United States Attorney General Eric Holder stated referring to AstraZeneca's Seroquel Settlement with DOJ: "These were not victimless crimes" April 27th, 2010
AstraZeneca Seroquel Injury Lawsuit - Year End Update & Review 2011
It’s the same deafening silence coming from the plaintiff law firms as 2011 draws to an ominous close. There has been lot’s of baseless bluster about final offer packets being sent out? Some more rumors about some of the plaintiff firms mailing out checks to the chagrin of many unsatisfied and angry injured parties. The charade has been unmasked.
It appears the plaintiff law firms have once again crawled into their profiteering black holes, while ignoring the concerns and complaints of their clients that they have both a sworn professional & ethical duty to serve. Injured parties are still being left in the dark about any & all particulars that have gone into these “secret” settlement negotiations. Everything is very hush-hush and being kept from those who (injured parties) have the most to lose from these questionable and dubious plaintiff law firm practices.
Those who have not signed onto this nefarious backroom settlement scam are now sitting back wondering, watching, & waiting for their law firms to drop the ball, their cases, and send them packing.
This is when the expected & much anticipated wave of legal malpractice suits should begin in earnest. The first cannon ball shots can almost being heard splashing across the legal-ship bow; as a war and its many battles surely lay ahead.
From those I have communicated with regarding this litigation; injured parties have not been given even the simple choice of whether to accept this token insult offer or not in any of the settlement offers or paperwork. This settlement in essence is being forced upon or ram rotted down their throats of injured parties against their will & best interest by greedy law firms that are solely looking out for their own financial interest at this juncture.
Injured party appeals & voiced concerns have been ignored and dismissed at every turn (a couple of cases have been highlighted on this Blog in an earlier post). Informational inquiries have been met with repeated resistance; in many cases misinformation & open hostility. In fact, many plaintiff law firms with little doubt have been shown to be actively working in an oppositional/adversarial role to those they are supposed to advocate for & represent. The vast majority of plaintiff law firms in the Seroquel Litigation obviously have not worked in the best interest of their clients. Shall we have to once again remind everyone that is these law firms’ solemn charge and most basic legal obligation?
What we have going on today is an unconscionable miscarriage of justice occurring right before our eyes. Innocent Injured parties are asking again that the Department of Justice investigate this ongoing travesty of unscrupulous practices being perpetrated upon victims of legal & corporate impropriety. The American Bar Association should be taking the lead in examining these ambulance chaser law firm profiteers, while holding them professionally accountable for their detestable actions; yet, they appear to have buried their heads in the sand accepting these blatant unethical legal practices & corruption to continue unchallenged.
Does the American public have to be reminded that a corrupted, dysfunctional, and biased legal process/system undermines the very basic principles of our Republic; while leading us down an inevitable darkened path toward oppressive governing tyranny & resulting societal anarchy?
The time is now to draw the line in the sand, and to make a stand for what is right. Change will not happen without us taking action and making our own personal sacrifice. The only question remaining is who is able & willing to finally step up to the plate & fight for what is right, just, and in the best interest of us all.
What can you do?
1)Reject the “supposed” Final Offer – It’s your Choice…
2)Force your law firms hand; demand a trial or to renegotiation of this settlement…
3)If your law firm drops you as a client or refuses to listen; seek legal counsel to represent you in legal malpractice litigation against these firms.
4)File complaints with the Department of Justice
5)Write and file complaints with the Court
6)File complaints with your State & National Bar Association
7)Contact, Write, or Call you’re Congressional and Senate representatives: demand an investigation….Do not allow AstraZeneca to be rewarded for the purposeful maiming & killing of many tens of thousands all in the name of unquenchable corporate greed.
8)The only way to assure that these kinds of corporate crimes and legal injustices will continue; is to do nothing…
9)Remember, you get the last word & final say on any settlement; ***not the law firm***...Do not enrich these unscrupulous law firms for not serving your best interest…
10)For those Lawyers reading! It’s far past time to hold your peers accountable!
Speak Out!! Make Your Voice Heard!! Be Persistent!!
Brownies laced with the antipsychotic Seroquel were given to a teacher's aid and 2 classmates according to this article, the brownies were the gift that keeps on giving from a senior at a New Milford High School in CT.
