Lawsuits - the Cost of Doing Business

"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.”

A New York Times report reviews what has been accomplished by multiple civil and criminal lawsuits against Big Pharma companies that have relied almost entirely on fraud to market industry's worst pharmaceuticals--antipsychotic drugs--which have become industry's most profitable cash cow.

"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."

But these lawsuits are no deterrent to crime, as Jerome Avorn, MD, Harvard medical professor correctly observes : "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.”

Full Article and Source:
Lawsuits, Just the Cost of Criminal Marketing of Antipsychotic Drugs

See Also:
Side Effects May Include Lawsuits