Medical Detox Programs in a stress-free environment

April 30, 2008

Big Pharma’s Questionable Ethics Creates More Problems For Schering-Plough

Filed under: Big Pharma, FDA, pharmaceutical sales, pharmaceuticals — Rod Malcolm @ 1:22 pm

Whistle-blower lawsuit alleges Schering-Plough failed to reveal problems with a drug that killed five people, including two children, and seriously injured 53 others.

Schering-Plough recently spent $14.3 billion to buy the drug company Organon, and now must face allegations that serious “adverse events” associated with Organon’s neuromuscular blocking agent Raplon were not disclosed before or after FDA approval back in 1999. After five people died, including two children, and at least 53 others suffered severe bronchospasm, Organon withdrew Raplon from the market in March 2001.

Raplon was designed to paralyze a patient’s throat to facilitate intubation — inserting a breathing tube into the trachea — and claimed to induce paralysis faster than older generic drugs that cost less than $1 per unit compared with $20 for a unit of Raplon. Problems arose when patients receiving Raplon suffered serious bronchospasms that stopped their breathing.

According to Ed Silverman’s Pharmalot blog on the subject, the Raplon problems occurred when Schering-Plough’s senior vp for global fertility, Hans Vemer, was still the top man over at Organon. The whistle-blower, Jeff Feldstein, a former Organon employee, first filed his charges in 2002, about the same time he filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against Organon. The US Attorney in Boston declined to join the whistleblower charges at that time, so Feldstein now is pursuing the case independently.

Feldstein’s lawsuit in federal court in New Jersey alleges that Organon executives knew of the serious problems with Raplon and instead withheld the evidence from the FDA in order to get approval. As well as failure to disclose, Feldstein also claims that Organon’s behavior caused false claims to be submitted to Medicaid and Medicare.

Schering-Plough, of course, vehemently denies the charges, saying it will “vigorously defend Organon”. However, the evidence offered by the suit, including copies of internal memos, strongly suggests that Organon ignored the warning bells expressed by clinical investigators prior to the drug’s launch.

If it is determined that Organon did fail to disclose to the FDA its concerns about bronchospasm, it will be yet another blow to Schering-Plough, already suffering from its partnership with Merck over the Vytorin and Zetia debacle. Then there’s the $435 million settlement in 2006 for federal civil and criminal charges that it illegally promoted several drugs for off-label use, and defrauded Medicaid — the third such settlement for Schering in just two years. Schering Sales pled guilty to one count of conspiracy for making false statements to the government and paid a $180 million criminal fine as well.

So, yes, the FDA has some changes to make to prevent these kinds of situations, and they need to do it fast. New policies are needed to jolt Big Pharma enough to wake up and smell the fire and brimstone. It’s time for new business models, both at the FDA and for Big Pharma.

April 28, 2008

Big Pharma Scams Do No Good For The Industry, And Let’s Not Forget They Often Kill People

Filed under: Big Pharma, Vioxx, pharmaceutical sales, pharmaceuticals — Rod Malcolm @ 4:35 pm

Merck and Schering-Plough are not the only Big Pharma players getting hurt by their own actions.

Before Merck and Co. withdrew the painkiller Vioxx in 2004, it was linked to tens of thousands of heart attacks. Now a new study of internal Merck documents alleges the company knew of the dangers years earlier, but falsified statistics to hide them from the FDA.

In the five years it was on the market, Vioxx was a blockbuster for Merck that generated billions of dollars. When it was eventually linked to heart attacks and strokes, the product was pulled from the market. Earlier this year, Merck agreed to almost $5 billion in compensation to the victims of the Vioxx — I hesitate to use it, but there’s just no other word to describe it — scam.

A scam is “a confidence game or other fraudulent scheme, especially for making a quick profit.” A popular synonym is the word “swindle”. And that’s exactly what Merck, a Big Pharma player, worked on its millions of patients, their physicians, and before that, the Food and Drug Administration that approved the drug.

Now Merck is embroiled in another possible scam, this one over its massively profitable — $5.1 billion in 2007 — cholesterol drug Vytorin, a combination of Merck’s Zocor and Schering-Plough Corp.’s newer drug Zetia. An ongoing study shows that Vytorin is no more effective than cheaper, generic versions of the statin drug Zocor at reducing plaque buildup. The report has doctors nationwide reverting to older, cheaper statin drugs. And Congress is investigating whether the two companies withheld the unfavorable study results to boost sales.

