Pharma execs in the 90s lied to the public to get more people to take gabapentin
Franklin quit three months later and became a whistleblower, filing a lawsuit that ended with Parke-Davis' parent company pleading guilty in 2004 to resolve criminal charges and civil liabilities and paying $420 million in fines. Despite the lawsuits and guilty pleas, more than ten years later, Michael Steinman, a professor of medicine at UCSF, said it’s hard to know if gabapentin would be so widely used today if it weren’t for all the money poured into the off-label marketing campaigns.“It certainly didn’t hurt,” he said. “I think the legacy of that has been that off-label prescription of gabapentin has persisted. Gabapetin has found a kind of niche to treat all sorts of things that doctors don’t know what to do with.”“I want you out there every day selling Neurontin. … We all know Neurontin's not growing for adjunctive therapy [when it gets combined with another medication], besides that's not where the money is. Pain management, now that's money…That's where we need to be, holding their hand and whispering in their ear, Neurontin for pain, Neurontin [alone], Neurontin for bipolar, Neurontin for everything. I don't want to see a single patient coming off Neurontin before they've been up to at least 4800 mg/day. I don't want to hear that safety crap either, have you tried Neurontin, every one of you should take one just to see there is nothing, it's a great drug.”