How Parasite Corporations Like Pfizer are Chucking U.S. Citizenship to Escape from Taxes

AlterNet / By Lynn Stuart Parramore
May 11, 2014 |


Let’s say you’re a giant American corporation like Pfizer, founded in Brooklyn way back in 1849. The fact that you exist and make a profit is largely due to the generous support of U.S. taxpayers. It’s the taxpayers, after all, who pony up for the National Institutes of Health, which does the basic research you rely on to develop drugs on which you make gigantic sums. And it’s the taxpayers who shell out large amounts of money to protect your patents, broker trade treaties in your favor, and protect your interests around the world in international negotiations. The same ones who pay for the public education of your employees and the costly infrastructure—the highways, airports, etc.—needed to move your products. The very folks who pay the billions in federal contracts you receive.

So what do you do? Do you pay your share of taxes to return some of this largesse?

Oh, no. You vigorously lobby for lower taxes and leave no loophole unexploited. You are not satisfied to have received $2.2 billion in federal tax refunds from 2010-2012 while raking in $43 billion worldwide even though 40 percent of your sales are in America. You’re not ashamed in the least that in 2012, you stashed $73 billion in profits offshore on which you paid zilch in U.S. income taxes.

Your greed and irresponsibility demand still more. So you decide to get out of paying a single nickel to the country that feeds you. You rig up an overseas purchase so you can “officially” relocate to a place with a lower tax rate and in doing so deliver a giant middle finger to your fellow Americans.

Last week, New York-based drugmaker Pfizer finally admitted why it wants to buy British drugmaker AstraZeneca, which is based in London. Sure, it will get some experimental drugs out of the deal, but that’s not what it’s really after. What Pfizer wants is to cheat American taxpayers.
Ian Read, CEO Hall of Shame

Pfizer is willing to shell out $100 billion for AstraZeneca so it can get a new tax home and lower its tax rate from the roughly 27 percent it paid last year, to the UK tax rate, which is now 21 percent and will drop down to 20 percent in 2015.

Let’s pause for a moment to consider the CEO of Pfizer, Ian Read, who is orchestrating this move. According to Forbes , he is a poster boy for grossly overblown executive salaries, hauling in almost $19 million bucks last year. Read looted the company for this obscene amount of money, despite the fact that under his leadership, profits actually declined in 2013. So instead of trying to make money by doing productive things, like, for example, investing in research and development for new products, Read is looking for shortcuts that are less about doing anything useful for society and more about plain destroying it.

Fiduciary Duty to Cheat?

Right on cue, Read trotted out the predictable nonsense that he has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize value for Pfizer shareholders, and therefore must make the tax-dodging move.

Actually, that is baloney, as economist William Lazonick has repeatedly pointed out.

Shareholder value ideology is merely an absurdity that has been spread through American business schools since the go-go 1980s — a specious justification that allows executives to turn corporations into predatory extraction machines at the expense of stakeholders like workers and taxpayers. The fiduciary-duty-to-shareholders argument would be laughed out of court in nearly all circumstances (such as the exceptional case when a company is going to be sold). The reason for this is simple. Any idiot can figure out that sometimes a company must take short-term profit hits in order to do things that are in the long-term interest of the company.

Shareholder value ideology is only about boosting stock prices in the short-term, which often depends on moves that decrease the company’s value over the longer time horizon,as Lazonick has tirelessly pointed out. So Read is utterly full of it. But things have gotten so out of hand in corporate America that executives now actually believe, as hedge fund legend Jim Chanos has observed, that they have a fiduciary duty to cheat .

There was a time when an American CEO would not dare to officially state the kind of complete disregard for the public that Read is expressing. We shouldn't underestimate the importance of shaming such anti-social CEOs for daring to do so now. Social norms matter for things like executive compensation and the consideration of stakeholders rather than just shareholders (people who own stock). Read should be made to feel that there is nothing normal, or acceptable, about his twisted logic.

A Modest Proposal

Read said that Pfizer would keep its corporate headquarters in the U.S. (a very swanky affair on 42nd Street in Manhattan) and keep its listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Which essentially means that his company will still be located in the place where it will not be paying any taxes. Which would make Pfizer a giant, blood-sucking parasite.

Of course, part of the problem is that mega-companies in other industries, like Boeing, actually pay no taxes at all, and that makes the Pfizers very upset. If other multinationals get off scott-free, why can’t they?

H. David Rosenbloom, an attorney at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington and director of the international tax program at New York University's law school, explained his view of Pfizer’s plans to Bloomberg: "This is basically an opportunity to go outside the U.S. and still sell in the U.S. and strip the tax base…If we ever had a legislature in the United States, we could do something about this, but I don't expect to live that long."

Which brings us to the question of what can be done about this looting. Some Democrats, like Sen. Carl Levin, are making noises about curbing offshore tax moves in the wake of Pfizer’s announcement. Will anything happen? Doubtful. Passing any meaningful legislation on international tax policy, as Rosenbloom points out, is all but impossible in a deadlocked Congress.

Since countries around the world are basically in a race to the bottom to lower corporate tax rates, causing companies to shift their tax burden by pretending to set up shop in places like Ireland, Switzerland and Bermuda, it may be that trying to collect corporate taxes is going to be a futile exercise in the future. Perhaps a better way, as Thomas Piketty suggests in his recent book, Capital in the 21st Century, is simply to tax individual income and wealth. We could start with Ian Read ( and don’t tell me he’s Scottish)— he’s living in the U.S. and doing his business here, so he should be paying taxes.

Here’s another idea, just for the heck of it: How about if the citizens simply occupy Pfizer’s headquarters in New York? Let us not forget that in 2010, after receiving millions of tax breaks to create jobs in New York City, Pfizer turned around and pinkslipped hundreds of employees . If Pfizer doesn’t want to pay any taxes in the U.S., then let's reclaim all the stuff we paid for, and consider Pfizer headquarters to be stolen goods. The fancy artwork in the company gallery would fetch a nice price at auction, and the office space could rent at a premium. An effort to pay back companies like Pfizer in their own coin might remind them that they can’t simply go on looting indefinitely. At some point, the looters may get looted.

Published clinical trials shown to be misleading

Comparison of internal and public reports about Pfizer’s drug Neurontin reveals many discrepancies 
By Rachel Ehrenberg
ScienceNews
January 29, 2013

Editor's note: This story was updated on January 31 with comment from Pfizer.

A rare peek into drug company documents reveals troubling differences between publicly available information and materials the company holds close to its chest. In comparing public and private descriptions of drug trials conducted by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, researchers discovered discrepancies including changes in the number of study participants and inconsistent definitions of protocols and analyses.

The researchers, led by Kay Dickersin, director of the Center for Clinical Trials at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, gained access to internal Pfizer reports after a lawsuit made them available. Dickersin and her colleagues compared the internal documents with 10 publications in peer-reviewed journals about randomized trials of Pfizer’s anti-epilepsy drug gabapentin (brand name Neurontin) that tested its effectiveness for treating other disorders. The results, the researchers say, suggest that the published trials were biased and misleading, even though they read as if standard protocols were followed. That lack of transparency could mean that clinicians prescribe drugs based on incomplete or incorrect information.

"We could see all of the biases right in front of us all at once,” says Dickersin, who was an expert witness in the suit, which was brought by a health insurer against Pfizer. Pfizer lost the case in 2010, and a judge ruled it should pay $142 million in damages for violating federal racketeering laws in promoting Neurontin for treating migraines and bipolar disorder.

Pfizer had in 2004 settled a case and paid $430 million in civil fines and criminal penalties for promoting Neurontin for unapproved use.

The study's results, published January 29 in PLOS Medicine, show that publications about drug trials don’t always reflect the research that was conducted, says Lisa Bero of the University of California, San Francisco, an expert in methods to assess bias in scientific publishing “We know that entire studies don’t get published and that what does get published is more likely to make a drug look favorable,” she says. “This adds another layer.”