In spite of widespread public concerns about the FDA’s effectiveness at protecting us from drug dangers, the agency appears to be stepping up to plate with Merck.

The FDA has rejected Merck’s application to sell the cholesterol drug Mevacor over the counter, and it has begun an investigation into the asthma and allergy drug Singulair, linking it to higher rates of suicide. Merck had already updated the drug’s warning label about side effects including tremors, anxiousness, depression and suicidal behavior, but further investigation may reveal more problems.

Merck shares fell 35 percent in the first quarter, much of the loss due to the Vioxx scandal, according to Wall Street analysts. The company is far from the only Big Pharma player in trouble, as scams, swindles and scandals continue to surface across the playing field. According to Ed Silverman in his Pharmalot blog, Schering-Plough’s share prices have been “ravaged” by the Vytorin controversy, caused “massive layoffs”, and in general “sullied the company’s reputation.”

Well, as the old saying goes, if the shoe fits . . .

There are plenty of laws on the books, at all levels of government, designed to protect the public from scams and swindles. It’s time for our lawmakers to take a very long hard look at how Big Pharma is being regulated and its products are tested and approved. And part of the scrutiny needs to be directed at the FDA itself. A lot of people need reassurance that the scams aren’t getting some help from Big Pharma friends on the inside.

April 26, 2008

Vioxx “Ghost Writer” Disclosure Emphasizes Need For Fundamental Changes In FDA Approvals

Filed under: Big Pharma, FDA, pharmaceuticals — Rod Malcolm @ 2:20 pm

Big Pharma’s ethics also need a major overhaul or the industry will go the way of the dinosaur.

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported this week that Merck and Co. faked reports on Vioxx. In other words, Merck employees wrote the reports, then attributed the articles to academic investigators hired and paid by the company to use their names.

Now that the JAMA report has made national news, all sorts of industry insiders are coming out of the woodwork and saying it’s common knowledge that Big Pharma hires ghost-writers — pays for the use of academic names — for research and development reports.

For example, in the In The Pipeline blog this week, Derek Lowe says there’s little doubt that the practice goes on. “I’ve never been in a position to see it happen, but it’s been reported for years,” he says.

Lowe points out that no one is suggesting the articles contain bad science or that conclusions drawn in them are faked, even if they written by Merck people.

“I haven’t seen anyone suggesting that the Merck studies themselves are bogus – they had damn well better not be – but by playing games with the external author list, the company invites suspicion,” Lowe says. The practice is driven by what he suggests is a need to bolster a drug’s image because of the money involved. Developing a new drug and shepherding it to market is enormously expensive.

Lowe gets close to the truth when he concludes that the only way to win back public trust, which he says “we’ve lost, in case anyone hasn’t noticed”, is to cut out the shortcuts and double-talk and “act as if what we’re doing — drug discovery — is something to be proud of.”

Calling for ethical changes in Big Pharma’s approach to its business is right on the money. But Lowe shows a lot of altruistic optimism when he says if such practices aren’t curtailed, the industry could face serious price controls, lots and lots of marketing restrictions, the FDA raising the bar for approvals to never-before-seen levels, and “flocks of lawyers beating their wings, circling around our every move” — as if Big Pharma can, on its own, accomplish the fundamental changes it needs to make.

Seeing as Big Pharma’s shady practices are so ingrained and so widespread, it seems to me that one of the measures Lowe warns of — the FDA revamping its approvals process and raising the bar – will almost certainly not be enough incentive to get Big Pharma’s ethics levels demonstrably high enough to warrant a return of public trust.

And while we’re talking about public trust, let’s face the flip side. The FDA itself has a long way to go in that department, too. The public wouldn’t be forced to resort to lawyers and the legal system if the FDA was really on the job.

April 24, 2008

FDA Handling Of Antibiotic Ketek Typical Of Poor Approvals And Safety Issues

Filed under: Big Pharma, FDA, pharmaceutical sales, pharmaceuticals — Rod Malcolm @ 10:57 am

It’s been more than two years since FDA scientist David Graham told a Senate panel that the FDA was “incapable of protecting America against another Vioxx.” Now he tells a House panel that “nothing has really changed.”

