Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 And starting right now, the justice department and heroic defenders of the public good like Eliot Spitzer, Sidney Wolfe and Dr. David Graham now stand a chance to bring this evil empire to its knees. And should we be lucky enough as citizens of this society, someday we shall be free of this scourge of companies we now call "Big Pharma. |
| Hopefully the justice department will send a strong message with the criminal indictment of Merck executives and FDA decision makers who were involved in what increasingly appears to be a conspiracy to conceal the negative side effects of Vioxx while the drug was heavily promoted and sold.
In a report filed by FDA researcher David Graham on November 2nd, it was revealed that Vioxx may have contributed to almost 28,000 heart attacks and deaths over the past five years. |
| REPPED: Pharmaceutical giant Merck is now under scrutiny by the justice department, which has begun a criminal investigation into the firm’s marketing of the painkiller Vioxx (withdrawn from the market on September 30, 2004). Since that time, the Vioxx scandal has expanded thanks in part to the publication of internal Merck e-mails by the Wall Street Journal. These e-mails showed that Merck was apparently aware of the dangers of Vioxx several years ago and yet attempted to construct clinical studies to obscure those dangers in an effort to continue marketing these drugs to the general public. |
Melody Petersen
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 In 2005, an official in the U.S. justice department testified before Congress that the government had begun 180 separate investigations of the marketing practices of pharmaceutical companies. The investigations involved dozens of companies and hundreds of drugs.
"We are not seeing isolated instances of misconduct," Ronald J. Ten-pas, associate deputy attorney general, told a House committee in 2007, "but repeated practices within the industry that have resulted in significant losses to federal health care programs. |
Fred A. Baughman, Jr., M.D. and Craig Hovey
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 One of the most frightening examples of pharmaceutical company drug pushing came in the May 13, 2004 announcement from the justice department that Pfizer had pled guilty to charges that it had wrongly promoted Neurontin, an epilepsy drug, for unapproved uses and agreed to pay $430 million, which included a $240 million criminal fine, the second largest ever in the prosecution of health care fraud. The justice department has made settlements for over $2 billion since the year 2000 as the result of investigations into how big pharmaceutical companies market their drugs illegally. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Jude Hospital and delivered him to U.S. justice department bounty hunters who, against his will, drove him across the border to the USA. There, the FBI arrested him and charged him with wire fraud (Keller had used the telephone to hold conversations with prospective patients). Keller was later convicted of wire fraud and sent to a North Dakota prison for two years. His kidnapping and arrest are blatantly illegal under international law. |
Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN
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| The Searle Company was due to be prosecuted by the U. S. justice department for fabricating test results indicating that Aspartame was safe (and later for racketeering charges) but legal mat-
Epidemiological:
The branch of science concerned with public health and the causes of disease. ters were held up and delayed by unscrupulous attorneys (whom later took extremely lucrative positions within the Aspartame industry) until the statute of limitations expired. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| As far back as the Reagan-Bush administration, the justice department fined Lilly $25,000 ($1,000 for each of 25 separate counts) for lying and mislabeling side effects related to Prozac.
In much more recent court cases related to Prozac, we find that in more than a decade of "defending" Prozac, Lilly was actually already aware of the dangerous side effects. When a court case appeared to be going against them, Lilly's lawyers would revert to a "business decision—settlement" so no guilt could be attached to them. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 In June 2003, eight months after the raid, Campbell was stunned to learn that the justice department had moved to dismiss his whistle-blower suit in favor of another qui torn suit that had been filed just three days before his. The first-to-file whistle-blower was a Catholic priest named John Corapi, who had gone to Moon in June 2002 for what he thought was a routine cardiac checkup and had been told, like so many of Moon's patients, that he would die without immediate surgery. |
| In the opinion of the outside specialists, between one quarter and one half of the patients who underwent catheterization or surgery at Redding Medical Center had been operated on inappropriately. justice department documents stated that at least 167 patients had died during cardiac surgery, or shortly after, as a direct result of the Redding doctors' aggressive treatment. Either the patients had been too weak to withstand the surgery, or the doctors had been negligent, or they had committed errors, sometimes in haste to go from one patient to the next. |
| When the justice department gave Hunt's medical records to outside cardiologists, they found no evidence that the surgery had been needed. Hunt's blurry vision cleared up once his blood pressure was successfully treated with drugs, but his life would never be the same after his surgery. He suffered a hernia at the incision site, which meant he could no longer do the physical labor of ranching: the fencing, bucking hay, and moving cattle. Five years later, he lost his ranch. |
| When his lawyer filed an objection to the Justice Department's decision, assistant U.S. attorney Michael Hirst, the prosecutor in the case, accused Campbell of being "driven more by greed than indignation." The prosecutor praised Corapi and Zerga, saying publicly, "Their willingness to blow the whistle on fraud resulted in our putting a stop to the surgeries and recovering $54 million." "That was a low point," Campbell told me. "It played out in the local paper as a battle between competing whistle-blowers, a doctor and a priest, duking it out in the courts. |
| If the justice department investigates and the fraud is proved, it enables the government to recover up to triple damages and substantial penalties from the defendants—while the whistle-blower can potentially receive a portion of the government's recovery. By then, Campbell was pretty sure he was going to need the money to start over in another town. Patients had left his practice; colleagues avoided him. The town of Redding was angry with him. |
| Maybe Moon and Realyvasquez and the hospital were deliberately bilking Medicare, as the Justice Department's charges against them indicate. Or maybe, as Moon and Realyvasquez claim, they were making judgment calls within the wide latitude permitted by the art of medicine, the uncertainty of cardiology. If that's the case, then the saga of Redding Medical Center points to the desperate need in medicine for clearer standards and better evidence for what works and what doesn't. |
Mark Schapiro
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 From the Office of Legal Counsel in the justice department came a gem of pretzel logic that amounted to a head-on challenge to the mainstay principles of international agreements. |
Kelly Patricia O'Meara
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 Karl Loren, Prozac Petition "The Office of the Surgeon General of the United States; The Department of Health & Human Services; The Federal Bureau of Investigations and The justice department. Legal Law Help "Safety and Health," http://www.legallawhelp.com/safety_and_health/prozac/.
