Another Year of Opacity and Ghostwriting for the Drug Industry

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http://www.counterpunch.org/rosenberg12312010.html

New Year's Edition

December 31, 2010 - January 2, 2011

Another Year of Opacity and Ghostwriting for the Drug

Industry

Interests in Conflict

By MARTHA

ROSENBERG

At the annual American Psychiatric Association

meeting in New Orleans this summer, 200 protestors chanted "no

conflicts of interest" and held up photos of individual doctors

outside the convention center. Inside the hall, their charges

were verified.

The meeting's Daily Bulletin disclosed that the APA president

himself, Alan Schatzberg, has 15 links to drug companies

including stock ownership and serving on a speakers bureau.

Doctors on other speaker bureaus like Shire's Ann Childress and

Wyeth's Claudio Soares gave presentations and workshops that --

surprise! -- extolled company drugs.

And signing books, side by side, was the duo now accused of

penning an entire book for the drug industry: Alan Schatzberg

and Nemeroff.

This month ProPublica and the New York Times report that

Schatzberg and Nemeroff's book, Recognition and Treatment of

Psychiatric Disorders: A Pharmacology Handbook for Primary Care,

may be the first entirely drug industry-approved textbook ever.

Published in 1999, the book's preface says it was funded by an

unrestricted education grant to Scientific Therapeutics

Information through London-based GlaxoKline (GSK).

Scientific Therapeutics Information of Springfield, NJ is the

same medical publishing company that spun Vioxx.

Schatzberg was investigated by the Senate in 2008 which found "a

lack of consistency" between what he earned from drug companies

and what he reported to Stanford where he continues to head the

psychiatry department. He owns $6 million of stock in a company

he co-founded, Corcept Therapeutics, which sought FDA approval

for a psychiatric drug despite Schatzberg's APA position.

Nemeroff, for his part, left Emory University in disgrace after

a 2008 Congressional investigation unearthed $1.2 million in

drug industry income, his $9 million NIH grant was terminated (a

rare occurrence) and he was banned from further NIH grants for

two years. But he resurfaced as head of the psychiatry

department at the University of Miami in 2009 after the medical

school dean, Pascal Goldschmidt, was assured by crony

Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health

(NIMH), that Nemeroff could still draw NIH money, according to

the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was payback for when

Nemeroff got Insel a job, say observers. Nemeroff still sits on

NIH scientific panels reviewing others' grant applications,

ensuring further cronyism.

Ghostwriting, of course, solves the

"Company-Says-Company's-Product-Is-Great" problem and increases

the chance of a paper's publication in a journal. It helps

"authors"' careers and may even spur their individual

prescribing habits since studies show doctors prescribe more of

a drug they are paid to promote.

But the consumer version, unbranded advertising, is also

effective: radio and TV commercials posing as public service

announcements that push "awareness" of diseases like ADHD,

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS) or

Excessive Sleepiness (ES) and drive worriers to sites where they

can self-diagnose with simple quizzes.

Meanwhile, the consumer version of bought doctors is "Astroturf"

or patient front groups like the "grassroots" National Alliance

on Mental Illness (NAMI), investigated by Congress for drug

industry links. These bought patients flash mob the FDA with sob

stories when an expensive drug is up for approval and lobby

Medicaid to not substitute less expensive drugs, inflating

entitlement program and insurance premium costs for industry's

benefit.

In the war against drug industry duplicity, company employees

are increasingly reporting misdeeds thanks to provisions that

entitle whistleblowers to 15 and even 30 percent of fraud

settlement sums, in some cases. And last month the Justice

Department filed the first criminal, not civil, charges against

a the drug industry operative, s, a former VP and

assistant general counsel at GlaxoKline. But as long as

politicians like former Louisiana Rep. Tauzin, who headed

the industry trade group PhRMA, and former CDC director

Gerberding, now head of Merck vaccines, are willing to parlay a

career's worth of knowledge and relationships to sell product,

the government is essentially fighting itself.

Martha

Rosenberg can be reached at: martharosenberg@...