Never mind the banks, look at what pharma giants have been mis-selling

The biggest mis-selling scandal to break this month was not the one which involved banks forcing small business borrowers to buy expensive interest-rate hedging contracts, under threat of not lending to them at all if they refused. The FSA hasn’t got to the bottom of that one yet: in terms of identifiable victims it could be at least as damaging to the reputation of the banks as the Libor scam. But it is dwarfed by goings-on in the pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline, which has been fined $3 billion by the US Department of Justice for a set of offences that deserved much bigger headlines than they got in a week which was unusually good for burying bad news.

The DoJ found that GSK had promoted antidepressants intended only for adults as being effective for children, when trials had shown they were not. This was done partly by publishing misleading material in a medical journal, while a radio host was also paid to hype one of the drugs, Wellbutrin, as a wonder pill that could also promote multiple orgasms and weight loss. Similarly an asthma treatment, Advair, approved only for treating severe cases, was pushed as being suitable for milder cases as well, with the suggestion that ‘mild’ asthma was a medical myth. Lavish hospitality, including trips to Hawaii and the Caribbean, was routinely offered to doctors and psychiatrists who agreed to write more prescriptions.

GSK’s chief executive, Sir Andrew Witty, who has been in post since 2008, passed the buck to his hard-driving predecessor Jean-Pierre Garnier by saying that these wrongdoings ‘originate in a different era’ and ‘we have learnt from the mistakes’. But this is just the latest in a long series of DoJ findings against drug manufacturers for misleading or bribing their customers: Pfizer, Abbott, Eli Lilly, Merck and the Anglo-Swedish combine AstraZeneca have between them paid $6.7