Supreme Court Finds Life Without Parole Unconstitutional for Some Juvenile Criminals

Justices Rule 5 to 4, Ban Life Without Parole for Juvenile Offenders Who Didn’t Kill
By DEVIN DWYER and ARIANE de VOGUE

The Supreme Court ruled today that the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment means juvenile offenders who haven’t been convicted of murder shouldn’t be sentenced to life in prison without any chance of parole.
Writing for a 5-to-4 majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy called life without parole an “especially harsh punishment” for a juvenile and said that while states may be permitted to keep young offenders locked up, they must give defendants “some meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.”

Three quarters of the states allow life without parole for juveniles, but there are only 111 juveniles serving such sentences, which, Kennedy pointed out, amounts to a national consensus against the practice.

“It becomes all the more clear how rare these sentences are, even within the jurisdictions that do sometimes impose them, when one considers that a juvenile sentenced to life without parole is likely to live in prison for decades,” he wrote.

Kennedy also cited the “diminished moral culpability” of a juvenile, who is often still maturing as an individual, and the prospect of rehabilitation as factors in the ruling.

The decision directly addresses two Florida cases involving teenagers put away for life following their convictions for non-homicide crimes. Joe Harris Sullivan was imprisoned at age 13 for raping an elderly woman, and Terrance Jamar Graham was sentenced at 17 for armed robbery while on parole.
Scott Makar, the solicitor general of Florida, had argued that the crimes committed by Graham and Sullivan were so violent that life without parole was justified. “We like to think that it is only used rarely,” he said during oral arguments before the court, “in those cases that are justified for public safety purposes where we have very serious violent offenders.”

A 6-to-3 majority of the justices disagreed with Makar on the specifics of the Graham and Sullivan cases.

Chief Justice John Roberts supported the majority on the facts of the specific cases but disagreed with broader application of the sentencing rule.

“I would not, however, reach the same conclusion in every case involving a juvenile offender,” Roberts wrote. “Some crimes are so heinous, and some juvenile offenders so highly culpable that a sentence of life without parole might be entirely justified under the Constitution.”
Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined in a dissenting opinion, criticizing the majority for trumping states’ ability to determine their own sentencing guidelines by imposing “its own sense of morality and retributive justice.” “I am unwilling to assume that we, as members of this court, are any more capable of making such moral judgments than our fellow citizens,” Thomas said.

It was only four years ago that the court banned the death penalty for juvenile offenders. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the opinion, relied on scientific data that showed that juveniles had not sufficiently matured to warrant a death-penalty sentence.

“The susceptibility of juveniles to immature and irresponsible behavior,” Kennedy wrote, “means their irresponsible conduct is not as morally reprehensible as that of an adult.”

The United States is the only country in the world that allows such a punishment. But victims’ rights advocates argue that the attention should be focused on the crimes the young men committed.

In court briefs, the state of Florida described how Graham, just shy of his 17th birthday, joined with accomplices to bludgeon a restaurant manager over the head to steal money.

“Shortly after his release from a county jail,” wrote Florida attorney general Bill McCollum, “Graham almost immediately resumed an even more violent criminal life.”

A Second Chance, Wasted
In court, the trial judge castigated Graham, who had been given a lenient sentence for his first violent offense and chose to “throw it away” after his release.

“Given your escalating pattern of criminal conduct, it is apparent to the court that you have decided that this is the way you are going to live your life and that the only thing I can do now is to try to protect the community from your actions,” the judge said.

But some experts say that juveniles can change.

“I believe that kids are just less responsible then adults, and we can’t hold them to the same standards of criminal culpability,” said Laurence Steinberg, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia.

“They are worse at making decisions, they are more easily coerced by others, and they have more trouble controlling their impulses,” he said.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Supreme_Court/supreme-court-life-parole-juveniles-kill/story?id=9536432

Placebo effect beats God, Prozac

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

This is the story of three drugs. Except one is not really a drug at all and is merely an illusion, a nifty construct, an intense belief that it might be a drug, even though, as mentioned, it is very much not. We just think it is. Isn’t that strange? Wonderful? Both?

