WhistleBlower Lawsuit over Drug Companies Promotional Tactics

The lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Boston alleges that Neurontin's manufacturer, Parke-Davis, and parent company, Warner Lambert, which merged with Pfizer two years ago, flouted federal law in the 1990s with an illegal marketing plan intended to drive up Neurontin's sales.

David Franklin's lawsuit is being closely watched by both the drug industry and its critics, who say pharmaceutical companies have become well-versed in using subtle tactics for increasing sales of drugs for other uses than the Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved -- a practice known as "off-label" uses. Franklin, who worked as a Parke-Davis drug liaison for less than five months in 1996 and now works at Natick-based Boston Scientific, claims the company adopted a strategy to create a drumbeat of publicity about Neurontin's effectiveness for unapproved uses such as pain, headaches and psychiatric illnesses -- defrauding the government in the process by encouraging doctors to write prescriptions and seek Medicaid reimbursement.

The federal government, 11 states -- including Massachusetts -- and the District of Columbia have joined Franklin's complaint, which has provided a rare look at the tactics drug companies use to provide information about different uses of new drugs to the very people responsible for prescribing them.

As described in the original news story, some of the stuff sounds an awful lot like bribing reputable doctors to put their names on papers instead written by the company. Some of the side effects of Neurontin include memory loss, abnormal thinking, and difficulty with vision.