In three of the 10 trials, the numbers of study participants in the published results didn’t match those in the internal documents. In one case, data from 40 percent of the participants were not included in the published trial. Dickersin and her colleagues also tried to directly compare several other aspects of the studies. But they found so many differences in definitions and in the analyses and protocols that the comparisons turned out to be difficult, she says.

“When we tried to draw a flow chart of who dropped out [of a trial], who stayed in — well, we couldn’t do it,” she says. “You can’t even judge if they did the right thing if you can’t figure out what they did.”

Pfizer did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The company outlined its policies for making clinical trial data public in a statement provided to Science News on January 30, concluding that the company reports on studies "in an objective, accurate, balanced and complete manner." The Johns Hopkins analysis highlights the need for standard definitions and protocols and greater transparency in reporting clinical trials, says Bero, a longtime advocate of making raw data from clinical trials publicly available. “You’re kind of held hostage to the paper that you are reading,” she says.

Tamoxifen Makes Women Live Longer (Says Pfizer, AstraZeneca)

 The medical establishment, guided by the corrupt profiteering of Big Pharma, makes sick people sicker and kills more people than the diseases they "attempt" (profit from) to cure.--jef

+++++

Pfizer’s Elixir of Youth?
by MARTHA ROSENBERG


It was a great moment in Pharma funded physician “education.” At a symposium at the American Psychiatric Association’s 2010 meeting called “Mood, Memory and Myths: What Really Happens at Menopause,” two Wyeth/Pfizer funded speakers tried to resurrect the benefits of cancer-linked hormone therapy. But the mostly-female audience was having none of it: what can we do about our “tamoxifen brain” from the cancer we already have, they wanted to know.

Women are to be forgiven if they are cynical about this week’s news about the cancer drug tamoxifen saving lives. Since the 1940s women were told they needed to be on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for the rest of their lives only to find in 2002 it was causing breast cancer, heart disease, strokes and blood clots. Studies that looked as solid as this week’s tamoxifen study assured women that lifelong HRT would prevent heart disease, dementia and other blights –when it turned out to be just the opposite.

The harm from HRT, recommended by the medical mainstream for decades, was so dramatic, when women quit HRT in 2002, the incidence of US breast cancer fell 15 percent among women with estrogen-fed cancer. Fourteen thousand women who were expected to get breast cancer didn’t because they eliminated the source, said news reports. Rather than a “cure” for breast cancer, this was a literal “cause.” Unfortunately, women, their clinicians and the medical press have already forgotten this man-made cause of cancer and HRT is making a comeback.

Why should women be cynical about this week’s study in the Lancet that finds women who stay on the blockerbuster cancer drug Nolvadex/tamoxifen for 10 years instead of the usual five years are less likely to die and have cancer recur? (Inspiring some to already suggest women should stay on tamoxifen, “for life.”)

The first reason is because the study was partially funded by AstraZeneca who makes Nolvadex or tamoxifen. AstraZeneca, formerly Zeneca, co-founded National Breast Cancer Awareness Month as a “public relations scam” says the Center for Media and Democracy’s SourceWatch, even as its parent company, ICI Pharmaceuticals/Imperial Chemicals Industries, manufactured pesticides and organophosphates linked to breast cancer. Some accused the drug giant of literally playing both sides of the street, especially since tamoxifen shares some chemical properties with endocrine disrupting pesticides.

The second reason for cynicism is: tamoxifen carries its own risks which are not such a great trade off (unless you are Big Pharma). “Treatment with 5 years of tamoxifen can cause side-effects such as endometrial cancer and thromboembolic disease and continuing tamoxifen for an additional 5 years is likely to increase these side-effects,” says the Lancet article. 3.1 percent of women undergoing the extra 5 years of tamoxifen therapy got endometrial cancer in the study versus 1.6 percent who did have extra years of the drug.

There is an increasing backlash among women breast cancer survivors against tamoxifen and such trade-offs. “My cancer had a one percent chance or recurring and I was told tamoxifen would cut my chances in half,” says Kay, a Chicago fitness instructor who underwent surgery and radiation for ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) at the age of 50. “That means if I exposed myself to the risks and side effects of tamoxifen, my chance of recurrence would be .5 percent. No thinking women would agree to that.”

And there is a another source of cynicism for women beyond the downside of tamoxifen and the external causes of cancer, including prescribed hormones, being ignored. In November the New England Journal of Medicine published a study estimating that mammograms have caused more than a million American women to be diagnosed with early stage breast cancers, in the last three decades, that would not have proved fatal if left undetected and untreated. The millions, perhaps billions, spent in health care dollars because of such overdiagnosis and overtreatment and the suffering of women have yet to be fully quantified.

“There is more money in treating breast cancer than preventing it,” declares Kay who says she studied profiteering on the disease or what she calls “Breast Cancer Inc” since her own diagnosis. “That is why they call DCIS which is stage 0, precancer–’cancer.‘ There is more money in treating it.”

Outsourcing the Drug Industry

As "Blockbuster Drug" Bubble Bursts, Big Pharma Takes Jobs Overseas

by MARTHA ROSENBERG

It is no consolation to the roughly one out of 600 families who lost their homes in the U.S. but Wall Street made a lot of money slicing and dicing mortgages it knew would implode, while hiding risks. Financial giants, like AIG, are still buzzing along and neither penalties or new laws will prevent a future crash, say financial analysts, because the risky business models have not really changed.

A similar Big Pharma bubble, leavened with risky blockbuster drugs that also blew up, is now bursting. Like Wall Street’s bundled high risk loans, the “tide” created by Big Pharma’s high risk drugs raised many ships during the 2000s from advertising, public relations and medical communication agencies to TV and radio stations, medical journals and doctor/pitchmen who shoveled in its marketing budgets. But now the joyride is over and Pharma is shedding jobs and settling billions in claims without changing its risky business model, like Wall Street.

In Europe, governments are no longer willing to pay the high prices for drugs that they once did say published reports and some countries are drafting laws making drug makers “prove their drugs are effective or risk having them dropped from the coverage list, or covered at a lower rate.” Imagine.

Germany has already saved 1.9 billion euros in 2011 by refusing to pay higher prices for drugs unless they are clearly superior to existing medicines, and Pharma worries that other countries will also get tough and want scientific proof for drug effectiveness instead of marketing and spin. 

In the U.S. and elsewhere, a drug only needs to be superior to no drug (placebo) to be approved by regulators–yet “new” is conveyed as “better than any drug to date” in advertising.  Some clinicians say Haldol, an inexpensive antipsychotic and lithium, a similar affordable bipolar drug are better than blockbuster antipyschotics and bipolar drugs that created Pharma’s 2000′s bubble.

Before the Vioxx scandal and major settlements over blockbuster drugs like Zyprexa, Bextra, Celebrex, Geodon and Seroquel, being a Pharma rep was probably the next best thing to working on Wall Street. Direct-to-consumer advertising did your pre-sell for you, and all you had to do was show up with your snappy Vytorin tote bag and samples case. Some Pharma reps had their own reception room with ice water, swivel chairs, and laptop ports at medical offices, and most waltzed in to see the doctor right in front of waiting and sick patients. (It didn’t hurt that reps were usually “hotties,” both men or women).

But, by 2011, the bloom had fallen off Pharma reps’ roses. The number of prescribers willing to see most reps fell almost 20 percent, the number refusing to see all reps increased by half, and eight million sales calls were “nearly impossible to complete,” reported ZS Associates.

Blockbuster drugs that were found to be unsafe after their big sales push or even withdrawn altogether, did not help the reps’ credibility with doctors. After the aggressively marketed hormone therapy was linked to high incidences of cancer, stroke and heart attack, Wyeth (now Pfizer) announced it was eliminating 1, 200 jobs and closing its Rouses Point, New York plant where Prempro products were manufactured.

As government and private insurers increasingly say, “You want us to cover what?” about expensive, dangerous drugs that are not even proven effective, Pharma bubble jobs are evaporating. Almost 20,000 jobs have vanished at AstraZeneca, Novartis and Pfizer in the last 12 months alone. (AstraZeneca scrapped 21,600 more since 2007). Meanwhile, Pharma is outsourcing more of its operations to poor countries.

Workers and people willing to be trial subjects are both a bargain in poor countries where many can’t understand drug risks or refuse them if they did (and most can’t afford the very drugs they help sell). In January the Argentinian Federation of Health Professionals accused drug maker GlaxoSmithKline of misleading participants and pressuring poor families into joining a trial for the Synflorix vaccine, which the company says protects against bacterial pneumonia and meningitis, reported CNN. In 2010, 10 deaths occurred during Pfizer and AstraZeneca drug trials at the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre which was ironically built for survivors of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, reports MSNBC. 3,878 workers perished in Bhopal when chemicals leaked at a Union Carbide pesticide plant.

Outsourcing drug manufacturing to cheap venues also contributes to Pharma’s cascade of “quality control” problems in which drugs are mislabeled, contaminated or otherwise made dangerous. It is speculated that Johnson & Johnson’s CEO William Weldon “was pushed to retire because of all of the quality issues at McNeil as well as with the company’s hip implant products, which have resulted in a raft of litigation,” reports FiercePharma.

Like the Wall Street bubble, the Pharma bubble was built on products that industry, but not the public, knew were risky, sold for quick profits. Now regulators are examining some of these “assets” more closely and with disturbing findings. The FDA now warns that bestselling statin drugs like Lipitor and Crestor, even approved for children, are linked to memory loss and diabetes associated with. The equally well selling proton pump inhibitors like Nexium and Prilosec for acid reflux disease (GERD) are now believed to increase the risk of bone fractures by 30 percent.

In March, the FDA even rejected a Merck drug that combines the active drug in Lipitor with the active drug in Zetia and Vytorin, a drug that Forbes calls Son of Vytorin. Vytorin (the father) was advertised to treat both food and family “sources of cholesterol” until results from a study that Merck and Schering-Plough appeared to withhold from regulators showed the drug had no effect on the buildup of plaque in the arteries (believed to correlate with heart attack and stroke). There was such a gap between marketing and science, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked the General Accounting Office to investigate why the FDA was approving “drugs that appear to have little to no effect in protecting lives and increasing health.”

Yet even as clouds develop over Pharma’s top-selling drugs, some say the FDA is too hard on new drugs, not too easy. “The FDA is impeding useful innovations in the U.S.,” says former FDA deputy commissioner Scott Gottlieb in the a Wall Street Journal oped, and lagging behind other countries. Former FDA commissioner Andrew Von Eschenbach, also writing in the WSJ, agrees. The FDA should improve U.S. drug competitiveness by allowing drugs “to be approved based on safety, with efficacy to be proven in later trials,” while the public is already taking the drugs. Isn’t that what’s happening now? (Insane!--jef)

Drugmakers have paid $8 billion in fraud fines

By Kelly Kennedy, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – The nation's largest drugmakers have paid at least $8 billion in fines for repeatedly defrauding Medicare and Medicaid over the past decade, but they remain in business with the federal government because they are often the sole suppliers of critical products, records show.

Pfizer, the maker of drugs that help alleviate arthritis and other ailments, has paid almost $3 billion in fines since 2002 and entered into three corporate integrity agreements with the Department of Health and Human Services aimed at preventing future fraud. It and other companies are fighting attempts by Congress to exclude them from government business because of their history of fraud.  Pfizer spent $12 million lobbying Congress in 2011.

Merck, another pharmaceutical giant, paid $1.6 billion in fines since 2008, Medicare and Justice Department records show, to resolve claims it was not paying proper rebates to the government.

Pfizer's 2009 settlement was for improperly promoting the use of drugs for purposes other than those for which they were approved by the government. Merck's 2008 settlement involved claims the company paid illegal kickbacks to health care providers in exchange for prescribing its drugs.

Government investigators say their hands are tied with the tools they have. They can exclude Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies from providing medications to Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries as punishment for bad behavior, but that would leave beneficiaries without drugs patented through a particular company.

Or they can fine the companies and force them to enter corporate integrity agreements that require government oversight and a promise not to defraud the government again — a promise that often goes unkept.

"We're seeing some of the big companies a second and third time," said Gregory Demske, assistant inspector general for legal affairs for Health and Human Services. "The corporate integrity agreement is not sufficient to deter further misconduct."

In addition, the cases are labor- and cost-intensive as the companies fight often for years to avoid an exclusion, Demske said.

To try to change that trend, the government announced in 2010 that, rather than exclude an entire company, investigators would go after individuals within a company. Demske said his organization, the Justice Department and the Food and Drug Administration have come up with some ideas to use within the scope of the rules — such as taking away a company's patent rights as a condition of a settlement. That could begin with cases being investigated now, he said.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, introduced a bipartisan bill that would make it easier for the government to find a middle ground, saying the law now forces "the inspector general to use all-or-nothing, mandatory exclusion penalties against corporations that have committed fraud." The bill would allow the exclusion of individuals from working with the government even after they've left the company where the fraud occurred.

Pharmaceutical companies altogether spent more than $200 million lobbying Congress in 2011, including $12 million spent by Pfizer. At least 12 pharmaceutical and medical device companies are lobbying specifically against a House bill, HR 675, that complements Grassley's.

None of the pharmaceutical companies —Abbott Laboratories, Pfizer or Bristol-Myers Squibb— contacted by USA TODAY responded to questions about their response to the government's proposed enforcement actions.

The industry's trade group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, says excluding an individual should occur only when there is "significant wrongdoing" that the individual knew about and did nothing to stop, said Matthew Bennett, the group's senior vice president.

The Creepy Ways Big Pharma Peddles its Drugs

Big Pharma uses ads that sow hypochondria, raise health fears and sell diseases to adults and their children. 

By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet
Posted on January 9, 2012

(Editor's Note: You can view the ads throughout the story and can click on the ad to enlarge it.)

It's no secret that advertising works. Big Pharma wouldn't spend over $4 billion a year on direct-to-consumer advertising if it didn't mean massive profits.

What is more unknown is why drug ads that sow hypochondria, raise health fears and "sell" diseases are often the most common--and effective--even when the drugs themselves are of questionable safety.

The nation's fourth most frequent drug ads in 2009 for were Cymbalta, making Eli Lilly $3.1 billion in one year, despite the antidepressant's links to liver problems and suicide. Pfizer spent $157 million advertising Lyrica for fibromyalgia in 2009, despite the seizure pill's links to life-threatening allergic reactions. The same year, it spent $107 million advertising the antidepressant Pristiq, even though it also had links to liver problems.

So, how does Pharma dupe us into using unsafe drugs? Today's drug ads, targeted directly to consumers since 1999, seem like they sell diseases and often cast women, children, the elderly and mentally ill in a bad light. But a quick look at ads before direct-to-consumer advertising (DTC) in medical journals shows that drug ads have always done so. It's just that patients didn't used to see them.

Here are some of Pharma's most offensive ad campaigns, then and now.

1. You're Sicker Than You Think

When psychiatric drugs first became popular for use in the general population, in the late 1960s, everyday personality problems became imbued with psychiatric labels. "Lady, your anxiety is showing (over a coexisting depression)," says a 1970 ad, showing an older, wrinkly woman in a bouffant wig with gigantic sunglasses and garish jewelry. "On the visible level, this middle-aged patient dresses to look too young, exhibits a tense, continuous smile and may have bitten nails or overplucked eyebrows," says the ad copy. "What doesn't show as clearly is the coexisting depression."

