Shannon Brownlee
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 In August 2003, Linda Cheslek received a "Dear Doctor" letter from wyeth Pharmaceuticals, the maker of Effexor. In the letter, wyeth warned health care professionals that clinical studies had found a heightened risk of hostility and suicidal thoughts in children and teenagers taking its drug. The company wrote, "You should be alert to signs of suicidal ideation in children and adolescent patients prescribed Effexor." Extreme agitation was one of those signs. |
| So how did wyeth manage to turn fen-phen into a blockbuster diet pill, which some seven million people had taken by the time the drug was pulled from the market, in 1997? The company's fifty-four-million-dollar marketing campaign included generous grants to professional medical societies like the American Diabetes Association and the American Society of Bariatric Physicians, who went on to endorse fen-phen. The company sponsored all-expenses-paid seminars for community physicians, where they could hear about the drug from Wyeth's paid thought leaders. |
Melody Petersen
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 Robinson, MD MPH has openly disclosed that s/he: has grant/research support from
Pfizer, Merck/Schering Plough, Hoffman La Roche, Astra Zeneca, wyeth Ayerst, Bristol Myers Squibb, Atherogenics, Proctor and Gamble, Glaxo-SmithKline, Sankyo and Abbott [sic]; and has resolved all relevant conflicts of interest." She did not explain how she had "resolved" all these conflicts.
In 2005 Dr. Robinson also disclosed that Pfizer was paying her not only to do research but also as a speaker and a consultant. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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 Even so, wyeth Pharmaceuticals, which produces Prempro, the most popular brand of HRT, projected profits of about $1.5 billion for 2004.
For us, the story of ERT, and then the almost repeat story of HRT, is frustrating. Numerous clinical studies show that there is little or nothing to be gained from estrogen treatments, and much to be lost. Yet a confluence of interests—pharmaceutical companies pushing drugs for diseases that they invented, professional imperialism, and the cultural stereotyping of aging women—has too much momentum to stop. |
Charles Barber
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 Effexor accounted for 18 percent of Wyeth's revenues in 2005.13 The antipsychotic Risperdal was Johnson & Johnson's second best-selling drug in 2004. And in 2004, the psychiatric drugs Zoloft, Seroquel, Celexa, and Lexapro were each the number-one or the number-two best-selling products of their respective manufacturers.14
If one were to put the most brilliant drug marketers in the world in a room for a month, they would not be able to come up with a more propitious set of contingencies upon which to launch a new category of drugs than that Prozac enjoyed by the time of its 1988 introduction. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| It dispatched Louis Lasagna, a famed clinical researcher and writer of essays on bioethics, to downplay the dangers of Wyeth's drug Redux, its new version of fenfluramine, when an FDA committee was considering whether or not to approve the drug in 1996. According to Mundy, George Blackburn, a Harvard researcher and chairman of the Committee on Nutrition for the Massachusetts Medical Society, was instrumental in getting the state of Massachusetts to lift a ban on fen-phen after cases of pulmonary hypertension surfaced. |
Gina Kolata
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 Wyeth vaccine. Experts testified that the company had done nothing wrong and that the baby's case of polio was probably not related to the vaccine. But wyeth lost and was ordered to pay $200,000 to the child's family. wyeth appealed to the Supreme Court, but the Court refused to hear the case and the judgment against the company held.
Neustadt and Fineberg, in their postmortem on the swine flu affair, tartly summed up what the Reyes case meant to vaccine manufacturers. The courts had ruled that wyeth had failed to adequately warn of its vaccine's dangers. |
Melody Petersen
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| According to a copy of an invoice dated in 1996, Excerpta Medica billed wyeth more than twenty thousand dollars to write one article describing the "therapeutic effects" of Redux, also known as dexfenfluramine. Dr. Richard Atkinson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, was to receive fifteen hundred dollars of that amount to serve as "author."
When the article was complete, Dr. Atkinson sent a letter to Excerpta, praising the ghostwriter's work. "Let me congratulate you and your writer on an excellent and thorough review of the literature, clearly written," the doctor wrote. ". . . |
| In 2002 wyeth, the maker of the antidepressant Effexor, hired Cara Kahn, the twenty-three-year-old star of the MTV show Real World Chicago, to urge college kids to be screened. Those working with the actress put up posters to attract students with slogans like "Stressed? Come find out how much" and "Come test your mood."
