Monday, April 14, 2014

Drugging children

All it takes is one honest person and some journalists to tell his story. The man in the photo by Brian Blanco below is Greg Thorpe, a former sales rep for Smith Glaxo Kline, who
alleged the company encouraged doctors to prescribe antidepressants to children when the FDA had not approved the drugs for pediatric use. Glaxo agreed to pay $3 billion to the federal government to settle the case,
according to a story in today's Denver Post by Christopher Osher and Jennifer Brown.


They write,
Pharmaceutical companies wooed academic leaders, ghostwrote articles, suppressed damaging health data and lavished doctors with gifts to make prescribing powerful psychotropic drugs to children a blockbuster profit center, a trail of lawsuits over the past two decades shows.

As a Colorado Springs sales representative for GlaxoSmithKline, Greg Thorpe tried to put a stop to the practice. His manager wrote him up for not being a "team player" after he objected to the free spa treatments and pedicures, hunting trips, tickets to sports games and skiing junkets that his supervisors expected him to give out to doctors and others.

Thorpe said he became disgusted with Glaxo's all-expense-paid trips to Jamaica and Hawaii for physicians and their guests to train them how to give speeches touting the drugs.

Some speakers were paid more than $500,000 annually to talk up the benefits of treating children with antidepressants when the FDA had never approved the drugs for such uses, documents show. The company budgeted as much as $6.8 million annually to entertain doctors in luxury sky-box suites at sporting venues, according to the documents.

Thorpe left the company where he had worked 24 years and later filed his lawsuit. It took nine years for government prosecutors to join the suit.

In 2012, Glaxo agreed to settle. Thorpe's cut for helping the government recuperate money drained from the Medicare, Medicaid and veteran programs was $20 million.

Glaxo was not the only company to use such tactics. Other firms pushed for off-label uses of newer antipsychotics, known as atypicals, contending they worked better than older versions.

During the 1990s, Johnson & Johnson received FDA approval for its new antipsychotic drug, Risperdal, to treat schizophrenia in adults. But the agency repeatedly rejected J&J's efforts to obtain approval for children.

The company had not proposed any child or adolescent psychiatric disorders that Risperdal would treat, the FDA noted in one denial letter. In one meeting, FDA officials worried that using the drug to treat conduct disorder in children would amount to creating a "chemical straitjacket." It was not until 2006 that FDA officials approved the drug for the limited use of treating autism in children.
Read more here.

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