Jacob writes:
Bristol-Myers Squibb is paying the government more than half a billion to settle charges that the company inflated the prices of its drugs, paid kickbacks to doctors and promoted its anti-psychotic drug Abilify for unapproved uses.
The broad outlines of the settlement were announced last December, but the specific accusations weren’t laid out until today. Here’s the AP story.
Given all the recent attention to industry money and off-label uses of atypical antipsychotics, we were particularly struck by the Abilify issue. The drug is approved only for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in adults, but the Department of Justice accused the company of promoting its use for children and for elderly patients with dementia. In a press release issued today, DOJ said:
BMS directed its sales force to call on child psychiatrists and other pediatric specialists, and the sales force then urged physicians and others providers to prescribe Abilify for pediatric patients. BMS also created a specialized long term care sales force that called almost exclusively on nursing homes, where dementia-related psychosis is far more prevalent than schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
The release also notes that the drug’s label carries a black-box warning highlighting the increased risk of death for elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis who are treated with atypical antipsychotics.
The company’s spent a lot of time in the doghouse in recent years. It paid $300 million to settle a shareholder lawsuit in 2004, spent the past two years in a deferred-prosecution agreement and paid a $1 million fine earlier this year to settle the generic Plavix debacle.
The whistleblowers in this case will share around $50 million!
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