The ad, both sexist and ageist, suggests the woman needs the antidepressant and tranquillizer Triavil.

Another ad from 1968 shows a bored, upper-middle-class couple whose hauteur is also said to really be depression. "Do you have patients who try to hide frustration behind conformity?" says the ad for the antidepressant Aventyl HCl.

You'd think such demeaning ads would vanish with DTC advertising because people would be offended. But You're Sicker-Than-You-Think ads are alive and well since DTC advertising and even flowering.

A three-page consumer ad in the late 2000s similarly conveys that everyday psychological traits could actually be dire mental problems that require medication. If you are "talking too fast," "spending out of control," "sleeping less," "flying off the handle" and "buying things you don't need," you could be suffering from bipolar disorder said the ads, which appeared in magazines like People. And here you thought it was the coffee. Accompanying photos of a woman screaming into a phone and contorting her face are so extreme they could come out of the movie Halloween Part II, if the woman were holding a knife.

Psychiatric drugs are not just advertised for everyday personality problems. Pharma is pushing them for everyday pain conditions. Eli Lilly's original depression campaign for the antidepressant Cymbalta, "Depression Hurts," seems to anticipate its subsequent approval for pain conditions including back problems. Now ads tout Cymbalta as a "non-narcotic, once daily analgesic FDA approved for three indications across four different chronic pain conditions," as if it does not have severe controversial psychiatric risks including the suicide of volunteers who tested it.

And seizure and epilepsy drugs, known for major allergic and psychiatric reactions, are also becoming pain franchises. "What's causing your chronic widespread muscle pain?" asks an ad for the seizure and epilepsy drug Lyrica. "The answer may be overactive nerves," says the ad, even though "widespread muscle pain" and "over-active nerves," are not mentioned in the approved labeling for Lyrica, says pharmaceutical reporter John Mack. The military spent $35 million on seizure and epilepsy drugs in 2009 alone, including for migraines, headaches and pain.

And speaking of overkill, ads for genetically engineered injected drugs like Humira, approved to treat serious diseases like Crohn's disease, psoriatic arthritis and chronic plaque psoriasis look like they are designed to sell beer or beauty treatments, not immune suppressing drugs that invite cancers and lethal infections.

DTC ads don't just escalate everyday problems into psychiatric problems, they also escalate real psychiatric problems into irresponsible, sensationalistic stereotypes. Ads for the best-selling antipsychotic Risperdal, widely used in children, and in soldiers with PTSD, suggest that people with mental illness have hallucinatory fears about "boiling rain" and "dog women." The "dog woman" ad, showing a half-dog, half-woman crouched on her elbows, her eyes blackened, furthers the sensationalizing of mental illness with the tagline, "Because relapses are a living nightmare."

2. Your Kid Is Sick 

DTC ads don't just convince people they're in need of new drugs, but also that their kids may be, too. And it's been going on for decades.

Long before Pharma convinced parents, teachers and clinicians that millions of US kids had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), kids were said to suffer from "minimal brain dysfunction" (MBD) and "hyperkinesis," two conditions that were essentially the same as ADHD. In fact, so many kids had MBD by 1976 that an ad for the drug Cylert hailed the "Importance of single daily dose to the child, the parents and the teacher," because kids wouldn't have to be singled out anymore at pill time at school. (ADHD has been so huckstered, a YMCA ad spoofs it with the headline, "Before video games, before Facebook, before Ritalin, there was basketball.")

Yet neither Cylert--whose approval the FDA withdrew in 2005 because of liver failure and deaths--or the current ADHD drugs are safe. In 2009, researchers reported that kids are more likely to die sudden deaths while taking them and the American Heart Association recommends electrocardiograms (ECGs) before kids take them. And yet, combined sales of ADHD drugs continue to grow from $4.05 billion to $7.42 billion in 2010.

Thirty years ago, it certainly looked like kids were being overmedicated. They were given the antipsychotic Thorazine for their "hyperactivity," "hostility," sleep problems and even for vomiting. Picky eaters and kids who wet the bed were given tranquillizers. Kids with tics, stuttering and school phobia were given the tranquillizer Miltown.  

But today, ads promoting drugs for kids continue, and now they are aimed at parents. Sometimes, it's hard to tell the difference between ads for drugs or ads for sugary cereals! Pharma tells moms to give their kids the bubble gum-flavored ADHD med, LiquADD and the grape-flavored ADHD med, Methylin. The latter campaign, to parents, is "Give 'em the GRAPE!"

DTC advertising has also convinced parents their kids suffer from GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) otherwise known as acid reflux disease, which was barely a disease in adults much less kids, before consumer advertising. "GERD Can Be a Big Problem for Little Kids," say award-winning ads for Prevacid, which won a "RX Club" Silver award in 2004. In Europe, kids are treated for another "adult disease" and given chewable Liptitor to lower their cholesterol.

Some of Pharma's most aggressive advertising has been designed to convince parents their children's minor sniffles or wheezing are imminent asthma and require immediate and expensive drugs. To make the asthma drug Singulair (which also comes in a yummy chewable), the seventh most popular drug in 2010, Merck inked partnerships with the American Academy of Pediatrics and Scholastic, both of which parents consider neutral organizations and not Pharma mouthpieces. Merck also partnered with Olympic gold-medalist swimmer Peter Vanderkaay and NBA kid clubs to sell the asthma drug.

"A kid who's got what your kid's got is out doing what your kid's not," says one Singulair ad campaign. "Find out how you can help your child breathe a little easier."

If Singulair were not harmful, the huckstering would simply be a case of wasting money and overmedicating kids. But Singulair has been linked to both pediatric suicide and to emotional, behavioral and ADHD-like symptoms in kids, the latter likely inspiring parents to give their kids "the grape."

Of course, another kid-targeted campaign is for the vaccine against the sexually transmitted Papillomavirus or HPV, immortalized by Gov. Rick Perry and Rep. Michele Bachmann in hot exchanges this fall. Many object to the sexualizing of 9-year-olds, to government lining Pharma's pockets by promoting the vaccine (including overseas) and to the risks of the vaccines themselves. But the ads for Gardasil and Cervarix are also offensive.

Last spring, poster-sized ads for Gardasil on Chicago's commuter trains pretended to sell real estate in sought-after neighborhoods. A closer look revealed descriptions of women in those neighborhoods who thought they didn't need the HPV vaccine but did, positioning HPV not only as a general risk to the population, like flu, rather than an STD but as "hip."

HPV vaccine ads got even cooler when GSK rolled out Cervarix extravaganza TV ads and its "armed against cervical cancer" campaign with an Angelina Jolie-like model displaying a skinny arm with a Cervarix tattoo.

3. Be Like Me, and Can Your Beer Do This?

Prescription drugs may affect health, but they are still consumer products sold with the same marketing principles as toothpaste or beer. In fact, the wacky, "Can Your Beer Do This?" Miller Lite campaign of the 1990s, came back to life to sell the antidepressant Wellbutrin XR. In a glossy, color magazine ad, a young man rows his girlfriend on a scenic lake and lists the benefits of his Wellbutrin XR. "Can your medicine do all that?" he asks.

What does it say about the success of DTC advertising that people are assumed to have an antidepressant?

Experiential ads also sell prescription drugs like vintage ads for the "Kodak Moment," "Maalox Moment" and the old cigarette ads for the "L&M Moment" did. "Lunesta Sleep. Have You Tried it?" asks a 2007 ad in Parade magazine, elevating the experience to something akin to "designer sleep."

And just as celebrities move other consumer products, they have been deployed to sell prescription drugs. TV personality Joan Lunden and former baseball star Mike Piazza stumped for the allergy pill Claritin, ice skater Dorothy Hamill and track star Bruce Jenner for the pain pill Vioxx, and Sen. Bob Dole for Viagra. NASCAR figure Bobby Labonte also endorsed the antidepressant Wellbutrin XL in 2004. Yes, his medicine could "do all that."

