Category Archives: Drug Companies

With over 1.5 million drug and medical device related injuries each year, consumers are forced to take legal action. Find out if you have a lawsuit. Read news stories about dangerous medical devices and prescription drugs, health studies and pharmaceutical litigation.

Blog, Civil Rights, Drug Companies, International, Legal News, Personal Injury, Supreme Court

CNN Pressured Dr. Drew ‘Like the Mafia’ to Retract Clinton Health Comments

When HLN cancelled Dr. Drew in August, the network said the decision was “mutually agreed” upon by both network executives and the show’s host, Dr. Drew Pinsky — but according to a report, executives at CNN (HLN’s sister network) pressured Pinsky to retract comments he made about Hillary Clinton’s health before the show was cancelled a few days later.

“CNN is so supportive of Clinton, network honchos acted like the Mafia when confronting Drew,” a source close to Pinsky told the New York Post‘s Page Six. “First, they demanded he retract his comments, but he wouldn’t.”

During a radio interview with John McIntyre on August 16, Dr. Pinsky commented on the release of the Democratic presidential candidate’s medical records, saying that based upon the information he had reviewed with another doctor, he was “gravely concerned not just about her health, but her health care.”

“Both of us concluded that if we were providing the care she was receiving, we would be ashamed to show up in a doctors’ lounge,” Dr. Pinsky concluded. “We would be laughed out. She’s receiving sort of 1950s level care by our evaluation.”

Eight days later, CNN executive vice president Ken Jautz announced that the last episode of Dr. Drew would air September 22.

“Dr. Drew and his team have delivered more than five years of creative shows and I want to thank them for their hard work and distinctive programming,” Jautz said in a statementannouncing the show’s cancellation. “Their audience-driven shows, in particular, were innovative and memorable TV. And Dr. Drew has been an authoritative voice on addiction and on many other topical issues facing America today.”

The cancellation was framed as part of a broader shakeup at HLN, including the end of Nancy Grace’s long-running show on the network.

But a source close to Dr. Pinsky told Page Six that the host’s comments on Clinton’s health led to a series of “nasty” phone calls and emails from network executives that were “downright scary and creepy.”

“Both of us concluded that if we were providing the care she was receiving, we would be ashamed to show up in a doctors’ lounge,” Dr. Pinsky concluded. “We would be laughed out. She’s receiving sort of 1950s level care by our evaluation.”

Eight days later, CNN executive vice president Ken Jautz announced that the last episode of Dr. Drew would air September 22.

“Dr. Drew and his team have delivered more than five years of creative shows and I want to thank them for their hard work and distinctive programming,” Jautz said in a statementannouncing the show’s cancellation. “Their audience-driven shows, in particular, were innovative and memorable TV. And Dr. Drew has been an authoritative voice on addiction and on many other topical issues facing America today.”

The cancellation was framed as part of a broader shakeup at HLN, including the end of Nancy Grace’s long-running show on the network.

But a source close to Dr. Pinsky told Page Six that the host’s comments on Clinton’s health led to a series of “nasty” phone calls and emails from network executives that were “downright scary and creepy.”

Full Article – http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2016/09/04/report-cnn-demanded-dr-drew-retract-clinton-health-comments-cancelling-show/

Blog, Business Law, Drug Companies, Legal News, Personal Injury

Has Charitable Giving Become A Profitable Form Of Investing For Pharmaceutical Companies?

Martin Shkreli, the notorious ex-CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, made waves last summer when he purchased the rights to Daraprim and raised its price more than 5,000 percent. Physicians use the drug to treat toxoplasmosis, a life-threatening condition that affects those with weakened immune systems (due to HIV/AIDS, etc.).

Days after Shkreli’s purchase, he contacted Patient Services Inc., a charity committed to making medical care more affordable. Shkreli wanted to create a fund for – you guessed it – patients who suffer from toxoplasmosis.

Patient Services Inc., or PSI, jumped at the opportunity, suggesting an initial donation of $22 million, including $1.6 million of its operational costs. Shkreli countered with an offer of $1 million and $80,000 of the company’s costs. This was a paltry offer, considering that Daraprim now costs $60,000 to $90,000 for six-week treatment in light of Shkreli’s price hike.

And that isn’t the worst of it.

Finding A Loophole

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PSI is a copay charity, one of seven large ones in the U.S. health care system. It exists to offer payment assistance to the 40 million Americans who qualify for Medicare, helping them to a smaller copay and smaller up-front costs. Even with the help of copay charities, Medicare recipients were still paying around $3,000 for their Daraprim prescriptions.