The depression screenings expanded from campuses to the general public. Iowans of any age were invited to dozens of screening sites set up across the state on Thursday, October 6, the official National Depression Screening Day of 2005. |
| Eli Lilly, Pfizer, wyeth, Forest Laboratories, and GlaxoSmithKline. But few of the college students learned that fact. During the screenings at Iowa State University, therapists played videos for the students to watch, including Life After Trauma: What Every Person Should Know, which was produced by Pfizer, the maker of Zoloft.
"When I began taking the questionnaire, I got more anxious because I wondered if I would have symptoms of having an emotional condition," wrote Katie Melson of her experience in an article in the Iowa State Daily, the student newspaper. |
| A year later, the FDA pressed wyeth to remove Redux and a similar diet drug called Pondimin from the market after doctors reported that they were injuring the heart valves of as many as a third of the patients who took them. By then millions of Americans had taken the drugs. The pills were later linked to dozens of deaths.
Scientists rely on a system of self-policing to prevent science from being turned into science fiction. Most scientific journals employ this safeguard, which is known as peer review. |
| Galderma Laboratories was giving teens seven free music downloads for their first prescription of an acne medicine called Differin and ten more songs when they got a refill, which the company called the "levels of cool." And wyeth was letting teenage girls create their own melodic ring tones and download them to their cell phones at a website promoting birth control pills called Alesse.
James U. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Even Justin's mother, a trained health care provider, hadn't a clue that her son's agitation might be a devastating side effect that could provoke him to suicide, until she received the "Dear Doctor" letter from wyeth. "The medical community thinks these drugs are safe and effective," she says. "They don't know what they're prescribing."
There's no way to know for certain if the drugs that Justin was taking caused him to commit suicide, or if he was hiding a profound depression from everybody around him—his family, his girlfriend, his friends. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler and executives from pharma heavies Abbott Laboratories, Schering-Plough, Eli Lilly and wyeth will all serve on BIO's board of directors, according to a press release the group put out today. Meanwhile, the chairman of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry's own trade group, is Amgen chief Kevin Sharer...
Action item:
Please keep up the pressure to protect dietary supplements, functional foods, and free access to your natural health options. Click here to get information on contacting your senators.
Here's a sample letter you can use to send to your senator. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| In the letter, wyeth warned health care professionals that clinical studies had found a heightened risk of hostility and suicidal thoughts in children and teenagers taking its drug. The company wrote, "You should be alert to signs of suicidal ideation in children and adolescent patients prescribed Effexor." Extreme agitation was one of those signs. In October 2004, a little more than three years after Justin died, the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning to health professionals and the public. |
| Big windows look out over the once-polluted Connecticut River, and the walls are hung with Corky's oil paintings, landscapes and nudes that possess some of the unsetding beauty of Andrew Wyeth's work. It is late March. Snow still blankets the ground; ice grips the river with no sign of a spring melt in sight. Wennberg, Corky, their black lab, Mattie (short for Matisse), and I climb into their car so we can drive to their favorite hiking spot. We pull off near an abandoned road, where Corky and I fit our boots with gizmos called Yaktrax, which look like miniature tire chains. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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 She says Wyeth's campaign featuring Hutton "plays off the celebrity worship in this country." Allina boasts an extraordinary collection of drug ads including Hutton's Parade appearance that come in very handy whenever she speaks publicly about the way menopause has been sold, and is still being sold to women. "We use the ads to show how drug companies expand the market for HRT," she says. "They all promote the idea that there is something wrong with women's bodies, there's something wrong with getting older, and these drugs are going to fix you. |
Peter Rost
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 Before I joined Pharmacia in 2001, Id been employed by wyeth, where I was managing director for the Nordic region in Europe, with four country managers reporting to me. Sadly, Id been asked to leave that position after only two years, in spite of delivering one of the best performances in the entire company. |
Kelly Patricia O'Meara
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 The other mind-altering drug 16-year-old Baadsgaard had been prescribed is Effexor, both an SSRI and SNRI (selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor) manufactured by wyeth Pharmaceuticals Inc., which the PDR lists the following known adverse reactions; insomnia, nervousness, anxiety, abnormal dreams, euphoria, hallucinations, hostility, manic reaction, psychosis, delusions, dementia, paranoid reaction, psychotic depression, and suicidal ideation. |
Dr. Timothy Scott