20-year veteran FDA scientist told the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation recently that the FDA is “incapable of protecting America against another Vioxx, and that since then nothing has really changed” in the FDA’s approvals process.

The subcommittee, chaired by Bart Stupak (D-MI), has been engaged in a series of hearings to evaluate the FDA’s ability to safely approve new drugs and provide post-marketing surveillance, with a jaundiced eye aimed at Big Pharma as well. The hearing was titled: “Ketek Clinical Study Fraud: What Did Aventis Know?”

Dr. David Graham told panel members that the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) “regards industry as the agency’s main client” rather than considering broad public safety as its mandate. It was Graham’s testimony in 2004 that helped lead to Merck’s arthritis drug Vioxx being pulled off the market in September of that year. Asked about other drugs that the FDA has mishandled, Graham told the subcommittee that atypical anti-psychotic medications to sedate nursing home residents kill roughly 15,000 people a year, and that the weight gain and diabetes dangers posed by Zyprexa, used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, was known for years to Eli Lilly, the drug’s maker.

Another physician, Dr. David Ross, who has worked on the CDER’s pre-approval side for a decade, said that the antibiotic Ketek, made by Sanofi Aventis, was approved in spite of the fact that the FDA knew it could “kill people from liver damage and that tens of millions of people would be exposed to it.” Ross testified that his FDA bosses forced him to ease back on his unfavorable review of Ketek.

The antibiotic Ketek, approved in April 2004, has been linked to liver failure and other adverse side effects, and the FDA announced in February that Ketek was no longer approved to treat sinusitis or bronchitis because its potential risks outweigh any benefits for these fairly benign conditions. It remains on the market to treat only pneumonia acquired outside a hospital or nursing home.

Mark Senak in his EyeOnFDA blog says the FDA is “in the stew”, and that the FDA leadership “may not believe that they are running for office. They are mistaken. They are running for an office called public confidence. And right now, as for the past few years, the agency is losing that essential race.”

Clearly there are problems with the FDA’s approvals policies and post-marketing controls. When you add Big Pharma’s propensity for unethical practices into the mix, such as withholding or altering clinical trial data, there is no question but to bring about serious changes in the way drugs are tested, reported and approved for public use.

Anything else continues the betrayal of public trust.

April 22, 2008

Will Federally-subsidized Counter-detailing Help Or Hinder Big Pharma?

Filed under: Big Pharma, pharmaceutical sales, pharmaceuticals — Rod Malcolm @ 8:57 am

“Pharmaceutical representatives often confuse educating with selling, and evidence shows that doctors’ prescribing patterns can be heavily influenced by these sales representatives.” (Senator Herb Kohl, D., Wis.)

There are few people who want to see an end to Big Pharma’s massive sales force more than Big Pharma leaders themselves. In his blog, Life Sciences Chronicle, more than 6 months ago, and again a few weeks ago in MedTech Futures, a regular feature at MidwestBusiness.com, industry watcher Dr. Ogan Gurel echoed Big Pharma’s concerns that the sales program is simply unsustainable.

“From direct personal experience,” Dr. Gurel says, “I know that many top pharmaceutical executives are keenly interested in solutions to the problem rather than sustaining what is ultimately an unsustainable arms race.” Big Pharma wants to get back to the business of bringing innovative medicines to the public, he says, rather than trying to sustain massive sales teams.

Created to promote prescription drugs to physicians, the sales rep program has bloated to an estimated cost of $20-billion-a-year and 100,000 sales reps knocking on doctors’ doors day in and day out across the country. Its value to the industry is in serious question by everyone concerned.

Herb Kohl (D., Wisconsin), chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, along with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), recently introduced a bill requiring Big Pharma to report all payments and gifts made to physicians. News reports said some Big Pharma companies welcomed the idea, and at least one was already doing so.

But things could get worse, rather than better, if a proposal for federal grants to counter Big Pharma’s sales efforts are approved. This past March, Sen. Kohl said he and Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Illinois) would introduce legislation to encourage “counter-detailing” grant programs.

Counter-detailing, or “academic detailing”, is the name for efforts, often made by medical insurers, to counter Big Pharma’s sales pitches, including its massive sales rep program which is referred to as “detailing.” Counter-detailing pushes doctors and patients toward cheaper generic drugs, and even tries to discredit Big Pharma’s claims about their more expensive branded products.