American taxpayers shoulder the difference. This is where the controversy of “charitable giving” comes into play. By donating a paltry $1 million to a copay charity, Shkreli was able to collect millions more from Medicare, thanks to his own drug price hike. “Big pharma” benefits, while taxpayers and patients suffer.

The Great Charitable Giving Illusion

Many pharmaceutical companies give the illusion that they participate in charity copay for altruistic reasons. Congress recently released an internal case study of Turing Pharmaceuticals, suggesting that its patient payment programs should be “repeatedly referenced” to promote public relations. Experts explain that giving millions to these copay charities makes pharmaceutical companies look altruistic, when the opposite is actually true.

The real intent of these donations is often to deflect criticism when they hike drug prices, leaving the health care system to pick up the broken pieces.

A History Of Deceit

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Daraprim may be the most high-profile example of this charitable funding phenomenon, but it’s certainly not the first. Retrophin, another drug company run by the now-infamous Shkreli, hiked the price on Thiola, a drug intended to treat recurring kidney stones, nearly 2,000 percent. At the same time, his company gave a donation to PSI for kidney stone patient copays.

Read Full Article – https://www.summitbehavioralhealth.com/blog/charitable-giving-profitable-investing-pharmaceutical-companies/

Blog, Criminal, Drug Companies, Legal News, Organized Crime

Drug arrest of John Gotti’s grandson triggers cops to raid late mobster’s Howard Beach home for the first time

BY
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Updated: Thursday, August 4, 2016, 10:27 PM

It’s the Fall of the House of Gotti.

The late mob boss John Gotti must be spinning in his grave after NYPD cops raided his iconic home in Howard Beach early Thursday to arrest his namesake grandson on drug charges.

The raid marked the first time ever that members of law enforcement crossed the Gotti threshold armed with a search warrant.

“They destroyed the house,” claimed Gerard Marrone, the lawyer representing John Gotti, the grandson. His father is mob scion Peter Gotti.

Detectives seized $40,000 and 500 Oxycodone pills inside a safe in Gotti’s bedroom where he was shacked up with girlfriend Eleonor Gabrielli, who was also busted, officials said.

Retired FBI supervisor Phil Scala said the 23-year-old grandson’s reckless behavior in the House of Gotti violated a sacred rule. The Dapper Don never conducted mob business in his home because he wanted to protect his family from exposure to his criminal activities, according to Scala, who headed the Bureau’s Gambino squad for years.

“If John was still alive he would be spewing every pejorative he could, knowing that somebody did something so stupid to besmirch his home and his family,” Scala told the Daily News.

Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said Gotti and a crew of dope dealers were peddling Oxycodone pills on the streets of Howard Beach and Ozone Park for $23 to $24 per painkiller pill.

Just like his grandfather was brought down by a bug planted in an elderly woman’s apartment above the mob boss’s Ravenite Social Club in lower Manhattan, investigators secretly installed a listening device in Gotti’s Infiniti sedan as part of their drug probe dubbed “Operation Beach Party.”

Gotti was recorded on a wiretap stating that he sold more than 4,200 pills a month and the illicit business pulled in $100,000 a month.

Undercover cops allegedly made 11 buys from Gotti, purchasing $46,000 worth of Oxycodone from him. He faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

Investigators also executed a search warrant at the Rebel Ink Tattoo Parlor where Gotti is a part-owner.

“He’s lucky his grandfather is not alive,” said Lewis Kasman, the deceased Gotti’s so-called adopted son. “John Sr. would have killed the kid himself.”

He also said the elder Gotti never brought business home.

“No wiseguy was allowed in that house and the only non-blood family member permitted inside was me,” Kasman said. “That was his (Gotti’s) palace, so to speak. This is a desecration of everything that John stood for in terms of the family house being sacred.”

The bedroom of Gotti’s son Frankie, who was killed in a tragic car accident, was maintained as a shrine in the house, Kasman said.

Also charged are Shaine Hack, 37, Edward Holohan, 50, Steve Kruger, 57, Justin Testa, 41, Michael Farduchi, 24, Melissa Erul, 23, and Dawn Biers, 46.

Investigators seized $200,000 from Hack’s home in Howard Beach — allegedly drug proceeds he was holding for Gotti.

The feds never sought a search warrant for the home in the past although there were unproven suspicions the “Gotti legacy,” — a massive stash of cash reaped from Gambino family rackets — was possibly hidden somewhere inside, Scala said.

Blog, Business Law, Drug Companies, Legal News

Big Pharma Promotes Legal Drug Addiction

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Big Pharma Promotes Legal Drug Addiction

Many of us believe that Big Pharma must be held accountable for this dangerous opioid trend, especially since several have been caught lying about the benefits and risks of their drugs.