" United States Government Accountability Office, "Adverse Drug Events - The Magnitude of Health Risk is Uncertain Because of Limited Incidence Data," January 2000, pg-10.
12 Thomas J. Moore, "Hard to Swallow," Washingtonian Magazine, December 1997. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The bill would even allow the justice department to file civil copyright lawsuits on behalf of the recording industry, meaning that you can have the justice department at your door for something as simple as copying a few MP3 files for a friend.
Fair Use would also be destroyed. Artists wouldn't be able to use images of President Bush's face in funny flash animations, for example. Publishers would not be able to use a company logo in an article that makes fun of that company. |
Mike Adams
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 Jude Hospital and delivered him to U.S. justice department bounty hunters who, against his will, drove him across the border to the USA. There, the FBI arrested him and charged him with wire fraud (Keller had used the telephone to hold conversations with prospective patients). Keller was later convicted of wire fraud and sent to a North Dakota prison for two years. His kidnapping and arrest are blatantly illegal under international law. |
Fred A. Baughman, Jr., M.D. and Craig Hovey
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| The justice department has made settlements for over $2 billion since the year 2000 as the result of investigations into how big pharmaceutical companies market their drugs illegally.
In 2003 Pfizer's revenues were $45.1 billion, and $2.7 billion of that came from sales of Neurontin. The drug was approved in 1993 as an anti-seizure medication for sufferers of epilepsy. Once a drug has been approved by the FDA physicians are free to prescribe it as they see fit, be it for the approved use or not, but pharmaceutical companies are not allowed to promote drugs for off-label use. |
| What the Justice Department's investigation revealed was that Warner-Lambert (a division of Parke-Davis before Pfizer bought it in 2000) blatantly violated the law by marketing Neurontin as a treatment for ADHD, bipolar disorder, Lou Gehrig's disease, migraine headaches, and even restless leg syndrome, among others.
Much like other pharmaceutical companies, they paid physicians to hear presentations on the off-label use of Neurontin under the guise of "consultant meetings," held in places like Hawaii and Florida. |
Kevin Trudeau
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 For instance, you can go to the justice department and turn in a corrupt government official. But that agency probably will not act unless an official in the justice department has a vendetta against that particular individual.
We were told that we would not have access to the purchasing-of-government influence system because of the ad we published. Now everyone in the system would be leery of us, for we could be doing investigation work for further publication. We were now considered truly outsiders and renegades.
Next, we discovered something that really drove all of this home. |
Peter Rost
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 This drug is approved by the FDA for the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis in postmenopausal women; however, since sales didn't go very well, the company decided to embark on off-label promotion. The justice department claims that sales representatives were trained to prompt or bait questions by doctors in order to promote Evista for unapproved uses and that Eli Lilly encouraged sales representatives to promote Evista by sending unsolicited medical letters to promote the drug for unapproved uses to doctors on their sales routes. |
| Christopher Christie, nominated by President George Bush to be the United States Attorney for the justice department in New Jersey. I told him that I believed that I had been subject to intimidation and illegal political pressure by my employer Pfizer, aimed at stopping my lawful political activity conducted in my private time. I also informed him that this included a written request to inform Pfizer of all my future contacts with Senators and Members of Congress in advance of such meetings. |
| When a few weeks had passed by I called the justice department in New Jersey, as I had been requested to do if Pfizer took any additional retaliatory action against me. And so it came about that I again met with James Nobile, chief of the special prosecutions division, and agent Stanley Beet.
In spite of the fact that I had been down to Washington, DC, only a month earlier for a formal testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, Jim didn't think that the law against dissuading someone from appearing before congress would help my case. |
| In its most recent annual report, Pfizer disclosed that the justice department had opened an investigation into its marketing of Genotropin, the growth hormone Dr. Rost was responsible for selling at Pharmacia. Dr. Rost said he could not confirm or deny whether he was involved in that investigation. But if he is, he may be protected by federal laws shielding whistle-blowers from retaliation."7
Alex Berenson ended the article writing, "Dr. |
| Just when I finished writing this manuscript, I got a call from the Justice Department's criminal division. A few days later I met with an FBI agent and the Deputy Health Care Fraud Chief in Boston.
And that is when I realized that it will take a long time until this story ends. This book is just the beginning of an amazing journey, so different from anything I could've imagined. It is not a voyage I knew I would chose a few years back, or that I could ever have imagined that I would take. So I will just try to enjoy, and make the most of every day. |
| I had not been allowed to talk about the suit, much less write a word in this book, since it had been filed under seal. The justice department in November 2005 declined to intervene in this civil action, leading the court to unseal the suit. The bad part about this development is that my lawyers will now have to do all the legal work on their own. The good news is that my minimum share of any fine has almost doubled, from 15 percent to 25 percent. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 I'm sure Merck executives would disagree, although we may find the justice department, in fact, agrees with that assessment.
What may be even more important to note in all of this is the Vioxx cover-up further confirms the character of the drug companies in our modern day environment of drug promotion and suppression of negative side effects. I've often talked about the distortion of medical studies and how so-called evidence-based medicine is really little more than scientific fraud.
Merck’s effort to discredit this negative study is yet another example of that. |
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