The three drugs — which, sorry, are not so much drugs as they are modes of comprehending our own weird little minds, needs and inherent psychoses — are presented here by way of two recent studies that essentially reinforce what similar studies have been declaring for years and decades and, in the second case, since the ancient mystics suckled wild plants in the forest, licked God, found the source of the soul, and said, you know, holy f–.

Let’s lay it out: According to a major new overview study, all of America’s beloved wonderdrug antidepressants — all the Prozacs, Paxils, Effexors, Zolofts of the world — are essentially useless and don’t really work worth a damn.

Wait, that’s not quite right. They can sort of work just fine, help millions of people and have enjoyed tremendous success. But there’s a huge caveat: Statistically speaking, all these drugs work no better — and often are far worse for you — than sugar pills, fake pills, placebos that patients only think are powerful, mind-altering compounds, but which in fact are no more chemically miraculous than a peppermint Altoid.

Have you heard this before? Of course you have. The placebo effect has been known for years. Decades. Forever. It’s one of those hotly controversial, yet irrefutable medical/psychological wonders that we don’t have the slightest clue how to unravel, much less leverage. And hence, it just freaks us the hell out.

Nevertheless, the recent findings, the result of one of the most comprehensive studies in recent years, are still nothing short of astounding. A sugar pill works as well as a hit of Prozac, if the patient believes she’s getting the latter? It’s just all sorts of confounding, in how it reveals how the power of the mind is still, to this day, barely understood, untapped, wildly feral, far more brightly powerful than we know what to do with.

It also reveals just how deeply invested massive drug companies are in convincing everyone they can “cure” depression with powerful, often dangerous chemical alternatives, how fearful doctors are of refuting this, how reluctant patients are to understand the difference, and how, above all else, nothing is as it seems.

Problem is, it ain’t just the pills. The placebo effect — hereby defined as the sheer force of will and belief, of the mind’s (and heart’s) ability to heal and nurture itself sans external assistance — applies to all sorts of constructs in our tortured modern world.

Organized religion? Hell yes. Is your life flawed and painful? Are you guilt-ridden and terrified of the world’s swarm of demons and daggers? Of course you are, sinner. Here, have a giant, unknowable deity. Give to it all your faith, hope, belief, money, angst, sexual shame. Believe in it wholly and without doubt, to the point where you lose a sense of yourself and your true divine source, forever and ever, amen.

There now. Feel better? Are miracles starting to happen in your life? Do you feel uplifted and joyful? Are you healed? It’s the power of Jesus! It’s God in your life! It’s because you have blind faith! No no no, it’s not you, silly. Even though, in fact, it totally is. Shhh.

Of course, what we call the power of faith is just the power of the mind, soul, the Self, rather harshly rerouted through some external conduit that relieves us from having to figure s–t out for ourselves. After all, it’s just much easier to give it all over to the god, the pill, the product, than it is to delve deep into one’s own dark and inscrutable psyche. Same as it ever was.

But whatever works, right? If expensive pills genuinely help millions, who’s to argue? If devout belief gives you stability and a sense of place, what’s wrong with that? It’s all well and good… until you factor in the cost.

The organized religion racket rakes in hundreds of billions a year, and requires a massive toll in guilt, shame, dogma, homophobia, war, pedophilia and sexual hysteria. The antidepressant market runs $10 billion a year and makes millions into casual addicts, convincing many they are powerless to get better without chemical assistance.

The placebo market is, at last check, absolutely free. Man, they just hate that.

Behold, study number two. This research reveals another time-honored truth that science is only now beginning to barely get a grip on, albeit nervously, suspiciously. Few want to claim it or ponder what it might mean to how we define illness, consciousness, God, the sanctity of the DSM-IV.

This research reveals, once again for the millionth time, that various psychedelics like MDMA, LSD and psilocybin really do, in fact, have a rather stunningly helpful — and often permanent — effect on the health and well-being of numerous patients, almost universally and without fail.

(Did you hear that? That’s the sound of a million mystics and healers, teachers and gurus throughout history, sighing and rolling their eyes).