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 And no one knew that wyeth supported Wilson during the writing of his book, paid for its publication and purchased so many books for free distribution by drug "reps" (representatives) to physicians that it actually helped push Feminine Forever onto the best seller list. No one knew that G. D. Searle and Company which manufactured the estrogen-progestin drug Enovid made Wilson a paid research consultant. (Progesterone is the only naturally produced hormone of its kind, supporting the menstrual cycle, conception and pregnancy. Progestins are synthetic forms of progesterone. |
Kelly Patricia O'Meara
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| What is interesting to note from the PDR is that wyeth Pharmaceuticals has this to say about treatment dosages: "In out-patient settings there was no evidence of usefulness of doses greater than 225 mg/day for moderately depressed patients." The pharmaceutical company limits doses to 375 milligrams per day and, yet, 16-year-old Baadsgaard was taking 300 milligrams per day—nearly the maximum allowable limit for adults suffering from depression. |
Dr. Timothy Scott
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| Thase has had close financial ties to wyeth and likely numerous other drug companies for many years.1
Thase writes concerning "The Emperor's New Drugs," "The authors appear not to appreciate the public health impact of relatively small therapeutic effects on conditions that afflict millions of people."2 Thase believes that even if "for every 10 patients treated with an active SSRI (instead of a placebo), one more did only slightly better than the placebos—the placebos accounting for over 80% of the antidepressant drug effect. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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| In relation to the awards, a wyeth spokesperson said the company was pleased when employees are recognized for their professional achievements.8
"These campaigns are extremely effective in reaching consumers," says celebrity-broker Amy Doner Schachtel. Working from her office in New Jersey, the attractive former drug company public relations expert has moved to the leading edge of medical marketing.9 Sometimes juggling two phones at once, she connects high-profile celebrities with big-name drug companies keen to educate the public about common conditions. |
Dr. Timothy Scott
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| It was on the market by April 1996. wyeth agreed to withdraw Redux in 1997 after a New England Journal of Medicine article reporting the link with heart valve damage made national news.29
The FDA does a tremendous job on many levels, but Baycol, Rezulin, Ephedra, Lotronex, Propulsid and a host of other approved but later recalled drugs make it clear that adverse events may not show up for months or even many years after FDA approval is received. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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| That ad urges the physician to Treat Her With Premarin, and Keep Her On Premarin, the wyeth drug that would become one of the biggestselling pills of all time. Looking over the ads with Allina in her downtown office, one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.
While company advertisements were urging physicians to Keep Her On Premarin, early studies were already suggesting women taking the drugs were at an increased risk of endometrial cancer. |
| The trial was run by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, and funded by wyeth. Its results were startling.
Researchers found that after four years, the group of women taking the drug had done no better than the group who were taking the placebo. The drug had failed to prevent any heart attacks—contrary to a lot of what women had been led to understand for a decade or more. More worrying still, in the first year of the study, a slightly higher number of women had had heart attacks in the group taking hormone replacement therapy. |
| The company-funded patient booklet distributed to Australian women in 2000 stressed the many purported "dangers" of menopause, yet it failed to mention the latest evidence about the dangers of Wyeth's HRT. Under the section about the benefits of HRT, the booklet stated that observational studies suggested the drugs reduced the risk of heart disease. It did not reveal that one of the first top-quality randomized controlled trials, the HERS trial, had suggested the drugs had no such benefit. Yet the HERS trial results had by then been known for two years. |
Greg Critser
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 Brad Thompson, the executive in charge of a pneumonia drug launch at wyeth, laid the essentials bare: "A multifunctional team should be established in three to four years prelaunch to transcend mere medical and marketing coordination." In other words, to create a brand while the drug was still under study. |
| Bayer faced at least 8,600 claimants over the recalled statin Baycol. wyeth, already beleaguered, was looking at another 90,000 additional victims of Redux. In 2005 (at the time of this writing), Merck's Vioxx liability was so huge as to elude any reality-based estimate.
And if many Americans were still willing to give pharma the general benefit of the doubt, when it came to the issue of pricing, the PR battle was all but lost. On that count, no one was buying the now nauseating line that high prices were simply a reflection of the high cost of developing new drugs. |
| Consider the campaign for Effexor XR, the new version of Wyeth's successful antidepressant. The company goal was twofold: find a way to justify its higher price and create new markets along the way. One solution was to make the drug appear "young." To rev up the sales force, the company hired a rap group to pound out an "inspirational" rap battle, a la the film 8 Mile, to set the tone. It then produced a commercial that portrayed a patient asking himself, "Are you really where you want to be?" and realizing, as its creator commented, that "a greater state of improvement was possible. |
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