Chemical Straight Jackets for Kids! Drugging Our Children: Ex-Pharma Rep Tells All | The Truth Talks Former Pharmaceutical Drug Rep., Gwen Olsen, explains .
There is big money to be made in prescribing medications to kids – especially when those medications are intended to be taken for life, as many psychotropic drugs are.
For any parent, having to accept your child needs psychiatric drugs must be agonising. But when Susan Bevis's 13-year-old daughter Amy suffered a breakdown after a vicious campaign of school bullying, it seemed the only option - as instructed by NHS psychiatrists.
Johnson & Johnson, the company that makes the antipsychotic drug Risperdal, has tentatively agreed to a settlement of $2.2 billion to resolve a federal investigation into the company's marketing practices. Although details are not fully finalized, this includes "a roughly $400 million criminal fine for the illegal promotion of the antipsychotic Risperdal," according to the Wall Street Journal. It's been well documented that Johnson & Johnson confidentially paid psychiatrists such as Harvard's Joseph Biederman to promote adult drugs such as the powerful antipsychotic drug Risperdal for children. The company has even ghost-written at least one of the Harvard professor's "scientific" articles.
To head off medical conflicts of interest, the Obama administration is poised to require drug companies to disclose the payments they make to doctors for research, consulting, speaking, travel and entertainment.
The drug industry spends nearly twice as much on promotion as it does on research and development, and historically one of their key targets has been physicians.
There are no genetic tests, no brain scans, blood tests, chemical imbalance tests or X-rays that can scientifically/medically prove that any childhood psychiatric label is a real “disorder”.
It has long been evident that “Big Pharma’ has saturated their primary marketplace with their dangerous and toxic drugs. They have drugged adults, seniors, people with supposed psychological disorders–and now the only way to increase their sales share is to take business away from another drug company or to find a new disease not served by current medicines, not an easy task when all the other manufacturers are trying to do the same thing. Now, however, the marketing geniuses at the pharmaceutical companies have found a huge, lucrative new and relatively untapped market: children.
The Supreme Court cast doubt Tuesday on efforts by states to limit drug manufacturers' use of information about the prescription drugs that doctors like to prescribe.
It was disturbing to read about the dramatic increase in diagnosed cases of ADHD in N.C. between 2003 and 2007 (“Cases of ADHD rocket in state,” AC-T, Nov. 20). This huge increase in such a short time frame seems inexplicable. In the mid-1990s, there was an explosion in the number of people diagnosed with ADHD once adults were included and the inattentive type of ADHD recognized. Expansion in diagnostic criteria and several popular books like “Driven to Distraction” and “Out of the Fog” increased public awareness of this disorder.
Drug companies say the millions of dollars they pay physicians for speaking and consulting justly compensates them for the laudable work of educating their colleagues.
Drug companies have long kept secret details of the payments they make to doctors for promoting their drugs. But seven companies have begun posting names and compensation on the Web, some as the result of legal settlements. ProPublica compiled these disclosures, totaling $258 million, into a single database that allows patients to search for their doctor. Receiving payments isn’t necessarily wrong, but it does raise ethical issues.
A unit of Forest Laboratories, the maker of the antidepressant Celexa, agreed on Wednesday to pay more than $313 million to settle criminal and civil complaints, including a claim that it had illegally promoted the drug for use in children.
A law intended to speed up development of new drugs for US kids has ended up financing clinical trials in poor countries, where the medicines might never become available.