In the past couple of days many readers may have come across a couple of headlines news articles highlighting & confirming how little has really changed when it comes to the pharmaceutical criminal cartels marketing of poisons such as Seroquel for massive profits & horrifying results. Yet, the body count continues to rise, and still AstraZeneca & others go about the nasty business of running their dubious operations as if it was just simply "Business as Usual". Now we have dog & pony puppet show Senate hearings giving some mouth air time to the ongoing carnage where very little has been done, quite obviously far far to late...
As they say; read it and weep... no one is really talking or thinking about the victims; they are the forgotten throw away lives that just get buried somewhere underneath the headline pronouncements of meaningless big dollars fines and hollow accountability promise banter; it's always all about the money... that's the up side down and backwards sad real world reality of our government & failed enforcement bodies in America.
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Inspector Highlights Psych Drug Use Among Elderly
Published December 01, 2011
Associated Press
Government inspectors told lawmakers Wednesday that Medicare officials need to do more to stop doctors from prescribing powerful psychiatric drugs to nursing home patients with dementia, an unapproved practice that has flourished despite repeated government warnings.
So-called antipsychotic drugs are designed to help control hallucinations, delusions and other abnormal behavior in people suffering from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but they're also given to hundreds of thousands of elderly nursing home patients in the U.S. to pacify aggressive behavior related to dementia. Drugs like AstraZeneca's Seroquel and Eli Lilly's Zyprexa are known for their sedative effect, often putting patients to sleep.
But the drugs can also increase the risk of death in seniors, prompting the Food and Drug Administration to issue multiple warnings against prescribing the drugs for dementia.
Antipsychotics raise blood sugar and cholesterol, often resulting in weight gain. An inspector for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services told the Senate Committee on Aging that the federal government's Medicare program should begin penalizing nursing homes that inappropriately prescribe antipsychotics, according to written testimony obtained by the Associated Press.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services provides health coverage to nearly 80 million senior, poor or disabled Americans.
HHS Inspector General Daniel Levinson proposed that Medicare force nursing homes to pay for drugs that are prescribed inappropriately, and potentially bar nursing homes that don't use antipsychotics appropriately from Medicare.
A report by Levinson's office issued in May found that 83 percent of Medicare claims for antipsychotics were for residents with dementia, the condition specifically warned against in the drugs' labeling. Fourteen percent of all nursing home residents, nearly 305,000 patients, were prescribed antipsychotics. The HHS Inspector General's office Medicare claims during a 2007 six month period.
Doctors are permitted to prescribe drugs for off-label uses, though it is illegal for drug companies to promote uses that haven't been cleared by the FDA. In recent years several pharmaceutical companies have paid huge fines to the Department of Justice in cases involving off-label marketing of antipsychotics.
In January 2009, Eli Lilly & Co. Inc. agreed to plead guilty and pay $1.4 billion for illegal promotion of Zyprexa, including marketing to nursing home doctors. The company told its sales representatives to use the slogan "5 at 5," to persuade doctors that giving 5 milligrams of the drug at 5 p.m. would make dementia patients sleep through the night.
AstraZeneca PLC has paid nearly $600 million in two separate settlements with federal and state prosecutors over alleged off-label promotion of its drug Seroquel.
More than 8% of children in foster care have received antipsychotic medication, and just over one quarter of those in foster care who also receive disability benefits take these drugs, according to a recent study in the journal Pediatrics.
The question is why? Children in foster care have typically been neglected or abused — indeed, simply removing a young child from his or her parents, even abusive ones, is in itself traumatic — so, not surprisingly, kids in foster care are more likely to suffer from psychiatric and behavioral problems than those who have stable families. Previous data suggest that foster-care children are about twice as likely as those outside the system to receive psychiatric medications.
Whether these problems are leading to higher rates of antipsychotic use, however, is not clear. "I think we have clinicians facing some very challenging situations," says Susan dosReis, associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and lead author of the study. "But we don't have information as to why the prescribers decided on these medications for [these particular] youths."