Of these drugs’ power to dance and frolic with the brain’s synapses, there is absolutely no doubt. This is no placebo effect. This is no sheer force of will. Psilocybin, for one, is an E-ticket to a shifting dimension, a dance on the blurrier edges of definitive reality. Ecstasy is a widening out, a warming up, an opening into the cold, cold heart of the human species.

Patients who get to dabble with these fine plants and chemicals are reporting astonishingly positive, almost impossibly curative reactions. Lives are forever altered. Ideas of the soul, heart, human connection forever reset and restored. Possibilities expand, PTSD contracts, hearts open, fear and inhibition dissolve. Love expands. And man, the PTB hate that, too.

Do you know why? Two reasons: One: No one holds the patent to these drugs. No one company stands to rake in billions if, say, MDMA is somehow decriminalized. Two: Science loves reliable data, anchor points, the flawed sturdiness of the scientific method. But when it comes to hallucinogens and psychotropics, it’s all just a delightful, slippery mess. The swim and swirl of consciousness, it would appear, just refuses to be pinned down.

The grand upshot: We are but infants. We hammer and prod at the brain, the self, inundate it with chemicals and blast it with terminology to try and get it to behave and respond in somewhat predictable ways. And yet, the ancient plants, the mystical connections they offer to that original source seem to prove one irrefutable point: We still have a long, long way to go to get back to where we started.

Torture Against Children and Adults with Disabilities in the United States

MDRI Alleges Torture Against Children and Adults with Disabilities in the United States
Files Urgent Appeal to United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture in Geneva
Washington, DC – April 29, 2010 – Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI) has found children and adults with disabilities tortured and abused at a “special needs” residential facility in Massachusetts and has filed an “urgent appeal” with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture to demand the United States government end the torture immediately.

In a report released today, Torture not Treatment: Electric Shock and Long-Term Restraint in the United States on Children and Adults with Disabilities at the Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC), MDRI documents the use of electric shocks on the legs, arms, torsos and soles of feet of people with disabilities – for weeks, months and sometimes years. JRC uses punishments as treatment and US advocates have been trying for decades to close the school and end these practices. The school also uses 4-point restraint boards, tying children to the boards while simultaneously shocking them for hours; mock assaults; food deprivation; shock chairs; isolation and long-term restraint. Residents at JRC are diagnosed with a variety of behavioral, intellectual and psychiatric disabilities such as autism, bi-polar disorder and learning disabilities.

Laurie Ahern, President of MDRI, states, “The cruelty perpetrated against children and adults at JRC is psychological and physical abuse, couched in the name of ‘treatment.’ The severe pain and suffering leveled against residents there violates the United Nations Convention against Torture. And to the best of our knowledge, JRC is the only facility of any kind in the US – and perhaps the world –that uses electricity combined with long-term restraint and other punishments to intentionally cause pain to children with behavioral challenges and calls it treatment.”

MDRI calls on the Special Rapporteur, along with the Obama Administration and the Department of Justice, to end the abuses against people with disabilities at JRC. MDRI is an international human rights and advocacy organization dedicated to the rights protection and full participation in society of people with disabilities worldwide. Visit http://www.mdri.org. Help us put an end to the torture of children with disabilities in JRC.

Read the 67 page report here: http://www.mdri.org/PDFs/USReportandUrgentAppeal.pdf

