Via America’s Lawyer: Mike Papantonio talks to attorney, Stephen Sheller, about his new book Pharmageddon, which outlines some of the biggest lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies he has been involved with over the years.
Transcript of the above video:
Mike:
My next guest has been involved in some of the biggest legal cases of the last few decades, everything from the butterfly ballet lawsuit, the Bush v Gore case, to the big tobacco fraud cases of the 90s. But his biggest success no doubt is recovering more than $6.4 billion from the pharmaceutical industry for deceptive marketing tactics and failing to warn consumers about adverse effects of these drugs. These cases are the subject of his new book, Pharmageddon: a Nation Betrayed.
Author and attorney Stephen Sheller joins me now. Stephen, you’ve been involved in many landmark cases, some of the same ones I’ve been involved with. We’ve watched all this develop. One of the landmark cases was big tobacco, to the fraud of Bush v Gore presidential election, a whole variety of things that you’ve been involved with. Why did you choose to focus this book on the pharmaceutical industry with all the things that you could have talked about?
Stephen:
The main reason Mike is that with all the things you and I have done over the years to bring justice to our system of justice, it seems to be almost getting worse the way things are going. The reason I focused on the pharma industry is that they’re the ones that have been getting away with most of the bad things that I’ve been dealing with. It arose frankly out of Bush versus Gore, when I was in Florida litigating that I got to the point where one of the lawyers got a call from a client who got Prozac extended release in the mail for her teenage son. She called him and then I ended on national television because he had no prescription for it.
The next thing I know I got calls from Eli Lilly’s detail reps from the west coast who said, “Well, we’re doing the same thing.” When I began investigating that, that was in the midst of the remnants of Bush versus Gore, I learned about their effort to illegally market a drug called Zyprexa, off label for you name it, they were marketing it for almost anything.
Mike:
Stephen let me interrupt you just a second. So the viewers understand, when a drug company has a product that they can use for one thing, in other words the FDA has approved that you can use it for birth control or whatever it may be, and they’re not making enough money, what they creatively do is they then try to say, “Well let’s find other things that doctors might by into.”
For example, with Yaz, you were involved with Yaz as well, with Yaz what they determined was, “We’re going to tell women that they can lose weight and that they can control acne if they take our birth control pill,” because there were dozen of birth control pills out on the market. Is this a common practice? You talk about Eli Lilly using this process, is this a common practice?
Stephen:
Yes, unfortunately it is all too common. Little is done about it, other than if they’re caught at it, they end up working out a deal often to pay some money but no one usually ever goes to jail for the illegal activity. It’s considered unlawful to market a drug off label intentionally by a drug company for uses not approved by the FDA. It’s gotten a little more complicated recently because now they’ve added freedom of speech arguments to this.
Mike:
There’s only a couple countries in the world that even allow advertising, I think it’s New Zealand and the United States where you can advertise a drug.
Stephen:
New Zealand and [crosstalk 00:03:49] Yeah, that’s it.
Mike:
What they actually do is create a disease. They create a disease. We saw Johnson & Johnson, Astrazeneca, for example engage in marketing practices for their antipsychotic drugs, but what they were really doing is sending sales people out in the field and saying, “You can use this for other stuff than it’s been approved for.” Now here’s what I want to ask you, what patterns have you observed in these cases about the ways that pharmaceutical companies market their products? Have you seen the patterns develop?
Stephen:
The main pattern you see is they market it for so called diseases that aren’t really disease and can’t be defined. There’s no test that you can that would decide that somebody has some kind of psychosis. You can’t do a blood test. The problem that you find is that these disease are designed like a Chinese menu, four from group A, five things from group B, you combine them and therefor you have some type of psychiatric disease or something that’s defined in something called the Diagnostic Manual, DSM IV or V.
They’ve defined and created the diseases. In fact they aren’t disease at all, they could be any number of things. They then get their sales people, they get the FDA to approve it for the disease of something or other. They use Risperdal for example for Tourette’s syndrome, they use Risperdal off label for a whole bunch of things.
Mike:
Steve, let’s take Risperdal for example. Risperdal was not … Again, you’re talking about taking a drug that it was not approved for, and the company’s saying, “We’re not making enough money on Risperdal for what it’s been approved for,” so then they go out and they invent other reasons to use Risperdal. Is that basically how it works? What’s your take?
Stephen:
That’s exactly what they do. You know one of the cooperating entities, Harvard University for example, a guy named Joe Biederman up there, a psychiatrist. They gave him a lot of money to frankly study, quote, Risperdal to treat bipolar disorder in children. They started giving it to children in large numbers and that became one of their biggest sellers for kids. Then they also decided that the elderly … they were busy trying to convince people, “Well you don’t need staff,” they don’t say that of course, “in a nursing home or in assisted place. We’ll give them five milligrams at five pm.” It’s not just Johnson & Johnson’s Risperdal, it’s Zyprexa, it’s Seroquel. “You won’t need anybody to take of them, they just sleep.” Now they’re [inaudible 00:06:48] because we discovered that people, the elderly would die from that stuff.
Mike:
Steve, your book Pharmageddon goes and it lays out step by step how, A, the company invents diseases, literally makes them, invents them, and then secondly, how they even expand that market step by step. I want to tell you it’s a good idea for a book. I want to read it when it’s out there. Make sure you stay with this, this is a story that most people simply don’t know about. Thank you for joining me.