But there has been a problem with celebrity drug endorsements, unlike product endorsements in which a celebrity like Tiger Woods or Martha Stewart could taint a product, a prescription drug can taint a celebrity! Did Dorothy Hamill know that Vioxx doubled the risk of heart attacks in users when she stumped for it? Did the model Lauren Hutton know that hormone replacement therapy causes a 26 percent higher incidence of breast cancer, a 29 percent increase in heart attacks, a 41 percent increase in strokes, and a doubling of the rate of blood clots when she shilled for it? Does actress Sally Field know that bone drugs like Boniva are linked to esophageal cancer, jaw bone death and the very fractures they are supposed to prevent as she pushes them?

Of course, good product marketing includes public relations. When Pharma sells a disease with no mention of the drug it is really selling, it's called "unbranded" advertising. Since DTC advertising, Pharma has invaded public service announcements (PSAs) that TV and radio stations confer for free, pretending their take-a-drug messages serve the public good, like messages to change smoke detector batteries or put kids in car seats.

One such "educational" "awareness" campaign called "Depression Is Real" saturated the radio air waves in 2011, funded by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which was investigated by Congress for its Pharma funding from Wyeth, part of Pfizer, and other groups. The high-budget ads, running for free, compare depression to diabetes because it doesn't go away and to cancer because it can be fatal.

4. One Kind of Ad You Won't See Anymore

Animal research at drug companies and the National Institutes of Health is a great scientific iceberg of which people only see a tip. In drug development, millions of animals die to prove a drug's "safety." At academic and medical centers, animal study grants from NIH provide millions to researchers and labs.

As sentiment grows against animal experiments and the government's gigantic National Primate Research Centers (new rules will limit the use of chimpanzees), the research is downplayed and even hidden. But there was a time when Pharma actually flaunted animal research.

"More than a decade of animal research on various animal species has suggested that Librium (chlordiazepozxide HCI) exerts its principal effects on certain key areas of the limbic system," says an ad from the 1970s, showing three monkeys crouching and dangling in cages as assorted experiments are conducted.

An ad for the diet pill Pre-Sate is even worse. It says, "one of the most sophisticated comparative animal studies ever conducted demonstrates direct action on the satiety centers," and shows five photos of cats in experiments. One shows a life-size white cat looking at the camera with a chain around its neck and invasive instrumentation embedded in its skull.

Today's consumers, it seems, wouldn't tolerate ads like these. (Or the experiments behind them.) Why do they tolerate derisive ads about "dog women" and ploys to market pharmaceuticals to kids as if it were candy?

Labor and Poverty

A House Divided?

by JOSEPH GROSSO

 

What is it about the even barely noticed presence of poverty that sends so much of American politics and culture into attack mode? Harsh treatment of the poor of course has a long history in the work houses, debtors’ prisons, and chimney-sweepers, as any reader of Blake, Dickens, Hugo, and Zola can recognize. Yet in the present-day one would be hard-pressed to find a society more intolerant than the present United States. By now the facts have been so rehashed as to become strangely easier to ignore: the highest rate of poverty in the Western world, highest child poverty, highest permanent poverty, highest income inequality, highest rate of incarceration, highest health-care costs, it can go on and on. On top of it all one will probably the only society where one will find more, or at least as many, protests against improving any of this as for; where else in the world are there pro-austerity marches?

It’s not as if the wealthy, as personified by Wall Street, have been behaving well. Last year Goldman Sachs paid $550 million to settle SEC charges that it withheld information from investors on a collateralized debt obligation (CDO) it sold that soon after was worthless. A federal judge this past November refused to endorse a similarly $285 million agreement that would have allowed Citigroup to avoid admitting any wrong doing when it marketed and sold a toxic CDO while taking a short position against it at the same time realizing a tidy $160 million for the bank while costing investors more than $700 million. Leaving finance and going back a couple of years and one finds pharmaceutical behemoth Pfizer paying a record $2.3 billion and pleading guilty to a felony count for illegal marketing- all these fines a mere pittance next to these companies bottom lines.

What’s this corporate mischief next to welfare mothers and drunks on the public dole?
It’s easy to see the persistence of poverty as a sort of insult to the American Dream in the mind of true believers. After all, what good is a class system in the land of opportunity? The excess riffraff that stand outside such nationalistic pride are easily detested.

Beyond such prideful chauvinism is an even darker scar that explains why the poor pay through the nose while the rich get off with pocket change. In What’s the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank famously posited that the white middle and working classes of the heartland are diverted with ‘moral’ issues such as gay rights and abortion into supporting the right wing economics that ultimately destroys them. This could be traced to the 1970s coinciding with the rise of neoliberalism and religious fundamentalism in a time of economic stagflation.

Yet as Jefferson Cowie describes in Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, the 1970s were also a time a great labor unrest, the most unrest in fact since the mid-1940s. In 1970 alone over 2.4 million workers engaged in large-scale stoppages. The United Mine Workers and United Auto Workers saw significant insurgencies against stale leadership and for greater industrial democracy. The United Farm Workers still had life. For all his petty bigotry it shouldn’t be overlooked that Archie Bunker, the enduring symbol of 70s popular culture, was a union man who worked on a loading dock. Still the 1970s were also the only decade other than the 1930s when Americans ended up poorer than they began. Robert Reich in Aftershock traces the rise of the anti-tax movement to the early 1970s, not as a movement towards social conservatism but as simply a protest about paying taxes with incomes that had stagnated.

Nonagricultural workers earnings declined by about 13% with family income only staying level with wives entering the workforce.

It was also the decade of deindustrialization, inflation, and a fierce white backlash against busing and affirmative action (Archie Bunker aptly summed up what many white men were probably feeling when he yelled at his progressive, ‘meathead’ his son-in-law Mike: ‘Look at me. I know I have a lot going against me. I’m white, I’m protestant, I’m hardworking. Can’t you find one lousy amendment to protect me?!’). Crowie quotes Cleveland Robinson, one of the founders of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, explaining “The basic ingredient to successful affirmative action is full employment.” Otherwise “you will have both blacks and whites fight for the same jobs.” Needless to say, full employment was far off the agenda by decade’s end, leaving that very dynamic in the minds of many working class whites.

Of course since its inception the American working class has been divided. Going back to the 1850s conflict between Yankee (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) and immigrant Irish (Catholic) workers undermined early organizing efforts, a pattern that would emerge in subsequent generations. An important point to bear in mind is that for all the anti-Catholic hysteria of the ‘know-nothings’ the overall trend was towards both separation and assimilation. Mike Davis brilliantly described this in Prisoners of the American Dream:

The ingenuity of American Catholicism, already becoming apparent in the 1850s, was that it functioned as an apparatus for acculturating millions of Catholic immigrants to American liberal-capitalist society while simultaneously carving out its own sphere of sub-cultural hegemony…

Thus what developed, according to Davis, was ‘two corporatist subcultures along a religious divide’, leaving the working class as a whole fractured at the time of grave national crisis unable to form an independent party, certainly unable to form some kind of alliance with oppressed black slaves- an inability that would extend right through the New Deal, which also excluded African Americans. This would continue as successive waves of European immigrants followed the same dynamic: initial discrimination, eventually achieving the status of ‘whiteness’ while keeping separate largely conservative subcultures, thereby reinforcing both American capitalism and a splintered working class.

If a divided working class is one side of the coin, the other mutually reinforcing side has been a state that for the most part has been callous in addressing the needs of working poor. This too has a long history that continues right through the present. Violence was always part of the equation. American labor history is far bloodier than any other industrial nation whether it was striking workers and their families at Ludlow, the martyrs of Haymarket, or the striking workers killed at Pullman.

