Meltdown in the Drug Industry - Speaking of Toxic Assets...

[ensho]

http://counterpunch.com/rosenberg03202009.html


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Pharma is melting down like Wall Street--and for the same reasons.

Toxic assets? Unsafe drugs. Ponzi schemes? Safety studies that were there were never there to begin with. Indecent profits footed by taxpayers? Medicaid fraud and "patent drugs." Mayday mergers? Pfizer/Wyeth; Merck/Schering-Plough. New "business models"? Biologics and vaccines.

In fact while the nation gasps at AIG and Freddie losses, pharma is running a strong second with Merck paying out $4.85 billion for Vioxx, Pfizer $2.3 billion for Bextra (and $430 million for Neurontin) and Lilly $1.4 billion for Zyprexa.

After this month's Wyeth v. Levine Supreme Court ruling, settlements over fen phen, Baycol, Vytorin, Ketek, Avandia, Bextra, Celebrex, Prempro, Premarin, Zyprexa, Risperdal, Seroquel, Lexapro, Celexa, Cymbalta, Fosamax, Boniva, Effexor, Lyrica, Geodon, (pant, pant), Ablify, Zoloft, Paxil, Prozac, Chantix, Singulair, Ambien and Trovan should be forthcoming.

Of course you can blame the Bush Administration's FDA packed with industry vets who waved their buddies' new drugs through after six week trials for the iffy drugs on the market. You can blame ghostwriters, "bought" doctors and direct to consumer disease advertising for getting them in medicine cabinets and on formularies.

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Still, the days when pharma reps would drive up to the state mental hospital and just ask for the order -- like the Pfizer reps who made over 200 visits to Western State Hospital in Tacoma, WA in four years where 118 prescriptions of controversial Geodon are written a day--are over.

Gone are the days when reps could just slide by the nursing home to see how their Seroquel, Risperdal and Zyprexa scripts were doing -- elderly warning label notwithstanding -- or collect their Post Traumatic Stress Disorder veteran "dividend" from psychoactive drugs for combat and after combat.

Gone are the antipsychotic and SSRI "deficiencies" of the poor, mentally challenged and children on Medicaid now that the drugs are causing diabetes and the states are suing.

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In February, New York-based Forest Laboratories was charged with illegally marketing antidepressants Celexa and Lexapro, burying a damning FDA study and paying Dr. Jeffrey Bostic, director of school psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, $750,000 a year to promote illegal pediatric drug uses in US District Court in Boston.
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thank goodness.

[MannyGoldstein]

1. SSRIs Don't Particularly Cause Diabetes

They often cause *some* weight gain, but they aren't in the same league as antipsychotics.

Many pharmaceuticals are very, very useful. Some are very, very bad. We need better efforts to make sure that the useful ones are used, and the bad ones are not.

[azul]

2. Spotlight on business-government corruption, where is the media?

Exciting new levels of bad business acumen under the Bushco banner. But still too boring to make past the business editors' news selections? Wouldn't be prudent to mess with big pharmers, I guess.

[PVnRT]

3. So, you think it's a good thing pharmaceutical companies are collapsing?

I suppose I could grind up my own pig pancreases to make my own insulin...

Of course, none of this has a thing to do with the culture of deregulation that Reagan started in the 1980's.

It's good that they are getting slapped for the abuses they've done, and hopefully Obama will strengthen the FDA.