal