Via America’s Lawyer: Mike Papantonio and Trial Magazine’s Editor Farron Cousins discuss the story on how two whistleblowers who worked for a drug company called QuestCor say the company bribed doctors to prescribe their dangerously overpriced anti-seizure medication, which raised the price of the drug by 97,000 percent! Then, Mike Papantonio is joined by legal journalist Mollye Barrows to discuss the legal troubles McDonald’s is now embroiled in, citing allegations of physical violence against employees and a corporate culture that fails to protect its workers from sexual harassment. Become a member today!:
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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Two whistleblowers who worked for a drug company called Questcor say that the company bribed doctors to prescribe their dangerously overpriced anti-seizure medication after they raised the price by nearly 100000%. I have Farron Cousins from the Trial Lawyer Magazine with me now to explain what's happening. You know, when you hear, you hear these stories from time to time and then you say, no, that really can't be, the drug company didn't raise that 50000%, this is 100000% that they raised the price of this drug. It's called Acthar. That's one, Acthar is the one we're talking about.
Right.
And it started off to where it goes from like what, it goes from $40 to $39,000 per prescription.
Right, for a, a small vial of this drug that is primarily used actually to prevent seizures in infants.
Yes.
I mean we're talking about newborn children having seizures and, and this company Questcor said, you know what's better than $40? What if we're making $39,000 per vial? And this story to me has every single piece that is wrong with Big Pharma wrapped into one. You've got the price hike of 97000%, the bribing of doctors, the off label marketing of this, and I know I'm getting ahead of myself. But this story has every ugly piece.
Well, let's, let's break that down a little a little bit though. Okay. First of all, you saw, you talk about the off label. Off label means that the drug comes onto the market for a specific purpose. Okay. It may be very narrow and then the company says, well, we can't make enough money by selling it for that narrow purpose so we're going to make up other things we can sell it for. This particular drug, for example, was sold for a whole host of things that have not even been clinically proven to be efficacious.
You understand they, they, they, they tell the doctor, doc, we think it can be used for this. The doctor then uses it for that and the doctors rarely, you know, they rarely say, well, what are the clinicals show? Show me what the clinical data shows because the truth is the clinical data showed that this product was not even efficacious for other things like MS and rheumatoid arthritis and some other things that it was used for. This is like the, this is the worst of the worst. I mean this, this, if you were to in capsule everything that's wrong with the, with the drug industry and everything that's wrong with government for letting them get away with this. Understand this whistleblower brought this case seven years ago. All right? It's sat around in the Department of Justice and the truth is the Department of Justice, unless it is a home run on, unless it's low hanging fruit and you can basically hand a victory to the government, they won't touch a case like this. So somebody says, well, you know, this sounds pretty bad. Maybe we can actually win this one. I mean, what's your take on that?
Well, and the reason they want to take it is because they can get a lot of money off too. They're, we're, we're talking billions of dollars they can recover from this drug company, Questcor, which is now Mallinckrodt. But the reason the DOJ is even involved in this and the reason the whistleblowers came forward is not because this company was ripping off consumers.
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