The Competitive Effects of Drug Withdrawals

In September 1997, the anti-obesity drugs Pondimin and Redux, ingredients in the popular drug combination fen-phen, were withdrawn from the market for causing potentially fatal side effects. That event provides an opportunity for studying how consumers respond to drug withdrawals. In theory, remaining drugs in the therapeutic class could enjoy competitive benefits, or suffer negative spillovers, from the withdrawal of a competing drug. Our findings suggest that, while the withdrawal of a rival drug may impose negative spillovers in the form of higher patient quit rates, on the whole non-withdrawn drugs in the same therapeutic class enjoy competitive benefits in the form of higher utilization.

Ethical pharmaceuticals? a deeper look at the ethics in pharmaceutical public relations

This study takes a deeper look inside the ethics of pharmaceutical Public Relations within marketing campaigns. More specifically, the researcher performed case studies on the ethically questionable marketing campaigns of Fen-phen and Vioxx and compared that data with data collected from focus groups composed of Rowan University graduate Public Relations Alumni. The case studies were performed through primary and secondary research of the campaigns conducted for Fen-phen and Vioxx. The data was then used to reconstruct the two campaigns. The focus group data was collected from three focus groups, each with four members, and all data was tabulated and then compared with the data of the case studies. Findings indicate that Public Relations professionals hold to a number of unethical practices and that other Public Relations professionals do not share in the large majority of those practices

Conflict of Interest, Bias, and Manipulation: Reassessing Prescriber Education and the Learned Intermediary Doctrine

The purpose of this essay is to explore how the pharmaceutical industry’s influence impacts the drug approval process and the resulting information provided by drug manufacturers to healthcare providers and ultimately to patients. For nearly half a century, United States courts have held under the Learned Intermediary Doctrine that the makers of prescription drugs are responsible for educating prescribers, not patients, about their products. The dialectic tension between corporate profits and required prescriber education calls into question the credibility of drug information from corporate, medical, and government sources. The key question to be addressed in this paper is, how credible is the information provided to prescribers by pharmaceutical manufacturers? Numerous critics have called into question the FDA’s ability to assure that medical drugs are safe and effective and the communication about them is accurate and unbiased. But the FDA is not the only healthcare organization that collaborates with the pharmaceutical industry and creates confusion and perpetuates deceptions. Medical schools accept money for clinical trials, provide researchers, and cooperate with pharmaceutical manufacturers much to the concern of numerous critics. In addition, clinical trials data, publications, and continuing education frequently lack credibility related to researcher/author bias and conflicts of interest. Unless the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on contemporary healthcare is markedly altered or eliminated, prescribers cannot rely on the information they are provided and therefore should not be held liable by the courts as learned intermediaries

Mass Torts: Dispute Resolution in France and the United States--the Vioxx and Mediator Cases Compared

Dispute resolution in legal systems has largely been designed for handling issues between small groups of individuals or organizations. Obtaining legal redress for those injured by mass torts and using the law as a means to prevent future occurrences has presented challenges for the development of effective dispute resolution mechanisms to obtain relief for plaintiffs and deter future tortfeasors. A comparison of French and American mass tort law and practice offers a fertile field for useful comparative study given the significant differences in approach taken by each country’s legal system. These differences derive as much from history, politics, the attitudes and practice of legal professionals, and business culture as from substantive law. This article describes and analyzes how these procedural and cultural differences impact French and American mass tort dispute resolution and how those differences must be carefully considered in any future attempt to integrate parts of one country’s dispute resolution mechanisms into the other. Using the French Mediator and United States’ Vioxx drug scandals and infrastructure disasters as case studies, this article examines and compares debates over class actions, American “entrepreneurial” lawyers versus French “corporationist” lawyers, the role of administrative agencies, notions of acceptable risk and individual responsibility, and the appropriateness of criminal law in mass tort dispute resolution. This Article concludes with an analysis of whether elements of each system might be adapted or serve to inspire the other legal system’s improvement

Corporate Misconduct in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Sadly, many pharmaceutical companies have engaged in unethical or illegal behavior. The current opioid crisis is the most recent example of misconduct by pharmaceutical companies. Moreover, this pattern of conduct is neither rare, nor recent. Instead, it is long-standing and pervasive in nature. Furthermore, unlike wrongdoing by other businesses that cause primarily economic or environmental harm, wrongdoing by pharmaceutical companies, like that of asbestos or tobacco companies, may cause personal injuries and death on a large scale