For all the ire liberals direct at the likes of Hoover and Reagan, the marginalizing of labor has been a bipartisan affair. Barack Obama has typically ignored the concerns of labor, a constituency that worked hard for his election, not even muttering a phrase like ‘living wage’ or voicing a peep for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make unionizing somewhat easier.

Historically divided and penned in by an indifferent and hostile state, a nasty strain of producerism has always been part of working class culture, a producerism that doesn’t spare the rich but whose main target has always been the poor and working poor, particularly when it lazily aligns itself to conservative interests and parties; the poor always being an easier target than the rich.

Traces of this can be found all the way in the Omaha Platform, which launched the Populist Party back in 1892. While the populists railed against war and trusts there was a resolution about ‘the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage earners’. It is not hard to see the same sentiment in the more recent rants against immigrants and the welfare state (i.e. big government): social Darwinism where only the few prosper in their gated communities and pent houses while the many are left to stew in bitterness and cynicism at their neighbors.

Given the roots of this it is hard to imagine much improvement in the short term. The political landscape is barren of any serious alternatives. Corporations have an even tighter grip on national elections and Obama has long discarded the opportunity early in his presidency to serious confront Wall Street. The main duty of the American Left should be to return to working class politicians with the difficult goal of uniting the working class with a sense of solidarity that runs across its diverse spectrum, with the ultimate long term goal of doing the same for society as a whole. That may seem sanctimonious and utopian, but is there any other way to seriously reduce poverty?

Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry

The Scandal of Reincarnated Rats
by RUSSELL MOKHIBER

John Braithwaite is back.

The famed Australian corporate criminologist is teaming up with a former European pharmaceutical executive – Graham Dukes – and together they are completing a new book on corporate crime in the pharmaceutical industry.

The working title – Corporations, Crime and Medicines.

It’s due out early next year.

Thirty years ago, Braithwaite finished his magnum opus – Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry (Routledge Kegan & Paul).

The book documented widespread fraud and corruption worldwide.

“In the latter part of the 1980s, I thought that the pharmaceutical industry was actually improving in its standards,” Braithwaite told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview. “Ciba Geigy was one company that had come under particularly aggressive attack from the consumer movement. And Ciba Geigy was responding and setting up corporate social responsibility policies with a new risk management initiative that it was trying to get other companies to join up with.”

“Pfizer became the number one company in the industry. It was sending senior executives to Australia to talk to me. They were really interested in what kind of internal procedures they could be putting in place to make sure that folks like Graham and I would not be making the kinds of critiques that were in Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry.”

“I was encouraged by that. I think actually I wasn’t conned. In the course of the 1980s, there was progress.”

“I actually finished the research for Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry in 1980. But the book was held up for concerns about libel.”

“But 30 years on, the situation has in fact become worse in most respects. Perhaps there has been some improvement in terms of safety and manufacturing processes among the majors. But on the other hand, the largest pharmaceutical corporations in the world have done a major disservice in the way they have approached the generic industry and, in a sense, stigmatized the generic industry.”

“In Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry, we concluded that 19 of the 20 largest U.S. pharmaceutical companies had engaged in serious corrupt activities in the course of the 1970s. And there was really no other industry in the United States that had such a consistent pattern. There were other industries – like the defense industry – that were doing terribly corrupt things. But in terms of top to bottom corruption, the pharmaceutical industry was the worst in the United States.”

“And in some ways, we are inclined to conclude that today it is even worse.”

In the area of research fraud, things are again worse 30 years later.

“A big part of the 1984 book was fraud in safety and testing of drugs,” Braithwaite said. “Remember the GD Searle company, of which Donald Rumsfeld was a CEO? They had the scandal of reincarnated rats. The rats would die when a drug was tested on them. And they would be replaced with living rats. That kind of blatant fraud is not dead in the pharmaceutical industry. There is a lot more sophisticated fraud in the form of suppression of negative safety and efficacy studies. And the boosting of positive studies.”

“But still, there is quite a lot of plain old fashion losing of negative data. And that is the same as the throwing away of the dead rat and replacing the dead rat with the reincarnated rat.”

“You generate data that a drug does not work. And you just suppress that data. It’s as if the study were never conducted and you start again and do another study until you get one that shows you what you want to find. Go to another university professor who will tell you what you want to hear.”

“That situation is, if anything. worse rather than better.”

On the Wall Street meltdown, Braithwaite says the situation could have easily been prevented.

“There was a lot of evidence that there was systemic mortgage fraud – liar loans, false representation of income and employment status of people on loans,” Braithwaite said. “And that had to do with a shift of the nature of capitalism. Banks issuing loans were no longer as interested as they should have been in assessing the capacity of the borrower to repay. Why? Because it was a move from a risk management financial sector to a risk shifting financial sector. You just slice and dice the loans and spread the risk around to a lot of other banks.”

“But it seems to me that there was a ready regulatory response to that. It was knowable that there was a problem. You had the FBI reporting as early as 2004 and 2005 that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud in the United States. You had this huge trend up in housing loan defaults starting in the mid 2000s. These were very clear red flags.”

“The simple regulatory strategy was for prudential regulators to go to mortgage brokers and banks and say – look, your portfolio of loans has twice the default rate of the average in our state. We want to sit down with you and look into why that is. And if that very simple regulatory inspection measure had been taken, it would have quickly become apparent that there was a pattern of fraud in the loans that they were issuing. And that would have been the early preventive step.”

“And you wouldn’t have necessarily had to prosecute those banks. You would have wanted to go around the country and stop the problem. That would be the most important thing. You would prosecute the ones with the worst patterns of conduct. But the more important thing would be return to integrity in the way loans are issued. Banks return to being interested in ensuring that these were levels of repayment that could be made.”

Merck Pays a Pittance for Mass Deaths

 (Maybe the biggest corporate/political lie out there is that pharmaceutical companies are these hard working scientists toiling to find a cure for every ailment known to man. People believe pharma is here for us, to make us better when we get sick.  They are sanctioned drug dealers who can get away with anything they want because they have billions of dollars to throw at any problem that could arise, any politicians who can be bought for the right price, and any pusillanimous, pretend regulatory agency like the impotent FDA, manned by future employees of big pharma once they leave "public service." 

The biggest joke is on sick people who desperately need something to feel better, to heal, and they have no choice (it seems to them) but to put all their faith in big pharma's latest, newest drug trial. When people stopped taking the anti-psychotic Orap (Pimozide) due to its horrible side effects, its makers had it reclassified as an anti-depressant so that they could milk it for more profits. The side effects of it range from akathisia (inability to sit still or stay in one place), tardive dyskinesia (repetitive, uncontrollable body movements) , and,possibly, neuroleptic malignant syndrome to death. They prescribe it to people with delusions, too. 

The drug companies exist to make huge mountains of profits. There's no money in curing any disease because diseases are huge money makers, especially cancer. A drug company, hospital and insurance company can milk hundreds of thousands of dollars out of one cancer patient. Oh, and these guys are very generous donors to political campaigns...no one can offer as much money to a campaign except for the banks.

And finally my point: so is it any wonder at all to any reasonably thinking human being that Merck would actually be punished? No one goes to jail, no one loses their job--even though there were numerous deaths--maybe conspiracy to commit murder, or voluntary manslaughter. And we keep taking each and every new pill they shit down the pike... and that fine amounts to nothing t=for a company that routinely clears billions of dollars per year net profit.

"This one will work! Oh,no! Maybe this one? Ahhhhh nooo, well something's gotta work! how about this one? Ooooohhhh..." And it's obvious that they only make things worse. --jef)

The VIOXX Settlement

by FRED GARDNER

Q: Who killed more Americans —al Qaeda crashing airplanes into the World Trade Center, or Merck pushing Vioxx?
A: Merck, by a factor of 18.

