(Craig Malisow/Houston Press)
The Texas Attorney General’s Office says a drugmaker lied in order to push an antipsychotic on foster children. So why are kids as young as three still taking the drug?
In 1993, Johnson & Johnson owned schizophrenia. That multimillion segment of the antipsychotic market had long been an untapped income source, populated by old-school generics that came with their fair share of side effects.
But now J&J, through its subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals, blew the doors off the market with its risperidone tablet, available in a rainbow of colors and sold under the name Risperdal….
Of course, one of the biggest problems with schizophrenia, besides its soul-crushing dreadfulness and tendency to tear families apart, was that there was only so much of it to go around. Eventually, Janssen would have to expand Risperdal’s usage and penetrate new markets. Bipolar. Dementia. Attention-deficit. And, just for the heck of it, stuttering.
Old people and kids were virgin territory; hopefully there were enough psychiatrists out there to find enough things wrong with them that could be treated by a little Risperdal. The problem was, the FDA had denied Janssen’s application for pediatric use, which meant that — even though the drug could be prescribed off-label — it couldn’t legally be marketed for anything other than schizophrenia in adults.
Janssen got around that prohibition by simply ignoring it and getting down to the business of figuring out how to infiltrate a state’s Medicaid formulary and position Risperdal as the preferred drug for a variety of conditions. And the best way to do that was to get state mental health experts and influential doctors at universities to spread the gospel.
(Read the full story at the Houston Press
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