Drug Companies Pay Off Government to Sell More Anti-Psychotic Drugs
The drug industry knows how to market their drugs. For the big named drugs they spend billions of dollars on consumer advertising, but to sell medicines that treat schizophrenia the companies focus on a smaller group of customers, the state officials who oversee treatment for patients with mental illness. These patients make states among the largest buyers of antipsychotic drugs.
Past evidence has shown, since the mid-1990s a group of major drug companies had campaigned to convince state officials that a new generation of drugs--with names like Risperdal, Zyprexa and Seroquel--was superior to older and much cheaper antipsychotics. The campaign has led a dozen states, including Texas, to adopt guidelines for treating schizophrenia, which in turn made it almost impossible for doctors to prescribe anything but the new drugs, which resulted in transforming the new medicines into blockbusters.
To adopt the guidelines, major drug companies wined and dined different state officials and urged them to follow the lead of Texas, according to evidence found. Evidence written in a report also showed that in May 2001, as Pennsylvania was deciding whether to adopt the Texas guidelines, a pharmaceutical company paid $4,000 to fly two mental health officials to New Orleans, where they ate at an elegant restaurant with the company executives. These reports show a lot more money was given out to other mental health officials at different times.
With all this evidence floating around, it started to stir up some concerns about the drug companies new generation of the drugs, called atypical antipsychotics, used to treat a variety of mental illnesses. The concerns were coming from a joint panel made up of the American Diabetes Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, and the North American Association for the Study of Obesity who said, mental patients who take these drugs may be increasing their risk for obesity, diabetes and high cholesterol--all which lead to heart disease.
The joint panel has issued a statement asking doctors to screen all patients on these medications for signs that could lead to any of these diseases, stating there is considerable evidence from studies conducted.
New York Times February 1, 2004
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