One of the most downplayed stories of our time ended with a whimper this week.  “Merck has agreed to pay $950 million and has pleaded guilty to a criminal charge over the marketing and sales of the painkiller Vioxx,” the New York Times reported Nov. 23 (in the business section, where important medical news is usually found).  The pharmaceutical giant copped to a misdemeanor: urging MDs to prescribe Vioxx for Rheumatoid Arthritis prior to 2002, when the Food & Drug Administration approved its use for that disorder.

The FDA had initially approved Vioxx (after a hasty “priority review”) in May, 1999 to treat osteoarthritis, acute pain, and menstrual cramps.  By September 30, 2004, when Merck announced its “voluntary recall,” some 25 million Americans had been prescribed the widely hyped drug. Evidence that using Vioxx doubled a patient’s risk of suffering a heart attack or stroke —based on a review of 1.4 million patients’ records— was about to be published in Lancet by David Graham, MD, an FDA investigator.  The FDA director’s office, devoted valet of Big PhRMA, had contacted the Lancet in a futile effort to stop publication of their own scientist’s findings.

Graham’s data indicate that 140,000 Americans suffered Vioxx-induced heart attacks and strokes; 55,000 died, and many more were permanently disabled. The Merck executives’ real crime was conspiracy to commit murder.

Some 3,000 Americans died in the attack on the World Trade Center. The murders perpetrated by Merck executives were not as dramatic, obviously, but were every bit as intentional. An early clinical trial had alerted them to the fact that Vioxx caused coronary damage. Their response was to exclude from future trials anyone with a history of heart trouble!

Once Vioxx was approved, Merck spent more than $100 million a year advertising it.  (You may still remember the tune to “It’s a beautiful morning…”) Merck execs continued to ignore and suppress indications that their new blockbuster was causing strokes and heart attacks.

Sales hit $2.5 billion in 2003. And when brave Dr. Graham first presented his irrefragable evidence to an FDA advisory committee in February 2004, Merck argued that the “unique benefits” of Vioxx warranted its remaining on the market. The FDA committee voted 17-15 to keep it available with a black box warning. Ten of the 32 committee members had taken money from Merck, Pfizer or Novartis (which were pushing drugs similar to Vioxx) as consultants.  If these MDs had declared their conflicts of interest, Vioxx would have been pulled from the market by a vote of 14-8. By buying an extra seven and a half months, Merck made an extra billion or two, and killed 6,000 more Americans.

Worldwide, Vioxx was used by 80 million people. Assuming their dosages were similar to the 1.4 million Kaiser Permanente patients whose records Dr. Graham analyzed, the death toll exceeds 420,000.

The great selling point to doctors —and the original rationale for developing “Cox-2 inhibitors” such as Vioxx and Celebrex— was their supposed safety compared to aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatories such as ibuprofen (Motrin, Advil) and naproxen (Aleve), which can cause gastrointestinal bleeding and peptic ulcers in some people. (There was no evidence that Cox-2 inhibitors were more effective than NSAIDs at reducing pain and inflammation.)

The NSAIDs work by inhibiting production of an enzyme, Cyclooxygenase, that helps make compounds called prostaglandins that facilitate the inflammatory response and protect the stomach lining (among other functions).  In the 1980s a researcher named Philip Needleman discovered that the body makes Cyclooxygenase in two forms —Cox-1, found in normal tissue, and Cox-2, which is more prevalent in damaged tissues associated with arthritis. The drug companies hoped that a compound that inhibited only Cox-2 production would reduce inflammation without gastric side effects. With 40 million Americans suffering from some form of Arthritis, an easier-on-the-stomach painkiller would mean blockbuster sales. And so they invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the ’90s developing compounds that would inhibit Cox-2 production, and arranging clinical trials to convince the FDA that such drugs were an improvement over the existing alternatives.

And now a word from our sponsor
If Cannabis and Cannabis-based medicines had been among the alternatives, the market for Vioxx et al would have been much smaller. (And if codeine wasn’t semi-prohibited, the market would have been smaller still.) How many drugs would lose significant market share if Cannabis-based options were available? Enough so that the pharmaceutical industry would quickly follow the housing sector down the drain.  Which is why Wall Street cannot allow legalization of the plant for medical use.

It may turn out that a cannabinoid produced by the plant, cannabidiol (CBD), exerts its anti-inflammatory effects by means of Cox-2 inhibition. A recent study shows that Cox-2 plays a role in breaking down one of the cannabinoids produced by the body, 2-AG. The breakdown product is a precursor to neuroinflammatory prostaglandins.

Let the punishment fit the crime
In 2007 Merck paid out $4.85 billion to settle claims by 27,000 Vioxx victims and their survivors. “The reason ‘so few’ people filed lawsuits,” a physician explains, “is that there is a significant background rate of heart attack. People may not have recognized their event as being related to Vioxx.”  The survivors of people who smoked cigarettes, were overweight or had other risk factors would have been discouraged by lawyers from filing claims, he added, because they’d have a hard time convincing jurors that their loved ones’ heart attacks were brought on by Vioxx use.

“No person was held liable for Merck’s conduct,” Duff Wilson of the Times reported Nov. 23.

To be fair-and-balanced in an otherwise Merck-friendly story, he quoted Erik Gordon of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, commenting “It’s just a cost of doing business until a pharmaceutical executive does a perp walk.”

That sounds tough but it isn’t.  Marketing dangerous drugs would still be “just a cost of doing business” to profit-driven corporations if a few individual execs were made to do time at Camp Fed. Why shouldn’t they be charged with conspiracy to commit murder, along with every accessory to the crime that a thorough investigation could identify? (This could provide meaningful work for the currently useless Drug Enforcement Administration.) The Vioxx conspiracy involved researchers who skewed data and sales execs who framed false pitches and government officials who tried to silence whistleblowers and God knows who else… If somebody is killed in a botched robbery at a Seven Eleven, the kid driving the getaway car is charged with homicide. But Merck’s CEO throughout the Vioxx era, Ray Gilmartin, left the company in 2006 with a golden parachute and joined the Harvard Business School faculty. The class he teaches is called “Building and Sustaining Successful Enterprises.”

A more effective way to counter deadly corporate fraud would be for the government to simply stop doing business with entities convicted of major crimes. If MediCare and state Medicaid programs stopped buying Merck or Pfizer drugs for, say, five years, it just might produce the result that we, the people, require.

The day before the Vioxx settlement was reported, the Wall St. Journal ran a story (in the Marketplace section) under the headline “Pfizer Near Settlement on Bribery.”  The corporate boo-boo in this instance involved pay-offs to doctors who purchase drugs for state-owned institutions overseas. Johnson & Johnson recently settled a similar bribery case. Merck, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and GlaxoSmithKline are all in settlement negotiations with the government.

On the home front, Pfizer has paid $2.3 billion for violating the federal False Claims Act and bribing institutional purchasers in connection with Bextra, Lipitor, Viagra, Zithromax, Norvasc, Lyrica, Relpax, Celebrex, and Depo-provera.

The systemic corruption is getting worse.  In the 15 years between 1991 and 2005, according to Public Citizen, drug companies paid the government $5 billion in penalties and settlements in connection with kickbacks and false claims. In the five years between 2006 and 2010 the pay out was $14.8 billion.  Four companies accounted for more than half the blood money ($10.3 billion): Glaxo, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Schering-Plough.

In recent years the drug industry has surpassed the “defense” industry as the top defrauder of the federal government under the False Claims Act.

Where is zero tolerance when we need it?

