Note to Readers: On Dr. Evil, Lawsuits, and Big Pharma
An appeal to lawyers, industry professionals, or anyone with an interesting memory
Racket this morning put out the second part of a series on pharmaceutical industry corruption. Written by my friend and former co-worker, journalist-turned-physician Dr. Matt Bivens, it describes the indescribable mischief caused by a single letter to the editor published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980. The piece also contains a video exhibit produced during discovery in a lawsuit involving Cephalon, Inc., now known as Teva. The firm’s sales staff decided to have fun discussing how to market its new oral fentanyl painkiller, Fentora® by making a spoof video of the iconic Austin Powers character Dr. Evil. In an unintentional irony, this “doctor” explains how his firm would use (air quotes) studies (air quotes) to convince humanity that Fentora® is the cure for “all breakthrough pain.”
The existence of this video has been reported on before, but Matt struggled to find the actual exhibit at first, even though it had been shown in open court. Eventually he pushed through and found the powerful visual (see the story for the full clip). In conjunction with a basic PACER search on larger pharmaceutical companies showing an awesome number of lawsuits, it led to a conclusion: there must be a sizable quantity of fascinating litigation exhibits that press outlets for whatever reason have either not heard of or ignored.
So, I’m making a general appeal to our readers: if you’re in medicine or law, or any field really, and know of an exhibit or exhibits in a case that could use a little sunlight, please write to taibbi@substack.com. A case title or party is really all we’ll need. We’re assigning someone to searching out exhibits and archiving interesting ones, so this might provide a good start. Thanks, thanks for your patience, and hope you enjoy Matt’s work.
This series of articles would benefit from the balance of including the human rights angle of pain pts. Under this anti-opioid/anti-pain regime, if you present to ER with pain you’ll be automatically considered a drug seeker instead of a person with an emerging health crisis.
This happened to me in 2003: presented more than a dozen times, and ignored by ERs until I had a full-blown spinal infection and sepsis. I’ve endured more than 20 years in untreated chronic pain and honestly couldn’t care less if I died tomorrow.
There is a lot to learn about all the corruption on the side of abandoned pts, jailed MDs, Suboxone lobby, and insane deaths of despair—including hospice pts who’re denied opioid pain medication. What sense does that make? The anti-opioid panic has become an anti-pain panic, and there’s something extra-cruel about never hearing from us. Here’s a source for more information, or hmu https://nationalpain.org
Matt - I made this comment on the original article, but this might provide some leads to look into:
Medical schools are now treating obesity as a chronic disease instead of a lifestyle disease and these lessons are funded by big pharmaceutical companies pushing their obesity drugs: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/the-hidden-struggle-in-health-care
In the early 2000s, NEJM editor quit due to the number of faulty trials in clinical studies: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/i-dont-know-why-liars-lie-but-they
Long story short, medicine is just another industry used to control the populace and has been that way ever since Rockefeller and Ford got involved: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/donating-to-a-good-cause-how-billionaires