The grant programs would help create training materials informing physicians about safety issues and comparative effectiveness of different medications, and send trained health care professionals to physicians’ offices to provide the information to physicians.

These ideas could be worse than doing nothing at all. Government-subsidized attacks on Big Pharma brands would hit Big Pharma right in the pocket-book, resulting in even more money poured into its sales forces to compete. There seems little chance that the government’s counter-detailing would support branded products, helping Big Pharma ease up on its sales forces.

Neither of the Kohl-backed bills does anything to effectively replace the bloated and unsustainable drug-rep business model with a viable alternative — one that actually informs physicians about the efficacies and safety issues of both generic drugs and Big Pharma’s branded products (without all the expensive baloney of the sales rep program) while increasing real and predictable patient safety.

What’s needed, and where the government should put its money, is into rebuilding the FDA’s approvals and aftermarket safety programs with sensible and effective policies that help Big Pharma to get more innovative drugs into the pipeline, providing the kind of thoroughly tested and ethically marketed drugs that people need, want, expect and, by their recent actions in the courts of America, are now loudly demanding.

April 17, 2008

Changes Promised In FDA Drug Safety Policies If DeLauro Has Her Way

Filed under: Big Pharma, FDA, pharmaceuticals — Rod Malcolm @ 5:42 am

Reacting to reports of deaths, injuries and continuing law suits due to prescription drugs, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., is calling for major improvements to the drug review system at the Food and Drug Administration.

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn, plans to use her clout as chairwoman of the House appropriations panel responsible for FDA funding, to improve drug safety — and it’s about time someone took the situation seriously.

Calling top agency officials simply “incompetent” over the recent crisis involving the blood-thinner drug heparin in which at least 19 people have died, DeLauro said real change can occur only with a new administration.

DeLauro was quoted in the media saying the FDA “is an agency that is charged with safeguarding the public health, but it’s being run like the keystone cops.”

In the heparin crisis, caused by contaminated ingredients from a Chinese factory, the FDA became aware of the problem only after hundreds were sickened and deaths had occurred. Of course, Congress announced an investigation.

This whole affair shows how little has changed at the agency in nearly a decade. In 1999, a contaminated antibiotic manufactured in China killed at least 17 people before the FDA took notice, and, as usual, Congress investigated. Ho-hum.

Mark Senak, commenting in a recent blog on the terrible first quarter the FDA is having, included DeLauro’s “Keystone cops” quote as one of the indications of trouble at the agency — a heavily funded, understaffed and apparently under-talented federal agency who’s single mandate is to protect the health of Americans, a job it is failing to do effectively enough.

The FDA has itself admitted it violated policy by failing to inspect the plant in China. But according to a New York Times report, drugs imported from China have soared since the last China drug scandal, while the FDA’s inspections of overseas drug plants have dropped significantly. Of the 566 plants in China that export drugs to the US, the agency inspected only 13 of them last year. The story is the same in India and other countries that make drugs or drug components for Big Pharma.

Last week Congress called on the FDA to move faster in forcing drug companies to include in their “direct-to-consumer” advertisements that flood TV every night ways for consumers to report drug side effects to the FDA. The agency tracks so-called “adverse drug events” — meaning drug side effects — and uses reports from doctors and patients to address safety problems with drugs already on the market. But because the system is voluntary, agency scientists complain, it misses the vast majority of drug reactions that occur.

“When only a fraction of adverse drug reactions are reported to the FDA, that means the system is failing,” DeLauro said. She stated her priorities are: Improving the FDA’s handling of post-market drug safety reviews; direct-to-consumer advertising; sufficient funding for generic drug reviews; addressing the agency’s advisory committee conflict of interest policies; improving device oversight; handling drug importation; and renewal of agency user fees.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that DeLauro and company remain in place through and after this November’s election.

April 13, 2008

Big Pharma Safety Issues Contributed To Lowest Sales Since 1961

Filed under: Big Pharma, medical drug detox, pharmaceuticals — Rod Malcolm @ 2:53 pm

Product safety issues for 10 percent of Big Pharma’s total prescription market were among several factors leading to significantly lower- than-expected sales last year.