ALEC Politicians Spin Special "Interest" Bill to Protect Corporate Wrongdoers as "Job Creation"

 (To my tea party friends--this is the end result of tea party politics: corporations exploiting you and your family so that they profit and don't get prosecuted for breaking laws...well, they'd be breaking laws had they not gotten those laws changed so that THEY don't get prosecuted, and THEY don't pay huge fines...but you do. ALEC exists to further cement profit as a higher priority than the rights of citizens. When you vote all tea party, you are in essence approving of your very own rape, figuratively, of course. But you'll still blame the other guys--and welfare moms and homeless people and minorities, and teachers--instead of the guys who are passing you around and having their way with you. Cognitive dissonance meets the Stockholm Syndrome...--jef)


Saturday, October 15, 2011 by PR Watch

by Lisa Graves

 

For years, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), has been itching to protect big corporations from high interest rates charged in cases where corporations have killed or injured Americans. Now, Wisconsin politicians serving on key ALEC task forces are pushing a bill embracing this idea as part of ALEC alumnus Scott Walker's latest effort to force the ALEC agenda into law based on claims that doing so will help "job creators."

Citizens Pay 12% but Companies that Injure or Kill Pay 4.25% 

 

The bill, introduced by Wisconsin State Senator Rich Zipperer of Pewaukee and Representative Paul Farrow, also of Pewaukee, would reduce the interest rate on court-ordered payments for Wisconsin residents who have convinced a jury and a judge that a corporation injured them, killed their loved ones, or violated consumer protections guaranteed by law. Under current law, in almost all types of civil lawsuits, Wisconsin requires the losing party to pay 12% interest on the judgment, until the amount owed is paid in full or unless overturned on appeal.

But ALEC politicians Zipperer and Farrow want to slash the interest rate charged (to about 4.25%) -- but only in cases involving personal injury and consumer claims. By definition these are cases in which virtually the only time there will be a financial judgment is when a Wisconsin resident proves in court that the defendant company violated his or her rights. But when a corporation, such as a bank or leasing company, sues a citizen and wins, the Wisconsin citizen still has to pay interest at 12% until the bill is paid in full.
How does this aid job creation?

"Lowering the price of breaking the law doesn't target job creation or economic development," says Laura Dresser an economist from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy. To put it less academically, "the only jobs it creates are for undertakers," said Democratic Rep. Brett Hulsey at a press conference about the so-called job creation bill package. To call legislation that rewards adjudicated corporate wrongdoers "job creation" is simply spin.

Anti-Consumer Bill Echoes ALEC "Model" 

 

The Zipperer-Farrow bill serves very special interests with their own special interest rate. It looks like ALEC's Pewaukee Posse -- a former estate lawyer and a current home inspector -- has taken a page from ALEC's "Prejudgment and Post-Judgment Act." That so-called "model" bill, which the Center for Media and Democracy exposed this summer through our ALECexposed.org project, would reduce the interest charged to corporations that kill or maim Americans.

This ALEC wish list item is a piece of the ALEC corporations' so-called "tort reform" agenda, an unabashed effort to tilt the scales of justice in favor of corporations in nearly every imaginable way. But Zipperer and Farrow have one-upped ALEC by adding consumer cases into the mix, on top of the cases involving Americans who have lost their lives or livelihood to corporate neglect, malfeasance, or greed. The Pewaukee Posse also tweaked the interest rate calculation of ALEC from using the Treasury bill rate to the prime rate plus one percent. These are differences without distinction -- both slash the interest rate paid by corporations that kill or maim. The Zipperer-Farrow bill is the ALEC bill on steroids by sweeping in all consumer cases in the state as well.

Pewaukee Posse Pushes ALEC Agenda in State 

 

It should come as no surprise that Zipperer sits on the ALEC Civil Justice Task Force. "Civil justice," in this case, is an Orwellian term for giving corporations whose products or policies happen to ruin people's lives more "justice" in the judicial system than corporations get under longstanding rules that protect people done wrong by corporate greed or negligence. The "private sector" head of that task force is none other than the so-called "King of Tort Reform," Victor Schwarz, who has long advanced the interests of tobacco and asbestos companies that for decades deep-sixed scientific proof that their products were literally killing Americans.

Zipperer is also one of the politicians who asked Wisconsin taxpayers to pay the $50 bucks a year ALEC charges for politicians to be members. And he's received financial compensation of over $1000 from ALEC for at least one trip, likely to an ALEC gathering known for schmoozing with corporate lobbyists -- lobbyists interested in legislation just like the one Zipperer and Farrow introduced. Like Zipperer, Farrow is no ordinary member of ALEC. He was chosen to sit on its Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force alongside lobbyists from AT&T and other companies that have been sued for policies and practices that take advantage of consumers.

Pfizer Lobbyist One of ALEC's Corporate Co-Chairs for Wisconsin 

 

This is not the only bill being spun as job creation that has ALEC DNA and that would adversely affect injured Wisconsin residents. Another ALEC bill sponsored by Zipperer would limit the rights of Wisconsin residents to recover any damages in strict liability cases (the primary legal basis for cases involving injurious products) if they are injured by prescription or over-the-counter drugs. Like the special interest rate bill, the drug bill goes even further than the ALEC model -- adding in medical devices and barring lawsuits for drugs approved by the FDA, not just barring punitive damages for regulated drugs, ALEC policy since 1995.

Perhaps, it should come as no surprise that the latest corporate co-chair of ALEC assigned to the state of Wisconsin is none other than Pfizer through its lobbyist Bryon Wornson. The list of drugs Pfizer has gotten through the inadequate FDA review process only to recall them later is long. Last year, an intravenous drug it distributed was recalled because it "might kill" hospital patients. That's just the tip of the iceberg on unsafe products produced and recalled over the years by Pfizer, and Pfizer is just one of the many transnational corporations whose drugs or devices got through the FDA's process only to end up killing or causing life-threatening harm to American consumers.

"This proposal does nothing to help employ the people of Wisconsin and everything to help big-time, special interest drug company CEOs," says Phil Neuenfeldt of the state's AFL-CIO, speaking of the drug and device bill.

The interest rate bill and the drug and device bill are part of a package being considered under Governor Walker's "Special Session on Job Creation," but so far it's hard to spot the bills that actually focus on creating jobs.

Very Special Interest Bill Just One of the Posse's ALEC Echoes 

 

The Pewaukee Posse has proven to be such eager sponsers of legislation with ALEC DNA that perhaps they will get gold stars, or "scholarships," from ALEC's new state co-chair Robyn Vos to attend coming ALEC conventions/vacations along with invitation-only parties hosted by global corps. Vos and his predecessor as ALEC state co-chair, Senate Leader Scott Fitzgerald, have been charged under ALEC by-laws with a "duty" to get ALEC bills introduced in their home states. ALEC's politician co-chairs also are tasked with distributing the largess raised by state corporate co-chairs, like Pfizer, from corporate coffers to fund trips for loyal legislators.

Zipperer has put his name and effort behind: SB-1, which echoes several ALEC provisions to limit the rights of Pewaukee residents and other citizens of Wisconsin killed or injured by corporations, including negligent nursing homes (signed into law by ALEC alum Walker); AB-7, the so-called "Voter ID" bill that may block tens of thousands of students and others from voting in 2012, and which includes provisions consistent with ALEC's model bill (made law by Walker); SB-10, a tax give-away that benefits Wall Street speculators, similar to ALEC's "capital gains tax elimination act"; and AB-94, which expands taxpayer subsidies for private schools, echoing ALEC's privatization agenda in its "parental choice" bills.

Farrow has also pushed bills echoing the ALEC voter suppression agenda, capital gains, and school privatization efforts, and has introduced even more ALEC-like bills than his Pewaukee brother, including bills limiting the use of transportation taxes and embracing the NRA's shoot first bill known as the "Castle Doctrine," which shares core concepts with a parallel ALEC bill urged by the NRA, the former ALEC Criminal Justice Task Force Co-Chair.

These lists do not include all of the other bills similar to the cookie cutter legislation flowing out of the ALEC bill factory that the Pewaukee Posse voted for or that ALEC Alum Scott Walker signed into law this year.

But their latest foray into advancing the corporate wish list, through their very special interest bill, goes even further than ALEC has dared by targeting not just Wisconsinites physically injured by corporations but also consumers statewide.