Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime

378 Pages·2015·2.18 MB·English

by  Peter C. Gotzsche

Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime
How big pharma has corrupted healthcare
PETER C GØTZSCHE
Forewords by
Richard Smith
former editor-in-chief, BMJ
Drummond Rennie
deputy editor, JAMA
Radcliffe Publishing
London • New York
Radcliffe Publishing Ltd
St Mark’s House
Shepherdess Walk
London N1 7LH
United Kingdom
www.radcliffehealth.com
_____________________________________
© 2013 Peter C Gøtzsche
Peter C Gøtzsche has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of
this work.
The author and publisher shall have no liability or responsibility to any person or entity regarding any loss or damage
incurred, or alleged to have incurred, directly or indirectly, by the information contained in this book.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the
copyright owner.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-190891-112-4
Digital conversion by Vivianne Douglas www.darkriver.co.nz

Contents
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