Although Big Pharma experienced a 3.8 percent sales growth in 2007, representing $286.5 billion in prescription drug sales, the rate of growth was down from 8 percent in 2006, and marks the lowest growth rate since 1961. According to a report from pharmaceutical marketing consultants IMS Health, product safety issues were among the reasons causing the slump.

IMS attributed the drop in sales to these primary factors:

• Loss of exclusivity of branded drugs to generics, which now hold nearly 68 percent of the market
• The fewest new, innovative drugs approved in 3 decades (and slowed physician adoption of new medicines, too)
• Slowing of Medicare Part D prescription drug business as that program matures
• The repercussion from mounting drug safety issues

Safety issues included a significant number of “black box” label warnings, as well as a number of important product withdrawals. The FDA also raised safety concerns about other products in the erythropoietins, diabetes and antidepressant therapy classes. Overall, says the IMS report, safety issues contributed to “significantly lower- than-expected sales, accounting for approximately 10 percent of the total prescription market.”

In his great blog, Eye On FDA, Mark Senak poses some interesting questions about the situation, suggesting that if the drop in product approvals isn’t because of the FDA’s backlog (which are due at least in part to staffing shortages), it could be increased concern over product safety:

“One can truly see one of the many impacts of the fact that the agency has issued more approvable letters in 2007, to a degree shutting down the pipeline, impacting the market, patients and stockholders. This of course, leads to the question whether or not this is a product of (i) a risk averse environment, or (ii) products have suddenly gotten bad, or (iii) the FDA has purposely slowed things down so that it can catch up.”

(“Approvable letters” are notices to drug makers that new products can’t be approved until additional actions are taken, usually in the area of more studies and testing.)

My thoughts are plainly this: Anything the FDA wants to do to beef up and improve testing before approving new drugs is okay with me. And I’m sure with the American public too, who are fed up with all the injuries, deaths and massive lawsuits stemming from incomplete, shoddy and even unethical testing and reporting — not to mention unethical marketing — that for too long has put the protection of profits and investor confidence ahead of consumer protection and confidence.

April 11, 2008

PharmedOut Helps Physicians Identify And Counter Big Pharma Marketing Ploys

Filed under: Big Pharma, pharmaceuticals — Rod Malcolm @ 7:53 am

Replacing unethical marketing with evidence-based science could, in the longer term, put a lot of money back into Big Pharma’s R&D pocket.

Shahram Ahari, the former Ely Lilly sales rep who went public with his tales of how Big Pharma’s marketing tactics target doctors with everything from gifts to possible sexual favors (see our earlier blog) has joined the group PharmedOut, an independent, publicly funded project that wants to help physicians identify and counter Big Pharma’s inappropriate pharmaceutical promotion practices. The group has released a free, web-based Continuing Medical Education (CNE) course to educate doctors about generic drugs and the drug approval process.

PharmedOut also wants to see unethical marketing replaced by evidence-based science — something we’ve been saying all along. If the Food and Drug Administration’s drug testing and approvals system ensured that Big Pharma’s products were thoroughly tested before releasing them, these kinds of marketing tactics could become unnecessary.

PharmedOut is being funded by money from a 2004 legal settlement between Warner-Lambert, a division of Pfizer, Inc., and the Attorneys General of 50 States and the District of Columbia over allegations that Warner-Lambert conducted an unlawful marketing campaign for the drug Neurontin. But according to some comments at the blog PharmaGossip, this kind of funding may be tainted because it comes, however indirectly, from Big Pharma. And after it’s gone, how will funding continue?

Regardless of PharmedOut’s funding, its intentions seem on the money. Reliable drug testing and full disclosure would remove doubts about a drug’s efficacy or safety, doctors would be free to prescribe a drug with more certainty, and the public would benefit from better drugs and lower health care costs.

Such a system would see Big Pharma having to continue spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing a drug — that’s a given that won’t change. But it could save a lot of the $7 billion it spends trying to sell its drugs to doctors — roughly $8,800 per physician — in a market place already glutted with poorly-evidenced drugs. That money could be ploughed back into R&D budgets already pinched by patent expirations and competition from generics.

Even more R&D money could be derived from efficient, longer-term testing and approvals. Better tested drugs could save billions in legal settlements over drugs that turn out to be less than perfectly safe, and more billions in settlements over Big Pharma’s corporate and executive culpability for crossing legal and ethical lines promoting poorly tested and under- or falsely-reported test results.

