1
1
1
Lilly's grant reports shows a $440,000 donation in 2008, and another $25,000 grant in 2009. The Council also received $20,000 in 2008, and $10,000 in 2009, from Wyeth (now owned by Pfizer). For the first quarter of 2010, Lilly's lists two grants to the Council totaling $90,000.
The front groups all have "experts" serving on advisory or scientific boards and committees from major universities and government agencies, who have financial relationships with drug makers of one kind or another. Some organizations even have drug company officials, often from marketing and sales departments, sitting on boards and committees. Many of the same people will serve in multiple groups within the pyramid.
For example, Dr Herbert Pardes, a former director of the NIMH, is president of the scientific board of the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD). He is also a past president of the American Psychiatric Association, and served as chairman of the APA's Council on Research for several years. A bio on the internet says he is a regular advisor to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), the Anxiety Disorders Association of American, and Mental Health America. He has also served on the board of TeenScreen and is a charter associate member of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance.
Collapse of the Pyramid?
For several years, with Iowa's Republican Senator, Charles Grassley, leading the charge, the US Senate Finance Committee has been investigating pharmaceutical industry funding, as it relates to marketing practices, involving Continuing Medical Education, consulting arrangements, publications in medical journals, the non-profit professional and patient advocacy organizations, and the conflicts of interest among academics who receive federal funding from the National Institutes of Health through research grants to major universities.
The Committee oversees spending in public health care programs, such as Medicaid and Medicare, for coverage of more than 100 million Americans, including mental health treatment and prescription drugs.
The "drug industry's most powerful means of boosting the bottom line is funding research, which allows companies to control, or at least influence, a great deal of what gets published in the medical journals, effectively turning supposedly objective science into a marketing tool," Shannon Brownlee explained in an April, 2004, Washington Monthly report titled, "Doctors Without Borders."
"By penetrating the wall that once existed around academic researchers," she says, "drug companies have gained access to the "thought leaders" in medicine, the big names whose good opinion of an idea or a product carries enormous weight with other physicians."
"Companies target academic KOLs, or Key Opinion Leaders, in the lexicon of marketing, and woo them with invitations to sit on scientific advisory committees, or to serve as members of speakers' bureaus, which offer hefty fees for lending their prestige to a company and touting its products at scientific meetings and continuing medical education conferences," she reports.
Grassley's investigations at major universities turned up more conflicted academics in the field of psychiatry than in any other specialty. His chief investigator, Paul Thacker, developed a system where he would request conflict-of-interest records on psychiatrists from their universities and simultaneously ask drug companies to provide reports on what they paid the same researchers.
Some of the biggest names in the field appear on the list of psychiatrists who failed to disclose all their financial benefits from drug companies, which thus far includes three from Harvard, Joseph Biederman, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens; Charles Nemeroff and Zachery Stowe from Emory; Melissa DelBello at the University of Cincinnati; Alan Schatzberg, outgoing president of the American Psychiatric Association, and chair of psychiatry at Stanford; Martin Keller, a former chair of psychiatry at Brown; Karen Wagner and Augustus John Rush from the University of Texas; and Fredrick Goodwin, of George Washington University, and also the host of a radio show called "Infinite Minds," that was broadcast for years by National Pubic Radio.
All of the above "KOLs" have served as officials, or on boards and committees, of major front groups, and many have received awards, consulting and speakers fees, and research funding from various organizations.
Ensuing Outrage
The revelation that millions of dollars have been flowing from drug makers to academics in psychiatry, undetected for a decade, has drawn outrage and demands for more accountability in the entire field. "Financial transparency and full disclosure is not just an advocacy position anymore," says anti-drugging proponent, Vince Boehm. "This is rapidly becoming the order of the day."
"While the efforts of advocates were crucial in precipitating this amazing shift in public policy," he says, "our efforts were unwittingly helped by the massive greed of our opponents and the public furor that ensued."
"Events such as the Biederman scandal at Harvard and other equally disgusting problems of the same proportions have provoked public outrage," he points out.
