Eli Lilly and Co. has agreed to add four new senior positions to “promote highly ethical and compliant behaviors” as part of a settlement of two lawsuits arising from the company’s illegal marketing and promotion of several drugs.
Grassley, who is the ranking Republican on the US Senate Finance Committee, is investigating the relationship between WebMD and drugmakers after learning the web site is running a TV ad that encourage people to take a depression-screening test sponsored by Eli Lilly, which sells Cymbalta.
An Alaska attorney who has gone up against a drug giant and won has a new target. Jim Gottstein is taking on psychiatry in Alaska for over-prescribing medicine to children. Gottstein was the attorney who forced Eli Lilly to pay more than $1 billion in settlements over the anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa. He also heads up a group called the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights, which filed the lawsuit. The group claims over-prescribing is disabling children for life.
There really should be a special place in hell for pharmaceutical manufacturers who make money by exploiting the weakest and most vulnerable of patients: old people with dementia…. Johnson & Johnson paid kickbacks to the nation’s largest nursing home pharmacy to increase the number of elderly patients taking the antipsychotic Risperdal and several other medications, according to a complaint filed Friday by the office of the United States attorney in Boston.
Many states have sued over the cost of atypical antipsychotic drugs, especially the cost of treating the diabetes and metabolic disorders they cause, which has decimated Medicaid budgets. Yet now the FDA gives pharma the Christmas present of approving Seroquel and Zyprexa for children and hence, Medicaid reimbursement even as its own Division of Pharmacovigilance (DPV) reported a “a direct association between adverse metabolic effects of treatment with atypical antipsychotics” and children!