The ideal of evidence-based science driving prescribing decisions can only come about if the onus is placed back on Big Pharma, the FDA and appropriate lawmakers to develop better, safer testing and approvals. However difficult it may be, there is no other way to get some shine back into Big Pharma’s tarnished image. It could be what’s needed to save the industry from the extinction it surely faces without some fundamental changes.

April 9, 2008

Big Pharma Rep Says ‘Sexual Tension’ Used To Manipulate Physician Prescribing

Filed under: Big Pharma, pharmaceuticals — Rod Malcolm @ 2:26 am

Two former pharmaceutical sales reps have blown the whistle on unethical tactics used by Big Pharma to curry favor with physicians, raising health care costs and doing no real good for patients.

Two former Big Pharma sales reps who regularly visited doctors to promote their company’s prescription products have gone public with claims of everything from free gifts, dinners, trips to strip clubs and even ‘sexual tension’ to manipulate America’s doctors into prescribing more of their products, saying reps were chosen for their attractiveness, not their product knowledge or scientific training.pic.JPG

Shahram Ahari, a former Eli Lilly sales rep, told medical students at Tufts, Harvard, and Massachusetts General Hospital recently about how the future doctors can resist the slanted sales pitches. Ahari also discussed the unethical nature of drug sales with Jim Braude of New England Cable News (NECN) in a video recently, and his claims are downright shocking.

Ahari, now at the University of California-San Francisco School of Pharmacy, who has testified before Congress on the situation, told NECN that reps were chosen for their looks and charm, and if doctors appeared to be attracted to the rep, that rep should ‘exploit’ the situation. He said he has no info on how far such exploitation might have gone, but he knew that doctors were routinely treated to expensive dinners, all-expense-paid trips, and even visits to strip clubs.

Ahari tells more of his disturbing story about selling the controversial drug Zyprexa in a video on the YouTube website. And another former Big Pharma rep, Gwen Olsen, has also uploaded a series of confessions about her unethical sales tactics to YouTube. Similar to Ahari’s revelations, she reveals a shocking lack of ethics and a willingness to exploit and manipulate physicians with little or no regard for patient safety by Big Pharma’s sales reps.

The Physician Payments Sunshine Act, introduced by Senators Chuck Grassley and Herb Kohl, will require drug and medical device makers to report gifts, honoraria, cash and free services made to doctors. The bill was proposed because of worries that Big Pharma’s marketing practices add to already skyrocketing health care costs and are not in patients’ best interests.

April 7, 2008

Senators Grassley and Kohl Introduce Bill Requiring Big Pharma To Report All Money Given To Doctors

Filed under: Big Pharma, medical drug detox — Rod Malcolm @ 5:23 pm

One new development in Washington this week clearly shows that we’re not alone in our call for Big Pharma reforms.

Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Herb Kohl have introduced a bill that requires drug and medical device makers to report to the federal government the value of free services, and almost every penny, they provide to doctors. Anything over $25 would have to be reported quarterly and would be posted on a government website for all to see.

For several months, Congress has been looking into the millions of dollars that flow from Big Pharma (and smaller pharmaceutical makers too) to America’s physicians, for everything from speaking engagements and consulting fees to golf weekends, travel and free meals.

There is some question about how, or even if, this practice influences what drugs doctors prescribe, because this seriously affects health care costs. The price of a cheap generic vs. an expensive brand drug, times the billions of prescriptions written every year, makes a huge difference in the health care bottom line.

In our view, there’s absolutely no doubt that Big Pharma’s physician bribery program sways prescribing practices. If it wasn’t working, Big Pharma wouldn’t keep on shelling out the millions of dollars to doctors. According to reports, some individual doctors have actually been paid hundreds of thousands a year in such gifts or fees-for-services.

The practice also raises the fear of potential patient harm from being prescribed drugs they might not need, or that may not be exactly what is needed.

Said Sen. Kohl, the bill’s co-sponsor, “At our June hearing, the pharmaceutical industry told the Aging Committee that they believe their practices are above-board. If that is the case, full disclosure will only serve to prove them right. If that is not the case, full disclosure will bring their influence-peddling out from the shadows. Either way, patients win.”

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