Drug rep Bruce Boise, refused to follow company-ordered sales strategies to convince doctors to prescribe Cephalon's Actiq, Gabitril and Provigil drugs for unapproved ("off-label') uses because he was worried the sales practices were illegal and the "off-label" uses were dangerous for patients.
He and 3 other whistleblowers will receive a reward totaling $46 million for their information and the work on the case they did with their attorneys on the federal case and roughly an additional $11 million for the state cases.
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If you need evidence that Cephalon's promotion of Provigil for non-approved uses is a very bad idea, consider my case:
Several years ago, My physician met for the first time with a Cephalon sales representative. Being a doctor who saw many adult ADHD patients, she decided to prescribe Provigil for me for a 3-month trial with an eye towards eventually substituting Provigil for Dexedrine. I had been taking Dexedrine for ADHD for nearly 15 years without problem. However, she became convinced after meeting with the Cephalon rep that Provigil could offer me therapeutic benefit equivalent to that of Dexedrine without posing the cardiac risks associated with amphetamines to someone like me in his middle 50s. Six weeks later, I awoke in a delusional state. 2 hours later I arrived painless at the ER, but highly hypotensive and well into acute renal failure. 30 minutes later, I was in cardiogenic shock, and after the on-call cardiologist inserted an intra-aortic balloon, a helicopter took me to a regional heart center. Finding no typical ECG signs of a myocardial infarction, I remained on a ventilator and on the brink of death for 2 weeks with my kidneys nearly useless. 32 days after I was admitted, I left the hospital for home, alive if barely. A year later, a cardiac MRI disclosed that I had suffered a small subendocardial infarction, usually associated with severe hypotension. I have since learned that hypotension/vasodilation is a side effect which studies have shown to occur in 1 out of every 30users of Provigil.
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