Drug Makers Pay Doctors To Write Studies Criticizing Generic Drugs, Opinion Piece Says

In a "move that may astonish even the most jaded critics of ethically challenged pharmaceutical marketing, makers of sleeping pills are now paying doctors to publish bad things about competing drugs," Daniel Carlat, a professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine, writes in a New York Times opinion piece. According to Carlat, widespread advertising for brand-name sleeping pills, such as Sepracor's Lunesta and Sanofi Aventis' Ambien, have made the medications "household names," but "most people have never heard of" trazodone, a widely prescribed generic hypnotic that psychiatrists frequently prescribe as a sleep aid. Trazodone carries no risk of addiction, is effective as a sleep aid, has a "long safety record" and costs as little as 10 cents per pill, Carlat writes. In recent years, several articles written by physicians have appeared in professional journals that criticize trazodone, using "rhetorical techniques" that "minimiz[e] [its] advantages" and "emphasi[ze] ... its negative qualities," he notes. Carlat says that the articles, which "purport to present balanced reviews of the scientific literature on sleeping pills," were sponsored by companies such as Sanofi-Aventis, Sepracor and Takeda Pharmaceuticals, the same firms "that stand to gain from trazodone's downfall." The "way to discourage [the] practice of negative marketing disguised as legitimate scientific commentary is to mandate fuller disclosure of links between drug companies and authors," Carlat writes, adding that the companies "should be required to disclose the exact nature of a doctor's involvement in preparing a sponsored article, as well as the dollar amount of his or her fee." He concludes, "I suspect it would be the rare doctor who would want such information to come to light" (Carlat, New York Times, 5/9).

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