See the Photo’s here: http://motherjones.com/photoessays/2007/08/school-shock

Rebecca Riley’s doctor on the defense

By Lane Lambert
The Patriot Ledger
Posted Apr 10, 2010 @ 09:00 AM
BOSTON —
Years before she became a board-certified psychiatrist, Dr. Kayoko Kifuji was diagnosing children as young as 2 as bipolar and hyperactive – and prescribing powerful cocktails of mood-altering drugs to quiet them.
By the time Kifuji finally passed the psychiatric board exam – on her fourth try – one of her youngest patients, Rebecca Riley, had a little more than a year to live. Her parents murdered the 4-year-old by overdosing her with one of the drugs Kifuji prescribed.
Both of Rebecca’s parents are in prison for her murder. Her mother, Carolyn, was convicted in February; her father, Michael, in March.
Now the spotlight is on the controversial doctor who testified in both trials in exchange for immunity. Kifuji and her employer, Tufts Medical Center, face a malpractice lawsuit filed by Norwell attorney Brian Clerkin, the court-appointed administrator for Rebecca’s estate, which was created for the benefit Rebecca’s brother and sister, who are now 14 and 9.
Glimpses into Kifuji’s background and treatment methods are part of a lengthy deposition she gave in December in the civil suit. The final pretrial hearing in the case is scheduled for June 1.
Kifuji diagnosed Rebecca Riley and her sister with mental illness and prescribed drugs for both girls and their brother. Prosecutors in the parents’ murder trials said the Rileys killed Rebecca because they couldn’t get disability payments for her, as they had with their two other kids.
According to the plaintiff’s lawyer in the malpractice suit, Benjamin P. Novotny, of the Boston firm Lubin and Meyer, Kifuji said she “trusted the mother” (Carolyn Riley) to tell her how the children were behaving and reacting to the drugs. She relied almost exclusively on what Carolyn told her about the kids when diagnosing them and ordering increasing amounts of drugs for them.
Kifuji also trusted the mother to keep tabs on Rebecca’s heart rate and blood pressure for signs of problems with the four drugs she was on. Kifuji, a pediatrician who later became a psychiatrist, told Novotny during the deposition that she didn’t realize she had a blood pressure cuff in her office and could check the girl’s vital signs herself until after Rebecca was dead. She said she didn’t take Rebecca’s pulse with her fingers because Carolyn Riley told her the child’s pulse “was within normal range.”
Kifuji also told Novotny during the deposition:
She prescribed clonidine – the drug that killed Rebecca – during the child’s first visit to control the “impulsivity” that Carolyn Riley described. Rebecca was 2 at the time.
She originally came to the United States from her native Japan in 1990 to research dust allergies in children. She switched her training to psychiatry when she went to New England Medical Center in 1994.
In 2000, she took a job at Baystate Medical Services in Springfield because it meant she wouldn’t have to return to Japan for two years and wait for an H-1 work visa.
She diagnosed dozens of children as bipolar or having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or both, and estimated that she prescribed drugs for 99 percent of her pediatric patients.
She usually saw Rebecca for 20 minutes at each office visit because she was seeing all three Riley children in an hour.
She explained that some researchers believe the area of the brain called the amygdala is different in people with bipolar disease. But she admitted she didn’t know where the amygdala is in the brain.
Kifuji’s medical career has taken her from Tokyo to Detroit and Boston. She was living in Somerville as of December.
She grew up in Kumamoto, Japan, on the southwest tip of the island of Kyushu, and graduated from Tokyo Women’s Medical College in 1981.
She’s been a permanent legal resident of the U.S. since 1990, and has held a medical license here since 1999.
She worked at Baystate in Springfield from 2000-03. Her outpatients there included the Rileys’ two older children, whom she also diagnosed as bipolar with ADHD.
After Rebecca’s death in December 2006, Tufts Medical Center placed Kifuji on paid leave after the psychiatrist agreed not to practice medicine. The state Board of Registration in Medicine reinstated her license this past September after Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz announced that a grand jury would not bring criminal charges against her.
In January, Tufts reaffirmed its support for Kifuji and her treatment methods, saying she provided “appropriate” care to Rebecca Riley. Kifuji began seeing patients again in the fall. As of December, she was seeing five outpatients – four children and one adult – and working with a state-funded child psychiatric access program.
Lane Lambert is at llambert@ledger.com.
READ MORE about this issue.

http://www.patriotledger.com/news/x905416295/Rebecca-Riley-s-doctor-on-the-defense

Why Are We Drugging Our Kids?

By Evelyn Pringle, TruthOut.org. Posted December 14, 2009.

Psychiatric drugs are overprescribed and can even make mental symptoms worse in kids. They’re also a goldmine for drug companies.

