Paxil
Few SSRI antidepressants have the checkered safety profile of GlaxoSmithKline's (GSK) Paxil. In 2007 the BBC revealed that Paxil's Study 329 showed adolescents six times more likely to become suicidal on the drug but results were buried . (GSK settled related charges in 2012 for $3 billion.) Rumors had circulated for years about suicide and toxic withdrawal symptoms with Paxil and they were evidently true. And there was more. In 2005, the FDA revealed birth defects associated with Paxil including heart malformations. (Babies may also have "seizures, changing body temperature, feeding problems, vomiting, low blood sugar, floppiness, stiffness, tremor, shakiness, irritability or constant crying," warned the Paxil web site.) Commensurate with the "forgiveness is cheaper than permission" business model, by the time the Paxil risks surfaced, GSK had taken the money and run. In fact, Paxil made $2.12 billion for GSK in 2002, the last year it was under patent, and was the preferred method of treating returning Iraq war veterans' PTSD. (Any correlation to the astounding military suicide rates?)
Ambien
One of Big Pharma's cash cows has been insomnia pills because everyone sleeps or watches TV when they can't and sees sleeping pill ads. Leading the sleeping pill category was Sanofi-Aventis' Ambien which netted $2 billion a year before it went off patent in 2006. But even as the patent expired, stories began to circulate about deranged behavior committed in an Ambien blackout. People drove and made phone calls on the drug with no memory of it; dieters woke up amid mountains of pizza and Häagen-Dazs cartons and one woman drank a bottle of black shoe polish in an Ambien black out. (Sanofi-Aventis was forced to publish ads telling people if they were going to take Ambien, to get in bed and stay there.) In 2012, the Mayo clinic in Rochester announced it was no longer prescribing Ambien to inpatients because of its fall rate --four times that of patients not on Ambien and greater than falls caused by age, mental impairment or delirium. In 2013, the FDA warned about Ambien hangovers, in which the drug has not left the body, and recommended lower doses, especially for women. The warning came too late for Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and former wife of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo who swerved into a tractor-trailer and kept driving during the summer of 2012. Witnesses said she had been weaving for miles. Kennedy told police she may have taken an Ambien thinking it was her daily thyroid med.
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