As noted by the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), the drug industry has “fostered the opioid addiction epidemic” in several ways, by:

  1. Introducing long-acting opioid painkillers like OxyContin, which prior to reformulation in 2010 could be snorted or shot. Many addicts claimed the high from OxyContin was better than heroin. In fact, from a chemical standpoint, OxyContin is nearly identical to heroin, and has been identified as a major gateway drug to heroin.
  2. Changing pain prescription guidelines to make opioids the first choice for lower back and other pain conditions that previously did not qualify for these types of drugs. Even the World Health Organization (WHO) has had a hand in this problem, although it restricted its promotion of narcotic painkillers to cancer patients.
  3. Promoting long-term use of opioids, even though there’s no evidence that using these drugs long term is safe and effective
  4. Downplaying and misinforming doctors and patients about the addictive nature of opioid drugs. OxyContin, for example, became a blockbuster drug mainly through misleading claims, which Purdue Pharma knew were false from the start. The basic promise was that it provided pain relief for a full 12 hours, twice as long as generic drugs, giving patients “smooth and sustained pain control all day and all night.”However, for many the effects do not last anywhere near 12 hours, and once the drug wears off, painful withdrawal symptoms set in, including body aches, nausea and anxiety. These symptoms, in addition to the return of the original pain, quickly begin to feed the cycle of addiction.7

A 2015 article in The Week does a great job revealing the promotional strategy developed by Purdue, and backed by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), that has led to such enormous personal tragedy.

As noted in this article: “The time-release conceit even worked on the FDA, which stated that ‘Delayed absorption, as provided by OxyContin tablets is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.’”

Other recent research has found that medical marijuana lowers prescription drug use.

The Big Q: Could that be why it hasn’t been rescheduled?

There are no other truly compelling reasons why addictive narcotics like OxyContin are legal, while marijuana, which is extremely unlikely to kill even if one take very high amounts is not.

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Read Full Article – http://www.livetradingnews.com/big-pharma-promotes-legal-drug-addiction-10406.html#.V6F8KZMrKRs

Blog, Business Law, Criminal, Drug Companies, Legal News, Personal Injury

Why pharma companies are fighting legal marijuana

By Christopher Ingraham

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There’s a body of research showing that painkiller abuse and overdose are lower in states with medical marijuana laws. These studies have generally assumed that when medical marijuana is available, pain patients are increasingly choosing pot over powerful and deadly prescription narcotics. But that’s always been just an assumption.

Now a new study, released in the journal Health Affairs, validates these findings by providing clear evidence of a missing link in the causal chain running from medical marijuana to falling overdoses. Ashley and W. David Bradford, a daughter-father pair of researchers at the University of Georgia, scoured the database of all prescription drugs paid for under Medicare Part D from 2010 to 2013.

They found that, in the 17 states with a medical-marijuana law in place by 2013, prescriptions for painkillers and other classes of drugs fell sharply compared with states that did not have a medical-marijuana law. The drops were quite significant: In medical-marijuana states, the average doctor prescribed 265 fewer doses of antidepressants each year, 486 fewer doses of seizure medication, 541 fewer anti-nausea doses and 562 fewer doses of anti-anxiety medication.

But most strikingly, the typical physician in a medical-marijuana state prescribed 1,826 fewer doses of painkillers in a given year.

These conditions are among those for which medical marijuana is most often approved under state laws. So as a sanity check, the Bradfords ran a similar analysis on drug categories that pot typically is not recommended for — blood thinners, anti-viral drugs and antibiotics. And on those drugs, they found no changes in prescribing patterns after the passage of marijuana laws.

“This provides strong evidence that the observed shifts in prescribing patterns were in fact due to the passage of the medical marijuana laws,” they write.

In a news release, lead author Ashley Bradford wrote, “The results suggest people are really using marijuana as medicine and not just using it for recreational purposes.”

One interesting wrinkle in the data is glaucoma, for which there was a small increase in demand for traditional drugs in medical-marijuana states. It’s routinely listed as an approved condition under medical-marijuana laws, and studies have shown that marijuana provides some degree of temporary relief for its symptoms.

The Bradfords hypothesize that the short duration of the glaucoma relief provided by marijuana — roughly an hour or so — may actually stimulate more demand in traditional glaucoma medications. Glaucoma patients may experience some short-term relief from marijuana, which may prompt them to seek other, robust treatment options from their doctors.

The tanking numbers for painkiller prescriptions in medical marijuana states are likely to cause some concern among pharmaceutical companies. These companies have long been at the forefront of opposition to marijuana reform, funding research by anti-pot academics and funneling dollars to groups, such as the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, that oppose marijuana legalization.

Read Full Article – https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/13/one-striking-chart-shows-why-pharma-companies-are-fighting-legal-marijuana/