Prescriptions for psychiatric drugs increased 50 percent with children in the US, and 73 percent among adults, from 1996 to 2006, according to a study in the May/June 2009 issue of the journal Health Affairs. Another study in the same issue of Health Affairs found spending for mental health care grew more than 30 percent over the same ten-year period, with almost all of the increase due to psychiatric drug costs.
On April 22, 2009, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reported that in 2006 more money was spent on treating mental disorders in children aged 0 to 17 than for any other medical condition, with a total of $8.9 billion. By comparison, the cost of treating trauma-related disorders, including fractures, sprains, burns, and other physical injuries, was only $6.1 billion.
In 2008, psychiatric drug makers had overall sales in the US of $14.6 billion from antipsychotics, $9.6 billion off antidepressants, $11.3 billion from antiseizure drugs and $4.8 billion in sales of ADHD drugs, for a grand total of $40.3 billion.
The path to child drugging in the US started with providing adolescents with stimulants for ADHD in the early 80s. That was followed by Prozac in the late 80s, and in the mid-90s drug companies started claiming that ADHD kids really had bipolar disorder, coinciding with the marketing of epilepsy drugs as “mood stabilizers” and the arrival of the new atypical antipsychotics.
Parents can now have their kids declared disabled due to mental illness and receive Social Security disability payments and free medical care, and schools can get more money for disabled kids. The bounty for the prescribing doctors and pharmacies is enormous and the CEOs of the drug companies are laughing all the way into early retirement.
Psychiatric Drugs Explained
During an interview with Street Spirit in August 2005, investigative journalist and author of “Mad in America,” Robert Whitaker, described the dangers of psychiatric drugs. “When you look at the research literature, you find a clear pattern of outcomes with all these drugs,” he said, “you see it with the antipsychotics, the antidepressants, the anti-anxiety drugs and the stimulants like Ritalin used to treat ADHD.”
“All these drugs may curb a target symptom slightly more effectively than a placebo does for a short period of time, say six weeks,” Whitaker said. However, what “you find with every class of these psychiatric drugs is a worsening of the target symptom of depression or psychosis or anxiety, over the long term, compared to placebo-treated patients.”
“So even on the target symptoms, there’s greater chronicity and greater severity of symptoms,” he reports, “And you see a fairly significant percentage of patients where new and more severe psychiatric symptoms are triggered by the drug itself.”
Whitaker told Street Spirit that the rate of Americans disabled by mental illness has skyrocketed since Prozac came on the market in 1987, and reports: (1) the number of mentally disabled people in the US has been increasing at a rate of 150,000 people per year since 1987, (2) that represents an increase of 410 new people per day and (3) the disability rate has continued to increase and one in every 50 Americans is disabled by mental illness.
The statistics above beg the question of how could this happen when the so-called new generation of “wonder drugs” arrived on the market during the exact same time period. The truth is, the “wonder drugs” cause most of the bizarre behaviors listed by doctors to warrant a mental illness disability.
Psychiatric Drug Goldmine
The CIA “World Factbook” estimate the world population to be about 6.8 billion and the US population to be a mere 307 million. In an April 2008 report, the market research firm Datamonitor reported that the “US dominates the ADHD market with a 94 percent market share.”
ADHD drug prices at a middle dose for 90 pills at DrugStore.com, are: Adderall $278, Concerta $412, Desoxyn $366, Strattera $464 and Vyvanse $385. Daytrana costs $437 for three boxes of 30 nine-hour patches.
The SSRI and SNRI antidepressants include GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil and Wellbutrin, Pfizer’s Zoloft, Celexa and Lexapro from Forest Labs, Luvox by Solvay, Wyeth’s Effexor and Pristiq and Lilly’s Prozac and Cymbalta. The average price of these drugs is about $300 for 90 pills at DrugStore.com.
The prices for anticonvulsants can run as high as $929 for 180 tablets of Glaxo’s Lamictal, and $1170 for 180 tablets of Johnson & Johnson’s Topamax.
In 2008, the atypical antipsychotics took over the slot as the top revenue earners in the US, and include Seroquel by AstraZeneca; Risperdal and Invega marketed by Janssen, a division of J&J; Geodon by Pfizer; Abilify from Bristol-Myers Squibb; Novartis’ Clozaril and Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa. The average price on these drugs for 100 pills at DrugStore.com is about $1,000. Lilly also sells Symbyax, a drug with Zyprexa and Prozac combined, at a cost $1,564 for 90 capsules at DrugStore.com in May 2009.
