Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare

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Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare, by Peter C. Gøtzsche, with forewords by Richard Smith, former editor-in-chief, The British Medical Journal, and Drummond Rennie, deputy editor, JAMA (Radcliffe 2013), is not the first exposition to compare the industry with the Mafia or mob. Author quotes a former vicepresident of Pfizer, who has said: "It is scary how many similarities there are between this industry and the mob. The mob makes obscene amounts of money, as does this industry. The side effects of organized crime are killings and deaths, and the side effects are the same in this industry. The mob bribes politicians and others, and so does the drug industry …" Most of this book is devoted to building up the case that the drug industry has systematically corrupted science to play up the benefits and play down the harms of their drugs. Yet the book is not all about problems. It proposes solutions, some of which are more likely than others to happen. It seems most unlikely that drug companies will be nationalised, but it is likely that all the data used to license drugs will be made available. Author says, "we now suffer from two man-made epidemics, tobacco and prescription drugs, both of which are hugely lethal. In the United States and Europe, drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. I shall explain in this book why this is so and what we can do about it." Foreword by Richard Smith Foreword by Drummond Rennie About the author 1 Introduction 2 Confessions from an insider Asthma deaths were caused by asthma inhalers Shady marketing and research 3 Organised crime, the business model of big pharma Hoffman-La Roche, the biggest drug pusher Hall of Shame for big pharma The crimes are repetitive It’s organised crime 4 Very few patients benefit from the drugs they take 5 Clinical trials, a broken social contract with patients 6 Conflicts of interest at medical journals 7 The corruptive influence of easy money 8 What do thousands of doctors on industry payroll do? Seeding trials Rent a key opinion leader to ‘give advice’ Rent a key opinion leader to ‘educate’ 9 Hard sell Clinical trials are marketing in disguise Ghostwriting The marketing machine Hard sell ad nauseam Highly expensive drugs Excesses in hypertension Patient organisations NovoSeven for bleeding soldiers 10 Impotent drug regulation Conflicts of interest at drug agencies Corruption at drug agencies The unbearable lightness of politicians Drug regulation builds on trust Inadequate testing of new drugs Too many warnings and too many drugs 11 Public access to data at drug agencies Our breakthrough at the EMA in 2010 Access to data at other drug agencies Deadly slimming pills 12 Neurontin, an epilepsy drug for everything 13 Merck, where the patients die first 14 Fraudulent celecoxib trial and other lies Marketing is harmful 15 Switching cheap drugs to expensive ones in the same patients Novo Nordisk switches patients to expensive insulin AstraZeneca switches patients to expensive me-again omeprazole 16 Blood glucose was fine but the patients died Novo Nordisk interferes with an academic publication 17 Psychiatry, the drug industry’s paradise Are we all crazy or what? Psychiatrists as drug pushers The chemical imbalance hoax Screening for psychiatric disorders Unhappy pills Prozac, a terrible Eli Lilly drug turned into a blockbuster Exercise is a good intervention Further lies about happy pills 18 Pushing children into suicide with happy pills Glaxo study 329 Concealing suicides and suicide attempts in clinical trials Lundbeck’s evergreening of citalopram Antipsychotic drugs Zyprexa, another terrible Eli Lilly drug turned into a blockbuster The bottom line of psychotropic drugs 19 Intimidation, threats and violence to protect sales 20 Busting the industry myths 21 General system failure calls for a revolution Our drugs kill us How much medicine do we really need and at what cost? For-profit is the wrong model Clinical trials Drug regulatory agencies Drug formulary and guideline committees Drug marketing Doctors and their organisations Patients and their organisations Medical journals Journalists 22 Having the last laugh at big pharma Money doesn’t smell Creating diseases