1 Boring Old Man

Just How Close Was Nemeroff With Glaxo?
Pharmalot
By Ed Silverman
September 13, 2011

^{… To be specific, in June 2004, an attorney named Greg Martin wrote Nemeroff to ask if he would consult on some planned litigation concerning the likelihood that the Paxil antidepressant might lead some adolescents to attempt or commit suicide. The two had apparently worked together in the past while Nemeroff was a professor at Duke.}

^{And so Martin wrote that he was contacted by the family of a suicide victim who was taking Paxil at the time of his death and the lawyer goes on to note how he read that Glaxo was accused by the former New York attorney general of supressing clinical trial data. “Before we get involved in these cases, I’d like to get a better handle on the science,” Martin writes.}

^{How does Nemeroff respond? “Dear Greg,” he writes, “I wouldn’t serve as an expert on such a case and I would advise you to steer clear of them as well.” A few years later, however, Glaxo was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to settle such cases. But Nemeroff was apparently thinking more about Glaxo.}

^{As the top of the e-mail thread indicates, he promptly forwarded the exchange to Alan Metz, who was the Glaxo vp and medical director for North America at the time. You know, just in case Glaxo execs wanted to keep tabs on what lawyers were thinking about possible litigation. For the drugmaker, consulting payments can come in handy.}

^{As for Nemeroff, he now chairs the psychiatry department at the Miller School of Medicine at The University of Miami, where he is, once again, seeking grants from the NIH, according to sources.}

That last comment about "potential grant applications" along with Insel’s telling Goldschmidt that Charlie could apply for NIMH money and Insel’s allowing Nemeroff to stay on NIMH committees set off a firestorm of protests – and Charlie Nemeroff got real quiet for a while. Insel made a minor mea culpa. But with Charlie, there’s always something waiting to emerge, like the ghostwritten [GSK financed] textbook from back in 1999 exposed by POGO in late 2010 [roaches…]. Now here comes this exchange from 2004 with the lawyer reported by Pharmalot above.

And there are so many more instances not mentioned here: 1991, testifying that Prozac did not cause suicidal ideas in children; 1993, launching the Paxil Marketing campaign with Sally Laden; interfering with Dr. David Healy’s move to an academic position in Canada because he talked about suicidality with the SSRIs; publishing with henchman Zach Stowe that Paxil was safe in pregnancy; unreported income to Emory in 2004; removal as Editor of Neuropsychopharmacology for unreported conflicts of interest in 2006; the list seems never ending.