Nearly every major drug company convicted of
criminal behavior in three-year, $11 billion sweep
Thursday, September 27, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
http://www.naturalnews.com
(NaturalNews) Many medical professionals and members of the general public are
losing faith in the credibility of the clinical trial and drug approval process,
and rightfully so in light of all the corporate corruption and criminal behavior
that has recently come to light. Two new papers published in the New England
Journal of Medicine (NEJM) suggest that drug industry corruption is so
pervasive nowadays that even the most rigorously-conducted studies and trials
are not being taken seriously by many doctors.
Over the past three years, nearly every major drug company on the planet
has been convicted of some kind of criminal behavior, whether it is fudging drug
safety data; pushing drugs for off-label uses; bribing doctors and medical
professionals to prescribe dangerous drugs; or conducting fraudulent clinical
trials. Collectively, these companies have been forced to pay roughly $11
billion in fines for these and other crimes, which have apparently become a
normal part of their corporate operating procedures.
"In all, 26 companies, including eight of the 10 top players in the global
industry, have been found to be acting dishonestly," writes Jeremy Laurance for
the U.K.'s Independent about Big Pharma's culture of corruption. "The
scale of the wrongdoing, revealed for the first time, has undermined public and
professional trust in the industry and is holding back clinical progress."
Drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), for instance, was recently fined $3 billion
for bribing doctors, lying to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA), illegally marketing and promoting drugs, and falsifying clinical trial
data (http://www.naturalnews.com/036417_Glaxo_Merck_fraud.html).
Merck, Pfizer, Novartis, and many other major players have also been convicted
in recent years of similar wrongdoing, and faced similar fines.
No drug company executives, employees have ever been held
personally responsible for criminal behavior
The real shocker in all this; however, is the fact that not a single drug
company executive at any of these behemoth organizations has ever been held
personally responsible for their companies' crimes. Though millions of
people have been injured or killed by these
drug companies' illegal
activities, the only penalties the industry has ever had to face are relatively
measly criminal fines that amount to practically nothing in the greater scheme
of things.
According to Kevin Outterson, a lawyer from Boston University, these
criminal fines, as large as they might seem to the average person, are a mere
fraction of these companies' overall revenues and profits. As we pointed out
before, such fines are now considered to be just another "cost of doing
business" to many drug
companies. As Outterson puts it, these fines will do little, if anything, to
actually deter such illegal activity from taking place in the future.
"Companies might well view such fines as a quite small percentage of their
global revenue," Outterson is quoted as saying by the Independent. "If
so, little has been done to change the system. The government merely recoups a
portion of the financial fruit of firms' past misdeeds."The
fat cats that have yet to be personally tried for criminal behavior
The following list of links identifies drug company executives that have never
been held personally responsible for corporate crimes:
• GlaxoSmithKline:
http://www.gsk.com/about/executivebiographies.htm
• Merck & Co.:
http://www.merck.com/about/leadership/executive-committee/home.html
• Pfizer:
http://www.pfizer.com
• Johnson & Johnson:
http://www.investor.jnj.com/governance/management.cfm
• Novartis:
http://www.novartis.com
• AstraZeneca:
http://www.astrazeneca.com/About-Us/Board-and-management
• Roche:
http://www.roche.com/about_roche/management/executive_committee.htm
• Sanofi:
http://www.sanofi.us
• Abbott Laboratories:
http://www.abbott.com/news-media/leaders.htm
• Bayer:
http://www.bayer.com/en/board-of-management.aspx
• Eli Lilly:
http://www.lilly.com/about/executives/Pages/executives.aspx
• Bristol-Myers Squibb:
http://www.bms.com/ourcompany/leadership/Pages/senior_management.aspx
Sources for this article include:
http://www.independent.co.uk