A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on April 27th, 2010 in World News

The headline is more than a bit shocking: AstraZeneca to pay $520M over drug Seroquel. Half a billion dollars. Wow.

The case involves AstraZeneca promoting Seroquel for uses that are not approved by federal drug regulators, including insomnia and psychiatric conditions besides schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Oh. My. FREAKING. God.

They develop a drug for schizophrenia and tell doctors that it’s okay to use it for a sleep aid? Those two problems are worlds apart. Worlds. I mean, if you can’t fall asleep, you can try drinking a beer. But that ain’t gonna help you with the hallucinations or delusions. Seems like a medication aimed at hallucinations and/or delusions would be a bit much for a sleeping pill.

U.S. Attorney Michael Levy of Philadelphia, where the settlement was filed, said that the company had “turned patients into guinea pigs in an unsupervised drug test.”

And you know what? They’ll do it again – because of this following paragraph:

Partly because of all the off-label use of Seroquel, the drug brought in $4.9 billion to AstraZeneca in 2009, making it the company’s second-best seller.

Here’s the deal: You advise doctors to over-medicate their patients and make $4.9 billion in one year and then they only have to pay a half-billion-dollar fine (not even, actually)…and any businessman in the world will say that it’s a good deal.

One of the primary reasons for regulation is to enforce some sort of morality on the open market. On that point, this “record settlement” is an epic failure.

Sphere: Related Content