The numbers suggest that the influence of pharmaceutical company marketing cannot be overlooked. Ninety-nine percent of youth receiving antipsychotic medications in the study were given atypical antipsychotics — the newer generation of these drugs, which are expensive and mostly unavailable in generic form and have been heavily advertised.
All of the major manufacturers of these drugs have been fined by the Food and Drug Administration for illegal marketing practices — in part, for marketing the drugs for unapproved use in children — with some convicted of criminal charges.
Eli Lilly, which manufactures the atypical antipsychotic Zyprexa, paid out $1.42 billion in 2009 — $615 million of that to settle criminal charges. The charges against Lilly involved selling Zyprexa to doctors for use in children, despite the fact that it was not approved for this age group.
Bristol Myers Squibb paid $515 million in 2007 to settle charges that it also illegally pushed its antipsychotic Abilify to child psychiatrists. Pfizer paid out $301 million in a similar case related to its drug Geodon. AstraZeneca paid out $520 million to settle charges over the drug Seroquel. In all of these cases, the drugs were sold for unapproved use in youth.
The new study by dosReis and colleagues included records of more than 600,000 children enrolled in Medicaid in 2003, including those in foster care, those receiving disability benefits for mental diagnoses, and those on the welfare program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
Overall, nearly 3% of all youth on Medicaid received at least one prescription for an antipsychotic medication that year, which is itself a high proportion, especially given that the main condition that antipsychotics are approved to treat —schizophrenia — is extremely rare in children. The rate of schizophrenia in children under 12 is an estimated 2 cases per 1 million children; it affects fewer than 1% of older teens. Antipsychotics are also approved to treat bipolar disorder, a diagnosis that is highly controversial in children. Some studies suggest that it affects 0.2% to 0.4 % of children, and up to 1% of adolescents.
And yet, between 1994 and 2003, rates of bipolar diagnoses in youth under 19 rose by a factor of more than 40, according to the National Institute on Mental Health. It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that this rise occurred during the period when atypical antipsychotics were being illegally marketed for children.
Indeed, most of the antipsychotics used in foster-care youth were for conditions that the drugs were not approved to treat. Fifty-three percent of prescriptions were written for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a condition that is ordinarily managed with drugs that have the opposite pharmacological effects as antipsychotics. The stimulant medications like Adderall and Ritalin, widely used for ADHD, tend to increase levels of dopamine, while antipsychotics tend to decrease it.
Moreover, 38% of youth in foster care and 34% of foster-care youth receiving disability benefits received simultaneous prescriptions for more than one atypical antipsychotic, for more than three months — a practice that the researchers said "has demonstrated greater adverse effects with only marginal benefits." Worryingly, black youth were 27% more likely to receive two or more antipsychotics than whites.
"Essentially, medications like antipsychotics can help with mood instability and aggressivity," says dosReis, explaining that the drugs are often used to treat symptoms rather than conditions. Very little research is available on medication use in children to guide these practices.
"One of the things I would like to see come out of this research is starting to think about monitoring and evaluating the quality of care [these children are receiving]. We're not supporting or condoning these practices. One extreme says that no one should get these medications, and that's as irrational as saying we should be using more," she says.
The risks of long-term prescribing of atypical antipsychotics to children, whose brains are still developing, are not known. What is known, however, is that the drugs cause severe weight gain in children, and that taking more than one antipsychotic drug may double, even quintuple, the risk of diabetes in youth. In adults, the weight gain associated with use of just one antipsychotic medication increase the risk of diabetes two- to four-fold, which has serious deleterious consequences for long-term health.
Although children in foster care may be genetically and environmentally at higher risk for mental illness, the disproportionately widespread use of antipsychotics in this group is troubling. "This study confirms the need for developmentally and trauma-informed practices in the vulnerable foster-care population," says Dr. Bruce Perry, founder of the ChildTrauma Academy. "Misunderstanding the pervasive effects of abuse and neglect leads to the mislabeling of behavioral and emotional symptoms in these children and then to overmedication." (Full disclosure: Dr. Perry is my co-author on two books.)
"The frustrating reality is that there are many evidence-based non-pharmacological interventions that have proven effectiveness and have no adverse effects," Perry says. Sadly, however, no one is spending billions to push them.
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Not enough evidence! Read this disturbing testimony before the Senate & Congress,