The briefing material submitted to an FDA advisory panel in April 2009 reported that an estimated 25.9 million patients worldwide had been exposed to Seroquel since its launch in 1997 through July 31, 2007, in the US, and the second quarter of 2007 for countries outside the US. Of that number, an estimated nearly 15.9 million took Seroquel in the US, compared to only ten million patients in the rest of the world. In 2008, the US accounted for roughly $3 billion of Seroquel’s $4.5 billion in worldwide sales.
For the full-year of 2008, Eli Lilly reported worldwide Zyprexa sales of about $4.7 billion, with US sales of $2.2 billion and only $2.5 billion for the rest of the world.
FDA as Promotional Tool
On June 12, 2009, an FDA advisory panel gave the green light to expand the marketing of Zyprexa, Seroquel and Geodon for use with 13 to 17 year-olds diagnosed with schizophrenia and 10 to 17 year-olds diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The FDA usually follows its advisers’ recommendations.
“Such approval gives manufacturers a shield from liability – for illegally promoting the drugs for off-label use,” said Vera Hassner Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection.
“And such approval ensures increased use of these drugs,” she warned. “Manufacturers and mental health providers will profit while children’s physical and mental health will be sacrificed.”
“The body of evidence showing these drugs to be harmful is irrefutable,” she said, “it is documented in FDA’s postmarketing database, and in secret internal company documents uncovered during litigation.”
According to Dr. Stefan Kruszewski, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the atypicals increase the risk of obesity, type II diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks and stroke.
He said the drugs were marketed as safer and easier to tolerate than the older, cheaper antipsychotics because they would cause fewer neurological injuries like tardive dyskinesia and akathisia.
Those claims turned out to be totally false, he said, and “they continue to cause same neurological side-effects as the older antipsychotics.”
“Children are known to be compliant patients and that makes them a highly desirable market for drugs, especially when it pertains to large-profit-margin psychiatric drugs, which can be wrought with issues of non-compliance because of their horrendous side effect profiles,” according to a June 29, 2009 paper titled, “Drugging Our Children to Death,” in Health News Digest.com, by Gwen Olsen, who spent over a decade as a pharmaceutical sales rep, and authored the book, “Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher.”
Children are forced to take their drugs by doctors, parents and school personnel, she said. “So, children are the ideal patient-type because they represent refilled prescription compliance and ‘longevity.’”
“In other words,” Olsen noted, “they will be lifelong patients and repeat customers for Pharma!”
“The initiative to drug our children for profit has exceeded all common sense boundaries and is threatening the welfare of every American child,” she stated, and it “is up to each and every one of us to stop this madness!”
Drug Makers Busted
Most all of the psychiatric drug companies have come under investigation over the past several years for promoting their drugs for off-label use, especially with children. However, the fines they end up paying are trivial compared to the profits earned through the illegal marketing campaigns.
In September 2007, Bristol-Myers Squibb entered into a $515 million civil settlement with the US Department of Justice for illegally marketing drugs, including Abilify, for off-label uses. In the first six months of 2009, Abilify had sales of $1.9 billion. In 2008, the salary and compensation package of Bristol-Myers’ CEO, James Cornelius, was $23,150,236, according to the AFL-CIO’s Executive PayWatch Database.
On January 29, 2009, Paxil and Wellbutrin maker, GlaxoSmithKline, announced that it would record a legal charge in the fourth quarter of 2008 of $400 million relating to an ongoing investigation initiated by the US attorney’s office in Colorado into the US marketing and promotional practices for several products for the period 1997 to 2004. The government inquired about alleged off-label marketing as well as medical education programs for doctors, “other speaker events, special issue boards, advisory boards, speaker training programmes, clinical studies, and related grants, fees, travel and entertainment,” according to a Glaxo annual report.
