Column: The Leading Edge
Casualties of the Drug Lords
by Phillip E. Johnson
On June 27, 2004, the Boston Globe published a story about the suicide of 16-year-old Kaitlyn Kennedy, who jumped off a stool at night with a rope around her neck in despair at her inability to resolve an off-and-on relationship with a controlling 20-year-old boyfriend. She knew that the relationship was unhealthy but couldn’t bring herself to cut the tie completely.
After observing Kaitlyn’s growing depression and self-destructive behavior, her frightened parents had sent her to a therapist, who prescribed the antidepressant drug Zoloft, beginning with a minimal dose and gradually increasing it to near the maximum level. When Kaitlyn was hospitalized briefly after deliberately cutting herself to draw blood, a nurse observed that she was increasingly agitated, irritable, and anxious, but did not link her condition to the drug. The parents learned later from medical records that their daughter had talked of her plan to hang herself.
On the day before the night Kaitlyn hanged herself, leaving a confused but loving note to her parents that seemed in places to be like that of a teen contemplating running away from home for a while rather than suicide, her father had shown the therapist a newspaper clipping about the risks of suicide among teens taking antidepressants. The therapist was unimpressed, and the parents, with an understandable desire to establish responsibility for an otherwise inexplicable tragedy, blamed the drugs she was taking and contemplated a lawsuit.
The causal connection between antidepressant drugs and teen suicide is suspected rather than proven, but the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning about it the month after Kaitlyn’s suicide. Great Britain, citing the suicide risk, has banned most of the drugs for young people.
Kaitlyn’s story caught my attention because a knowledgeable friend had recently remarked to me that he is appalled by the scale on which powerful drugs are being prescribed for teenagers with emotional problems, and because I know that the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the medical profession is sufficiently corrupt to make any informed person suspect that doctors are not necessarily well-informed about the drugs they prescribe, and even that drugs are sometimes prescribed less for the benefit of the patient than for the profit of the drug manufacturers.
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Institutionalized Corruption
On the same day that the Globe reported Kaitlyn’s suicide, the New York Times published an article headlined “As Doctors Write Prescriptions, Drug Company Writes a Check.” It began with this disclosure:
The check for $10,000 arrived in the mail unsolicited. The doctor who received it from the drug maker Schering-Plough said it was made out to him personally in exchange for an attached “consulting” agreement that required nothing other than his commitment to prescribe the company’s medicines. Two other physicians said in separate interviews that they, too, received checks unbidden from Schering-Plough, one of the world’s biggest drug companies.
These checks and others issued to doctors by drug companies, it continued,
some of them said to be for six-figure sums, are under investigation by federal prosecutors in Boston as part of a broad government crackdown on the drug industry’s marketing tactics. Just about every big global drug company—including Johnson & Johnson, Wyeth and Bristol-Myers Squibb—has disclosed in securities filings that it has received a federal subpoena, and most are juggling subpoenas stemming from several investigations.
Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Darwin on Trial, The Wedge of Truth, The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press), and other books challenging the naturalistic assumptions that dominate modern culture. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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