… university researchers” has long been a theme on this blog. UD‘s coverage has been local (“The [University of Wisconsin] Pain Group may have helped pave the way for OxyContin’s widespread use.”), neighborly, and much farther out, since this is a global phenomenon.

I’m not talking here about the massive, and I believe structural, fraud in most countries in the world, involving corporations openly bribing doctors to mis-prescribe and over-prescribe their meds. This is certainly the big picture, and every now and then someone complains, and newspapers cover the fraud, and corporations cough up penalty money and the fraud resumes. I’m talking – since this is University Diaries – about the corruption of universities by pharma.

Dennis Normile’s concise summary, in Science Magazine, of
the disintegration of Japan’s credibility as a site of research activity, ends by quoting a University of Tokyo official lamenting “a lack of awareness of research ethics.” But how can this be? Is he arguing that scientists at Japanese universities don’t know it’s wrong to make up research results in exchange for money from corporations?

The Japanese have actually arrested someone in the Novartis scandal (background here). Color UD shocked. Color her shocked beyond recovery if the guy actually goes to jail for more than a day or two.

Novartis embedded one of its employees – made him a staff scientist – in five Japanese university laboratories. Five.

As a Novartis Pharma employee [Nobuo] Shirahashi took charge of analyzing data from clinical tests comparing Diovan and other blood pressure-lowing drugs at five Japanese universities … between 2002 and 2004.

How did that happen? How did a Diovan pusher get accepted – hired? – into five university labs in Japan and then take charge of clinical results?

That’s the ¥1.1 billion question, ain’t it?

In case you were wondering why pharma is intrinsically corrupt. And will remain so. After all, this writer didn’t even mention pharma’s impressive capacity to make up bogus ailments, frighten the shit out of us about them, and provide pills.

Just a reminder – and an update – of one of the biggest pharma scandals of the year. Background on this one here. Basically the company gave humongous money to the university, which duly manipulated data for the company’s benefit. In turn, the company duly advertised its product by touting the results it had paid for.

Whoring for pharma: Happening also at a university near you.

An entire issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics is devoted to the notorious corruption of the pharmaceutical industry, and (of abiding interest to University Diaries) the way pharma-supported university research has corrupted universities.

The rise of pharmaceutical-firm-funded university research changes the social context of research, and along with it, the opportunities and constraints on researchers. [Garry C.] Gray uses a case study of a medical school professor’s first experience with pharmaceutical company-sponsored research in order to examine how funding arrangements can constrain research integrity. The case study reveals that there are conflicts between the norms of commercial firms and universities.

Prohibiting your faculty from using industry representatives to ghostwrite their articles! Now I’ve seen everything! The gall.

This first paragraph from today’s Brown University newspaper isn’t quite correct. It should read “co-ghosted.” Because not only did Brown’s Keller put his name on a fraudulent study, he seems to have allowed his good friend Glaxo to write the article for him. “Keller acknowledged in 2006 that over the years, he had received tens of thousands of dollars from GSK and its affiliates.”

Brown University stands in fervent solidarity with Martin Keller.

After all, this sort of corruption is a drop in the bucket for Brown, whose last president signed off on the Goldman Sachs bonuses, and whose board of trustees is a Rappaccini’s garden of shady hedgies.

Brown has grown a certain money culture; in it, special relationships with friends like Glaxo Smith Kline and Goldman Sachs bloom. That’s Brown.

University of Miami. President: Donna Shalala. Search her name on this blog and ask yourself: Why is this person still the president of a university?

Pharma loved Harvard because of its big ol’ name.

That has changed, as a Harvard professor who studies the interaction between industry and med school professors notes. “For a long time in medicine, not just at Harvard, but everywhere, there was a culture that said doctors were entitled to industry perks, but that culture is breaking down,” [Eric] Campbell said. “Doctors no longer assume it is their right and duty to accept these perks from industry.”

But hey. One school keeps the perk banner waving — and it’s UD‘s own GW!

“It’s just a rough environment,” said Dr. Lawrence DuBuske, [a Massachusetts] allergy specialist… “The industry wants very little to do with Massachusetts.”

DuBuske, who has been a top speaker for GSK and AstraZeneca about asthma medications, resigned from Brigham and Women’s last year, rather than give up his speaking appearances. Since then, he has landed a job at George Washington University School of Medicine and Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

No. It wasn’t. A heroin addict about to graduate from pharmacy school at Oregon State University has been arrested for dealing.

Drugs fuck up a lot of people, but not this guy. Although addicted, he was a terrific, stand-out senior, ready to put on a white coat and play Mr. Roxicet’s Neighborhood.

UD has written before on this blog about medical and pharmacy and nursing students who get these degrees for the express purpose of giving their distribution business legitimacy. Obviously there’s little a university can do by way of screening for these people… but I’m reminded of something Russell Brand said in an essay he wrote about his friend Amy Winehouse:

All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they’re not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but unignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his speedboat, there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they’re looking through you to somewhere else they’d rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief.

I’ve seen the toxic air of elsewhere plenty of times among people I know. Also, sometimes, among students. I’m as guilty as anyone of ignoring it, deciding it means something besides addiction, or just allowing myself to be pointlessly annoyed by it.

But university programs graduating people who will have access to lots of drugs have much larger detection problems.

There’s an excellent overview of the gruesome mental health industry in today’s Globe and Mail.

Even as the DSM tries to be more inclusive and “dimensional,” it runs the risk of sucking millions of merely unhappy and eccentric souls into the ranks of the mentally disturbed, at vast cost.

… in the case of depression would be the practice of giving depressed people multiple anti-depressants. A recent study suggests that

Combination antidepressant treatment using 2 antidepressants appears to offer no advantage over monotherapy in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and may even do more harm than good, new research suggests.

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A public policy group in England responds to the amazing statistics on British women and their use of antidepressants:

These shocking figures reveal an escalating crisis in women’s use of anti-depressants. We know from working with women and girls in our centres that anti-depressants have a role to play but they are too readily prescribed as the first and only remedy. Three in five women are offered no alternatives to drugs at their reviews and one in four currently on anti-depressants have waited more than a year [to be considered for psychotherapy].

Hospitals are also notorious sources of oxycodone. This blog has written about hospital personnel – medical students, nurses, doctors, other employees – who steal the stuff. The latest story involves a Staten Island oxycodone ring.

One of the suspects, Angelique Sestito … works as a nurse at Richmond University Medical Center, West Brighton, though it’s not clear if she used her position to obtain drugs, the sources said.

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UPDATE.

While ghostwriting isn’t exactly a well kept secret in any industry, we wonder if [AMD, a semiconductor company, is] upset over the horrible trash published in [its executives’] names. We would be.

TechEye

A Nashville paper writes a long, thoughtful piece on the corruption of American medical education and practice.

The reporter interviewed – or tried to interview – some highly paid pharma shills. One of them, a professor at Meharry, said

he would need to check with the school’s communications department before commenting, but did not respond by press time.

Poor man can’t open his mouth without permission — either from his university, or from Eli Lilly.