In 2007, Bristol-Myers Squibb settled a federal suit for $515 million charging that it illegally hawked the antipsychotic Abilify to children and the elderly, bilking taxpayers. The next year, the state of Texas charged Janssen with defrauding the state of millions with "a sophisticated and fraudulent marketing scheme," to "secure a spot for the drug, Risperdal, on the state's Medicaid preferred drug list and on controversial medical protocols that determine which drugs are given to adults and children in state custody." Soon after, Idaho, Washington, Montana, Connecticut, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, West Virginia, Arkansas and Texas took Big Pharma to court over the antipsychotic spree.
When, during the same time period, the state of Florida began requiring doctors to get approval for high priced antipsychotics before giving them to kids under age six on Medicaid, more evidence of overmedication emerged: prescriptions for the pills dropped from 3,167 in 2007 to 844 in 2008, reported the Tampa Bay Times. END
Martha Rosenberg's top selling health policy book, Born with a Junk Food Deficiency, was released in April by Prometheus Books.
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