Illegal Psychiatric Drug Marketing System Charted/Exposed

April 13, 2009 - PRLog -- It is illegal to market drugs that are not FDA-approved for a specific condition. This criminal offense is called off-label marketing. Yet, 2 million children are currently being prescribed psychiatry's most powerful drugs, the newer antipsychotics (heavy tranquilizers), off-label.

It is also common knowledge that you cannot heavily sell a product without marketing it so it can also be assumed that these drugs are being marketed illegally -- off-label. State attorney general's offices and several branches of the US Department of Justice are winning major law suits against large pharmaceutical companies for this off-label marketing. Other suits are being won by theses same government agencies against drug companies for covering up harmful, and even lethal, psychiatric drug side effects. Still, government agencies are missing out on the prosecutions of many layers of individuals and groups that are involved in a complicated maze of off-label marketing which has allowed these crimes to sneak by, under the radar, for many years.

Now, for the first time, this illegal psychiatric drug off-label marketing scheme has been charted out for the public and prosecutors to see and it is all in the attached chart (A full view of the chart can be seen here: http://www.nowpublic.com/health/illegal-psychiatric-drug-...). This chart reveals how drug companies have been able to pull in several billions of dollars per year while selling drugs wherein the risks for outweigh any benefit. Hopefully, it can help protect millions of children who are being betrayed and used as a commodity.

The flow of this chart starts with money coming out of Big Pharma and ending up with huge profits for these same psychiatric drug manufacturers.

The chart runs both top down and left to right. It starts with Big Pharma funding the American Psychiatric Association (APA) which creates a committee to vote mental disorders into their Diagnostic Manual. In medicine, diseases are generally found through scientific tests while psychiatry votes in your Attention Deficit Disorders, Mathematics and Reading Disorders, etc. Of all the 374 mental disorders listed, there is not a single one that has a medical test to perform a diagnosis. They are all based upon a mental health practitioner's opinion of behavior and that's what allows a massive amount of fraud. This is because you can label any person and there also isn't any test to disprove a mental disorder. Again, it's just opinion.

Now, let's get back to the chart. A person has to be labeled with a mental disorder or "illness" in order to be prescribed any drugs. This part of the marketing procedure is done by the APA as they dream up and vote in disorders as a huge percentage of their funding comes from drug companies.

Step 2 is drug approval so see column two. Drug companies pay psychiatrists, and often their major universities and university-connected teaching hospitals, millions of dollars to research their drugs. These studies are submitted by the drug companies to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in order to get drug approval for a certain condition and age group. The FDA doesn't study these drugs themselves so rely on the data of the drug companies and the psychiatrists who the drug companies pay. Do you think that drug companies are generally going to hire psychiatrists who would give poor drug results that could cost them billions of dollars in future sales? Of course not. This system pretty much ensures that the FDA does not protect our safety. To get FDA-approval, the data submitted to the FDA only needs to show that the drug is slightly more effective that a placebo (sugar pill) and that the benefits slightly outweigh the risk. That's a very low standard, especially considering that the results come directly from the drug companies that stand to make profit only when the drug is approved.

Further down column 2, you will see that once a psychiatric drug (or any drug) is approved for any condition or age-group, the drug company merely has to get a positive study on the drug in one of three private drug references in order for Medicaid to pay for it. Psychiatrists and doctors can then get paid to use these drugs for other purposes. For example, if an antipsychotic is FDA-approved only for schizophrenia in adults, one study in the DrugDex manual that's published by Thompson Reuters, can allow them to get paid for prescribing the schizophrenia drug for kids labeled with attention deficit disorder. That's frightening and is also what's happening.

Column 3 is about marketing. Please review the chart as I don't want to cover every little detail when it's already laid out for you. In this column, drug companies hire public relations and marketing firms to reach legislators, judges, doctors, psychiatrists, government agencies, patient and family groups, etc. which all work to push the drugs. There's also a tremendous amount of pharmaceutical funding to front groups to lobby for psychiatric drugging and to promote how many, many people have certain mental disorders that require drugging. There's also millions in pharmaceutical funding of mental health screening tests in schools, doctors offices and online that get people thinking that they need to be drugged.

The chart and what's written above is part of the practice of  marketing drugs, especially illegal, off-label drug-marketing for conditions and age groups not FDA-approved. Now that prosecutors have this graph, they should use it to research and prosecute not just the drug companies and their executives, but the entire gamut. All the tenticles of the illegal psychiatric drug marketing octupus need to be exposed and prosecuted; from the APA, to politicians, judges and other government agents, to members of the National Alliance of the Mentally Ill and other "family" groups, to psychiatrists and their universities and more. Only in this way will we protect children and the general public from being betrayed as Big Pharma commodities. You can visit www.cchrnewengland.org for more data.