1 Boring Old Man

It has been a little over a year since Allen Jones and the State of Texas v. Johnson & Johnson et al [the TMAP Trial] in Austin Texas. I had by then spent a couple of years blogging about the corruption in the psychopharmacologic industry, and I flew out for the trial. Frankly, my reason was that I wanted to hear about it in person to make it real. It still felt like some summer beach novel – a thriller created for public consumption. It was much more real than I could have ever imagined – rotten from top to bottom. J&J settled the suit to keep all of the details out of the public record by my reckoning. If you don’t know the story, put TMAP in this blog’s search to catch you up.

The lynchpin in the case was one Allen Jones [the one with hair]. He was working in the Pennsylvania Office of the inspector general and ran across some shaky bank accounts that led him to uncover a scheme that involved a third of our states requiring physicians in public medicine to preferentially use expensive, in patent, psychoactive drugs instead of older, generic, medically equivalent drugs – defrauding the public health systems of untold millions of dollars. The scheme was instigated by J&J and other PHARMA companies and run through a Texas University/State program called TMAP. Allen was fired for pursuing the investigation in Pennsylvania, so he sued Pennsylvania and filed a whistleblower suit in Texas. It took eight years for the suit to finally come to trial. Meanwhile Allen worked the investigation and supported himself doing stone masonry.

Besides sitting through a trial that dispelled any doubts I had about how corrupt the academic-pharmaceutical alliance had become, I also made a new friend. We just spent a few days with Allen on the Gulf, talking a bit about weighty matters, but mostly having fun – eating the local fare [too many oysters] and watching the local fauna on the beach. The afternoon fishing trip was on a day when a cold front came through, so the fish didn’t cooperate, and we recovered with steaks instead of flounder that evening. But it was a delightful and surprisingly restful trip.

Allen had experience working with chronic mental patients, and when he came upon the irregularities, he was quick to realize what was afoot. It was those patients he was determined to help. His superiors tried to wave him off but they had the wrong guy for that, and didn’t even stop him by marching him out of the building with his stuff in a cardboard box. He successfully sued in Pennsylvania and later won in Texas – setting off a chain reaction of big PHARMA suits in this last year. Whistle-blowers generally have a rough time and it can be a show-stopping life experience, even for those who are successful. Best I can tell, Allen has spent the last year reclaiming his life after a very long, tense eight years getting into that courtroom.