Pfizer: Public Menace & Criminal organization

[SquidInk]

Pfizer should be dissolved, and all of the shareholders who enable it's wide ranging crimes against society should be charged with aiding and abetting.

On the bright side, they had to pay a huge fine over this one - an entire 3/4 of one day's income! -source

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has been ordered to pay 2 million US in damages for fraudulently marketing gabapentin, an anti-seizure drug marketed under the name Neurontin.

A federal jury in Boston ruled Thursday that Pfizer fraudulently marketed the drug and promoted it for unapproved uses. The jury sided with California-based Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc. and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, the first to try a gabapentin case against Pfizer.

Data revealed in a string of U.S. lawsuits indicates the drug was promoted by the drug company as a treatment for for pain, migraines and bipolar disorder — even though it wasn't effective in treating these conditions and was actually toxic in certain cases, according to the Therapautics Initiative, an independent drug research group at the University of British Columbia.

The trials forced the company to release all of its studies on the drug, including the ones it kept hidden. -source

[Bobbi Snow]

PFIZER isn't the only manufacturer who is guilty of many atrocities... They all hire their own P.R. people to write their own GLORIOUS reviews, whether there's negative data being hidden, or not! Got a problem? Take a pill... All the TV ads make me ill. They are indoctrinating as many people as they can into believing we can self-diagnose and then ask our physicians for this pill and that one. And we wonder why our kids are doing drugs at ever earlier ages???

[SquidInk]

Well, we can self-diagnose, right?

[Bobbi Snow]

Sometimes, Squidlink... but there re lots of people who have the potential to become hypochondriacs... and these insidious commercials are targeting THOSE people and their doctors who also depend on commercials to tell them what's current.

Thankfully, MY doctor reads everything, and is willing to admit he doesn't know if any particular drug is as good as it's press. Joel is 6 years older than I am, and has himself been victimized by bad drugs. So when he sees and hears something that ends with "can in rare cases result in death" he is very, very careful about prescribing it.

[SquidInk]

I see your point.

The fact still remains regarding the criminal double standard in our "justice system". If you and I had been caught peddling snake oil around Canada (to the tune of "$300 million a year"), and had been doing so since the 1990's, the hole we would be tossed into (as mere citizens) would dark and deep. Corporations like Pfizer get away with murder, again and again.

This is an ongoing problem with Pfizer. After the first incident, all decent people should have divested immediately. Those who did not can't claim ignorance at this late date.

All the 401k'ers who care not what they are funding are just as culpable as the boards of directors.

[SquidInk]

But when it came to prosecuting Pfizer for its fraudulent marketing, the pharmaceutical giant had a trump card: Just as the giant banks on Wall Street were deemed too big to fail, Pfizer was considered too big to nail.
...

So Pfizer and the feds cut a deal. Instead of charging Pfizer with a crime, prosecutors would charge a Pfizer subsidiary, Pharmacia & Upjohn Co. Inc.

The CNN Special Investigation found that the subsidiary is nothing more than a shell company whose only function is to plead guilty.
...

As a result, Pharmacia & Upjohn Co. Inc., the subsidiary, was excluded from Medicare without ever having sold so much as a single pill. And Pfizer was free to sell its products to federally funded health programs.
...

Two years later, with Bextra, the shell company once again pleaded guilty. It was, in effect, Pfizer's imaginary friend stepping up to take the rap.

"It is true that if a company is created to take a criminal plea, but it's just a shell, the impact of an exclusion is minimal or nonexistent," Morris said.
...

In all, Pfizer lost the equivalent of three months' profit.

source

[OMG]

I saw the CNN piece you just wrote about. really well done by them.

Something like this makes my blood boil thinking of the whole corperations are individual bullcrap that's was decided. So corperations like this has the ability to have every loophole to go with that we can't, but have all the rights and protections we have as individuals. This is seriously is a few of the topics you would think all individuals being it left or right would want to stand up against, having what we diminish by corperations being called the same. But now people are only outraged and protest what millionaire talk show hosts who get their money from billionaire corperations like these tell them to be angry about

[SquidInk]

Another WikiLeak:

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, already fighting state criminal charges in northern Nigeria, also faces a string of criminal counts and billion in civil claims brought by federal Nigerian authorities in the capital of Abuja, newly obtained documents show.

Nigerian prosecutors confirmed this week that the federal attorney general's office has charged Pfizer and some of its medical researchers with forgery, possessing an illegal drug and unauthorized practice of medicine.

All the charges stem from a 1996 Pfizer drug trial in which some children died and others suffered debilitating injuries after being treated during a meningitis epidemic. - source