Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16575
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: news
Adams M
Interview with Elissa Ladd, creator of documentaries revealing off-label marketing deceptions of Big Pharma
Natural News 2009 Oct 4
http://web.archive.org/web/20100210031935/http://www.naturalnews.com/027162_drugs_health_disease.html
Abstract:
Mike Adams interviews Elissa Ladd, PhD, RN, FNP, the Assistant Professor at the MGH Institute of Health Professions. She was awarded grant money from a Pfizer drug marketing settlement and used it to make a documentary showing how drug companies use misleading tactics to market drugs for non-approved uses. (http://www.perxinfo.org/perx/educat…).
Mike: Could you give us the short version of what you have done and how these documentaries came to be?
Elissa: Well, it was born from a grant program called the “Attorney General Consumer & Prescriber Education Grant Program.” I know that’s a mouth full, but basically that particular grant program arose from a very large settlement that Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company, had to pay as a result of illegal marketing activities of a drug.
One of their subsidiaries, or a company that they I guess purchased, was actually promoting the drug. I am not exactly sure what the legal kind of relationship was, and it was based on the illegal marketing activities of the drug Neurontin otherwise known as the generic version of Gabapentin.
What happened is that they were marketing a particular drug originally approved by the FDA as a seizure drug and they were marketing it for purposes other than seizures. They were marketing the drug for many, many other purposes. For example headaches, chronic pain, and a lot of different other indications and really that kind of activity is illegal. This is called off-label marketing. They’re marketing for a use other than what was approved by the FDA.
That’s where the grant arose from, and this particular program’s intention was to educate prescribers. The first arm of it is to educate prescribers about pharmaceutical marketing – educate them about how pharmaceutical marketing and promotional activities could affect prescribing decisions.
Mike: Now when you say prescribers, of course, you mean typically the MDs who are writing out those prescriptions.
Elissa: Right, but the program actually funded about 28 programs through this particular grant program. Most of the programs were directed at physicians, medical schools, health services, researchers. We were the only actually what you’d call advanced practice nursing program that was funded, because nurse practitioners prescribe medications as well.
Mike: Oh, okay. Now how much money was in the settlement to begin with?
Elissa: [It was several million dollars.] You can find that out on the Web if you go to that particular website, the Attorney General Consumer Prescriber Education Grant Program, you could probably find that there.
Mike: Okay and then you applied for a grant for a portion of those funds, correct?
Elissa: Correct, right.
Mike: Can you reveal how much you or your organization was awarded?
Elissa: Yes that’s fine. Most of the organizations were awarded about $400,000 to develop these programs. The other thing I just did want to mention also is that actually this grant is actually quite extensive, and so it not only funded many, many different kind of similar grant programs across the country, but also they’re going to be funding either several very large consumer education grant programs as well. Those have not been announced yet but there is another arm to the funding as well.
A documentary on the truth about drugs, courtesy of Pfizer!
Mike: I see. Now what is interesting about this in what you have done is that essentially you have used this money from the drug companies to educate people about how manipulative drug companies can be in their marketing. Is that an accurate assessment?
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