It all starts out simply enough. It seems Dr. Gleason fell in love with a drug called Xyrem, used to treat cataplexy, a form of narcolepsy that causes temporary paralysis. The doctor decided that Xyrem was helpful for other things as well, such as insomnia and depression, so he started writing prescriptions "off label" for those conditions. Nothing unusual there. Doctors do it all the time, it's called practicing medicine.
Next the manufacturer notices the high number of prescriptions coming from Dr. Gleason, and asks if he would be interested in giving talks to other docs about how wonderful Xyrem is, for a fee. According to the Times:
“I started doing those, and I started getting requested a lot,” Dr. Gleason said. He received $450 to visit a doctor in the office, $750 for speaking at a luncheon and $1,500 for a dinner speech. He made as much as $3,000 a day, he said.
Although he continued to see some patients, the Xyrem talks gradually became his primary source of income.
So now he's a drug industry whore. Maybe a bit slimy, but very very low on the scale of drug company evilness. Especially considering he was a doctor talking about what he actually did in his medical practice. Here's where the weirdness starts. back to the Times:
In the early afternoon of Monday, March 6, half a dozen men in suits surrounded Dr. Gleason, at a train station on Long Island and handcuffed him.
“I said, ‘Well, this is a gag,’ ” Dr. Gleason recalled in a recent interview. “They said, ‘No, this isn’t.’ ”
Dr. Gleason, 53, was taken aback because he was arrested, and later charged, for doing something that has become common among doctors: promoting a drug for purposes other than those approved by the federal government.
Arrested for telling other doctors how he practiced medicine. WTF? What terrified me more than the obvious assault on the first amendment was my inability to come up for a reason as to why on earth the feds would decide it was worthwhile to use their resources to bust a small time doctor promoting a small time drug. The unfamiliar sensation of bafflement swirled through my brain until I saw these words:
In 2000, after highly publicized cases in which young women died or were raped after GHB was slipped into their drinks, Congress designated the drug a Schedule I controlled substance, in the same class as heroin.
What a relief. The story goes on:
In 2002, after Orphan presented clinical trial data showing GHB’s effectiveness against cataplexy, the F.D.A. approved the drug, under the brand name Xyrem, as a cataplexy treatment. In 2005, the agency approved Xyrem for the treatment of all forms of narcolepsy.
To help persuade the F.D.A. to approve Xyrem, Orphan Medical agreed to make the drug available only from a single pharmacy in Missouri, which ships it to patients nationally. No other prescription drug, even other Schedule III medicines, is so tightly controlled.
In case your brain didn't click like mine did when I saw that paragraph, I'll tell you what the Times doesn't. Dr. Gleason's crime was running smack dab against the "War On Drugs." The federal government was dragged kicking and screaming into approving this med, and remains unhappy about it to this day. Yes, the drug industry has Congress and the executive branch by the nads most of the time, but nothing, nothing mind you, will ever get in the way of the manufacturing of fear by those in power, as the fear they spread is what keeps them there. The war on drugs is integral to keeping us afraid. Fear drugs. Fear Xyrem. My world is back to normal.
You can read the whole story here
1 comment:
Well said. It's ALL intimidation, and it will keep on happening until we stand up and say NO!
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