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Run away! Run away!

If you read this blog, you know that the University of Wisconsin’s Pain and Policy Studies group has always been a mite controversial, with its love of drug industry money and its intellectual enthusiasm for that industry’s pain pills. It’s just the sort of academic unit pharma craves in its never-ending quest for respectability (and respectability is quite the holy grail when every year you pay out billions of dollars in marketing violations). Here are all the smiling PPSG people who don’t want to talk to you anymore.

And why not? Because Charles Grassley doesn’t like the fact that much of America is addicted to, or on its way to being addicted to, painkillers, and he sent PPSG a letter because he really wants to talk to them about it.

The groups that were sent letters on Tuesday included the American Pain Foundation, a patient advocacy group, and the Pain and Policy Studies Group at the University of Wisconsin. (The foundation’s board last week voted to close because of “irreparable” financial problems.)

Among other activities, the study group, which at one time received large contributions from Purdue Pharma and other opioid producers, lobbied for changes in state laws making it easier to prescribe the drugs.

Well, they can shut the thing down… But when Congress calls…

UD wouldn’t mind knowing what the University of Wisconsin has been doing all these years while PPSG pill-popped its merry way through their halls. Has the university heard of conflict of interest?

Margaret Soltan, May 9, 2012 6:38PM
Posted in: conflict of interest

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One Response to “Run away! Run away!”

  1. Mike S. Says:

    Grassley strikes me as the kind who outs impropriety primarily when it suits him politically to do so.

    He got in the UC’s business over bogus accounting at UCSF about 4 years ago, yet the matter remains unresolved today. I have a tough time believing he actually cares whether money is being misused b/c he doesn’t appear to have the will to see the case to its end.

    So there are a bunch of addicts in the heartland and Chuck is going to make political hay of it for a little while. If nothing substantial results, I’ll be wondering whether Purdue Pharma made some large contributions to Grassley.

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