E-DRUG: Creating ills for pills
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Bitter Pill
How the press helps market prescription drugs instead of monitoring them, sometimes with deadly consequences.
Featured in this week's Harvard World Health News
http://www.worldhealthnews.harvard.edu/
[Thanks Joana. Additional text of the article added by the moderator for those who can't access the web easily. BS]
by Trudy Lieberman
Reprinted from Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 2005.
[copied as fair use]
(July/August 2005) -- Last December, Sepracor, a company in Marlborough, Massachusetts, whose core business is concocting slight variations of the world's best-selling drugs, got the go-ahead from the Food and Drug Administration to sell Lunesta, a new sleeping pill that could be used for months without losing its effectiveness. To prime Wall Street for the drug's potential profitability, Sepracor's chief executive officer, Timothy Barberich, told analysts that insomnia is "one of the most prevalent and growing medical needs in our society," while David Southwell, the company's chief financial officer, described insomnia to the media as "underrecognized" and "undertreated," and estimated the U.S. market for sleep aids at $3.5 billion a year and growing. Following the industry's modern marketing script (create a need, then a drug to fill it) Sepracor soon began selling Lunesta to the public -- with the help of the press.
As with most launches of drugs, Sepracor and one of the academic medical centers involved in testing the drug (in this case, Duke University) offered journalists sources they could call, including those with financial links to Sepracor. And the company got results. For example, some of the nation's most respected newspapers peppered their stories with quotes from Dr. Andrew Krystal, who conducted the Duke clinical trial of Lunesta and was the lead author of the study that reported the results. Krystal had designed and conducted other studies for Sepracor, and had also served on a company advisory board. Most of the news stories did not disclose his financial ties to the drugmaker.
To humanize their stories about Lunesta, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post both featured Terri Bagley, a forty-three-year-old owner of a North Carolina cleaning business who had been paid to participate in the Duke trial, and who was offered to the press by Duke P.R. officials. Bagley told the Times that Lunesta could reduce "road rage" since "there'll be a lot more well-rested people out there." In the Post she said she was counting the days until she could get a prescription. A story headlined sleepless at duke find cure, appearing in the Raleigh News & Observer , a paper near Bagley's hometown, devoted several paragraphs to her sleeping problems.
The Washington Post ,The New York Times , and Good Morning America did offer an independent opinion. Dr. Gregg Jacobs, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, said that other treatments for sleep disorders, such as talk therapy, may work better than sleeping pills. Jacobs himself, though, was amazed at the tone of the coverage. "You would think that, the way the media covered it, it was a new miracle drug," he says. "It's not even close."
Americans have always been obsessed with all things health-related, but today a drug can move almost instantaneously from medical research to miracle cure through news media that too often seem more interested in hype and hope than in critically appraising new drugs on behalf of the public. The problem has grown dramatically in recent years as direct-to-consumer advertising has increased, delivering ever-higher ad revenues to the nation’s media. Instead of standing apart from the phenomenon and earning the public’s trust, the press too often is caught up in the same drug-industry marketing web that also ensnares doctors, academic researchers, even the FDA, leaving the public without a reliable watchdog.
Full text is available at http://cjr.org/issues/2005/4/lieberman.asp
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Joana Ramos, MSW
Cancer Resources & Advocacy
7303 23rd Ave. NE
Seattle, WA 98115
206-229-2420
http://ramoslink.info/
"Joana Ramos" <joaninha@comcast.net>