In January 2009, Eli Lilly settled with the DOJ and more than 30 states for $1.4 billion over the off-label marketing of Zyprexa. The agreement included a $615 million fine for a federal criminal charge. But $1.4 billion was chump change considering that Zyprexa was still Lilly’s best seller in 2008, with sales of $4.69 billion. Lilly also has paid over $1 billion to settle lawsuits filed by Zyprexa patients. In the first six months of 2009, Zyprexa sales were $1.5 billion. In 2008, Lilly’s CEO, John Lechleiter, had a pay package worth $12,856,882
In September 2009, the DOJ reached a $2.3 billion settlement with Pfizer related to the off-label promotion of several drugs, including the psychiatric drugs, Geodon, Zoloft and Lyrica, in the largest health-care fraud settlement in history. But even though Pfizer took the entire $2.3 billion as an earnings charge for the fourth quarter of 2008, the drug maker was still able to post a fourth quarter profit of $268 million. Pfizer’s CEO in 2008, Jeffrey Kindler, had a salary and pay package of $15,547,600.
Johnson & Johnson is also dealing with the DOJ and state-level investigations into the off-label marketing of Risperdal. The company’s latest SEC filing lists nine subpoenas received by the company involving promotions of Risperdal, including one “seeking information regarding the Company’s financial relationship with several psychiatrists.” In the first six months of 2009, Risperdal earned $660 million. J&J’s CEO, William Weldon, had a pay package worth $29,127,432 in 2008.
AstraZeneca’s third quarter SEC filing lists a $520 million tentative settlement agreement with the US attorney’s office in Philadelphia to resolve allegations related to the off-label marketing of Seroquel. At “least 34 states are pursuing separate investigations of AstraZeneca’s marketing practices as part of a joint investigation and others may be conducting their own probes,” according to Ed Silverman on Pharmalot.
“A half a billion dollar one-time settlement is just a small cost of doing business for a company that sold $17 billion worth of the offending drug in the last five years,” Dr. Roy Poses points out on the Health Care Renewal web site. In 2008 alone, Seroquel had world-wide sales of more than $4.4 billion.
As of July 13, 2009, AstraZeneca was also defending approximately 10,381 served or answered personal injury lawsuits and approximately 19,391 plaintiff groups involving Seroquel, according to SEC filings. Some of the cases also include claims against other drug makers such as Eli Lilly, Janssen Pharmaceutica and/or Bristol-Myers Squibb, the filing notes.
On September 23, 2009, Shire Pharmaceuticals received a subpoena from the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General in coordination with the US attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, seeking production of documents related to the sales and marketing of Adderall XR, Daytrana and Vyvanse, according to Shire’s third quarter report for 2009.
In a November 6, 2009, SEC filing, Abbott Labs said the federal prosecutor for the Western District of Virginia was conducting an investigation for the US Justice Department of whether the company’s sales and marketing of Depakote violated civil or criminal laws, including the Federal False Claims Act and an anti-kickback statute related to reimbursement by Medicare and Medicaid programs to third parties.
In 2008, Depakote had sales of $1.36 billion and Abbott CEO, Miles White, had a salary and compensation package of $28,253,387.
In February 2009, the DOJ unsealed a lawsuit alleging that Forest Laboratories marketed the antidepressants Celexa and Lexapro for unapproved uses in children, and paid kickbacks to induce doctors to promote the drugs, including Dr. Jeffrey Bostic at Harvard University. In its latest SEC filing, Forest disclosed that it reached an agreement in principle in May 2009 to settle the civil aspects of US federal and state probes. “Penalties in the civil settlement are covered by a $170 million reserve Forest created in April,” according to a November 9 report by Dow Jones.
Forest also disclosed that the agreement “does not resolve the government’s ongoing investigation into potential criminal law violations” related to Celexa and Lexapro, and thyroid drug Levothroid, Dow Jones notes. In 2008, the salary and compensation for Forest CEO, Howard Solomon, was $6,565,324.
Over the past year and a half, a large number of so-called “Key Opinion Leaders” in the field of psychiatry have been exposed for not fully disclosing money received from many of the drug companies above through an investigation by the US Senate Finance Committee under the leadership of Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley.
The list so far includes Harvard University’s Joseph Biederman, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens; Charles Nemeroff and Zackery Stowe from Emory; Melissa DelBello at the University of Cincinnati; Alan Schatzberg, president of the American Psychiatric Association from Stanford; Martin Keller at Brown University; Karen Wagner and Augustus John Rush from the University of Texas and Fred Goodwin, the former host of a radio show called “Infinite Minds,” broadcast by National Public Radio.
