Pfizer to Pay $142 Million for Drug Fraud
March 26th, 2010Pocket lint.
Via: CBC News:
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has been ordered to pay $142 million US in damages for fraudulently marketing gabapentin, an anti-seizure drug marketed under the name Neurontin.
A federal jury in Boston ruled Thursday that Pfizer fraudulently marketed the drug and promoted it for unapproved uses. The jury sided with California-based Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc. and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, the first to try a gabapentin case against Pfizer.
Data revealed in a string of U.S. lawsuits indicates the drug was promoted by the drug company as a treatment for for pain, migraines and bipolar disorder — even though it wasn’t effective in treating these conditions and was actually toxic in certain cases, according to the Therapautics Initiative, an independent drug research group at the University of British Columbia.
The trials forced the company to release all of its studies on the drug, including the ones it kept hidden.
A new analysis of those unpublished trials by the Therapeutics Initiative suggests that gabapentin works for one out of every six or eight people who use it, at best. The review also concluded that one in eight people had an adverse reaction to the drug.
“The much larger majority of people will not get any benefit and many of them will have chronic neurotoxicity or poisoning of the brain,” said Dr. Tom Perry of the Therapeutics Initiative.
