{"id":41547,"date":"2013-11-12T19:39:03","date_gmt":"2013-11-13T00:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=41547"},"modified":"2013-11-12T19:51:15","modified_gmt":"2013-11-13T00:51:15","slug":"good-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2013\/11\/12\/good-company\/","title":{"rendered":"good company&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>Ever since I wrote this [<a href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2013\/11\/11\/off-to-juvey\/\"><em>off to juvey&hellip;<\/em><\/a>]:<\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div><strong>I&rsquo;m lead to two conclusions.<\/strong> <\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>First, in our  negotiations with the pharmaceutical industry [and the KOLs], I&rsquo;m closer  to scorched earth than on any other issue I can think of. I&rsquo;m not a  scorched-earth kind of guy, but it&rsquo;s clear that no matter what they say  or even what they mean now, in the heat of battle when they can smell  the profits, this story is typical of how they act &ndash; over and over &ndash; all  of them. It&rsquo;s not a question of trust. It&rsquo;s evidence based!<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>Second. This story is  missing teeth. Put the executives in jail  [and the KOLs]. Take all the  ill-gotten profit instead of a piece. Pull the drug&rsquo;s patent  protection. Do whatever it takes to stop the game playing with people&rsquo;s  health and lives. When we work with adolescents, we try to rehabilitate  them, but at some point we throw in the towel, and it&rsquo;s off to juvey.  Our jails aren&rsquo;t that overcrowded. There&rsquo;s room for plenty of these  guys&hellip;<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">I&#8217;ve been mildly haunted by saying it. That seems odd in that I read things like it every day in tweets and comments and other blogs. I&#8217;ve probably even sort of said it before, though maybe not in bold type. But I guess I hadn&#8217;t felt it as a passion. In reading around this afternoon, I ran across this by Roy Poses of <a href=\"http:\/\/hcrenewal.blogspot.com\/2013\/11\/another-and-huge-22-billion-settlement.html\" target=\"_blank\">Healthcare Renewal<\/a>:<\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>Yet none of these actions has resulted in any negative consequences for  any individual within the company.&nbsp; No one who authorized, directed, or  implemented bad behavior will pay any penalty, even were the bad  behavior to have lead to significant personal enrichment.<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">Bernard Carroll, also of Healthcare Renewal <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2013\/11\/11\/off-to-juvey\/#comment-251834\">comments<\/a>:<\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>What we are talking about is recidivism. Clinicians recognize that this  trait is associated with sociopathy and narcissism [sense of  entitlement]. When the two co-occur, watch out! Juvey isn&rsquo;t enough to  hold &lsquo;em&hellip;<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">And this by Howard Brodie of <a href=\"http:\/\/brodyhooked.blogspot.com\/2013\/11\/deadly-medicines-over-top-or-overdue.html\" target=\"_blank\">Hooked: Ethics, Medicine, and Pharma<\/a>:<\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>In a minor way, the evolution of this blog parallels what G&oslash;tzsche is up to. If you take the trouble to go back and look [I don&rsquo;t advise it], <font color=\"#990000\">check out how long it took me to use the actual words <em>bribery<\/em> and <em>corruption<\/em> in describing Pharma behavior<\/font>. I now use those words unabashedly because I am quite secure in knowing that the behavior is accurately described by such terms, and there is no point in pussyfooting around the real and serious problem the behavior poses. If we get overly obsessive about not appearing intemperate, we pay the price of failing to endorse the really basic and drastic reforms that are needed to clean up the current mess.&nbsp; <\/strong><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">Brodie&#8217;s comment was in a post reviewing Peter G&oslash;tzsche&#8217;s book, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Deadly-Medicines-Organised-Crime-Healthcare\/dp\/1846198844\" target=\"_blank\">Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare<\/a>, where G&oslash;tzsche says:<\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong><em>&ldquo;I dedicate this book to the      many honest people working in the drug industry who are equally appalled      as I am about the repetitive criminal actions of their superiors and their      harmful consequences for the patients and our national economies. Some of      these insiders have told me they would wish their top bosses were sent to      jail, as the threat of this is the only thing that might deter them from      continuing committing crimes.&rdquo;<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">So, it appears that I&#8217;m in good company. This is hardly a pugilistic crowd.<\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\">I know what moved me over to the darker side. After I read the documents from this recent Janssen settlement, I went back and read the Rothman Report that was prepared for the TMAP Trial but never made it to the courtroom. For a time, it was available through the Texas Court Offices and I got hold of a copy just by asking. It&#8217;s the most definitive accounting of what went on inside Janssen and their ghost-writing comrades at Excerpta Medica. My copy is technically shaky, but readable: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><u><a href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/rothman-report-1-20.pdf\" target=\"_blank\"><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Report pages &nbsp; 1-20 <\/font><\/strong><\/a><\/u><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><u><a href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/rothman-report-21-42.pdf\" target=\"_blank\"><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Report pages 21-42 <\/font><\/strong><\/a><\/u><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><u><a href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/rothman-report-43-65.pdf\" target=\"_blank\"><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Report pages 43-65 <\/font><\/strong><\/a><\/u><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><a href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/rothman-report-66-86.pdf\" target=\"_blank\"><strong><font color=\"#200020\"><u>Report pages 66-86<\/u><\/font><\/strong><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/rothman-report-66-86.pdf\" target=\"_blank\"><strong><font color=\"#200020\"> <\/font><\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"182\" vspace=\"2\" hspace=\"4\" border=\"1\" align=\"right\" src=\"http:\/\/bulletproofyourtaxes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/kid-go-to-jail-card.jpg\" \/>Re-reading it with a year or so&#8217;s distance from that earlier case, it seems even more monsterous than it did before. It contains example after example of things that are antithetical to anything that has a place in healthcare, describing the workings of a corporate machine that&#8217;s detached from even the protection of the sick, much less their care. And the deliberate efforts to mislead physicians is an affront that feels personal to me. Those journals they were messing with feel like something of mine, a connection to some central reservoir of information vital to my job. I actually stopped reading that literature for the last decade or more of my career., and as I said in the last post [<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2013\/11\/12\/the-monotony\/\">the monotony&hellip;<\/a>], that was a painful loss. When you read a medical article, you see a group of authors trying to pass on something they&#8217;ve seen, or figured out &#8211; something they&#8217;re trying to teach. If you read that last twenty pages of the Rothman Report, that&#8217;s not at all what you&#8217;ll find. It&#8217;s a bunch of technical writers and hired doctors putting together advertisements to influence what I do without regard for the consequences. And they&#8217;ve won me over. They need to go to jail. Even more, their bosses need to go too. This is neither victim-less nor perpetrator-less crime&#8230;<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ever since I wrote this [off to juvey&hellip;]: I&rsquo;m lead to two conclusions. First, in our negotiations with the pharmaceutical industry [and the KOLs], I&rsquo;m closer to scorched earth than on any other issue I can think of. I&rsquo;m not a scorched-earth kind of guy, but it&rsquo;s clear that no matter what they say or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41547"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41572,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41547\/revisions\/41572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}