Fines as a Business Expense
The fraud settlements are “merely a cost of doing business to these pharmaceutical Goliaths and, in fact, caps their liability for these crimes,” said Alaskan attorney Jim Gottstein, the leader of the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights), a public interest law firm.
“Most importantly,” he noted, “these settlements have not stopped the practice of psychiatrists and other prescribers giving these drugs to children and youth and Medicaid continuing to pay for these fraudulent claims.”
“Because of the massive, harmful, increase in the psychiatric drugging of America’s children and youth, who are inherently forced, PsychRights has made addressing the problem a priority,” he said.
Gottstein conducted an investigation and determined that the vast majority of off-label psychotropic drug prescriptions for children and youth that are paid for by Medicaid constitute Medicaid fraud.
PsychRights now has a national “Medicaid Fraud Initiative Against Psychiatric Drugging of Children & Youth,” designed to address this problem by “having lawsuits brought against the doctors prescribing these harmful, ineffective drugs, their employers, and the pharmacies filling these prescriptions and submitting them to Medicaid for reimbursement,” according to its web site.
“Anyone who submits or causes claims to be submitted to Medicaid for drugs that are not for a ‘medically accepted indication’ is committing Medicaid Fraud,” said Gottstein, in a July 27, 2009 press release announcing the launch of the national campaign.
“Those guilty of this Medicaid Fraud include psychiatrists and other physicians prescribing these drugs, their employers, and pharmacies submitting the false claims to Medicaid,” he pointed out.
PsychRights estimates that over $2 billion in such fraudulent Medicaid claims are being paid by the government each year.
“Once one sues over specific offending prescriptions, all of such prescriptions can be brought in, which means that any psychiatrist on the losing end of such a lawsuit will almost certainly be bankrupted, because each offending prescription carries a penalty of between $5,500 and $11,000,” PsychRights explained.
It is hoped that once the doctors and pharmacies realize they are subject to financially ruinous Medicaid fraud judgments, the practice will be stopped or substantially reduced.
“Each prescriber may have a million dollars or few, at most, to lose, but the pharmacies’ financial exposure can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars and it is hoped this will attract attorneys to take these cases,” the web site noted.
In September and October 2009, Gottstein gave presentations on the initiative at the annual conferences of the National Association of Rights Protection and Advocacy and the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology in order to find people who are potentially interested and willing to pursue such cases.
“This was successful and we have at least a few such cases cooking,” he reported. “PsychRights stands ready to help people interested in bringing such suits.”
In late 2006, Gottstein won international fame by subpoenaing and releasing thousands of documents involving Eli Lilly’s illegal marketing of Zyprexa, which resulted in front page stories in The New York Times.
PsychRights also has an appeal pending on a lawsuit filed against the state of Alaska and responsible state officials seeking declaratory and injunctive relief that Alaskan children and youth on Medicaid have the right not to be administered psychotropic drugs unless and until a number of specific conditions are met. The lawsuit seeks to prohibit the state from paying for psychiatric drugs prescribed off-label to children and youth.
In responding to the lawsuit, the state claimed that they do have any control over or responsibility for the psychiatric drugging of children in their custody, or any responsibility under Medicaid, and moved for dismissal on the grounds that PsychRights does not have standing, or the right to bring the suit, because it was not harmed by the state’s actions.
The court agreed and dismissed the case. “We think the judge is wrong and have filed an appeal,” said Gottstein.
In May 2009, Gottstein sent letters to Sens. Charles Grassley and Herb Kohl and Reps. Henry Waxman, Bart Stupak, John Dingell and Barney Frank, describing the massive Medicaid fraud involved in the prescribing of psychiatric drugs to children in the US and asked for “assistance in stopping these illegal reimbursements.”
As of November 8, 2009, Gottstein reported, “I haven’t gotten as much as an acknowledgment of receipt from any of the members of Congress to whom I wrote.”
While pursuing causes on behalf of PsychRights, Gottstein donates all of his time on a pro bono basis.

http://www.psychrights.org