The Worst Drug Fraud in History? Do You Still Trust Them with Your Life?
Health Thursday, December 1st, 2011
By Dr. Mercola, Mercola.com
Drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline has preliminarily agreed to a $3 billion settlement over the sales and marketing practices of several of its drugs, including the diabetes drug Avandia.
This represents the largest federal drug-company settlement to date, surpassing the $2.3 billion paid by Pfizer in 2009 for illegally promoting off-label uses of four of its drugs.
The sum, though extraordinarily large by most people’s standards, represents only a slap on the wrist to the drug giant, which assured investors the payments would be funded by “existing cash resources.”
To put things into perspective, GlaxoSmithKline has a market value of more than $110 billion, according to the New York Times.
This massive financial clout essentially allows them to engage in criminal behavior that they can later buy their way out of – not unlike the way you might pay for a speeding ticket.
As Sidney M. Wolfe, director of Public Citizen’s health research group, told the Washington Post:
“The size of the penalties, although large, are not as large as the money [the drug companies] make and so they keep doing it over again …
The only way this is going to stop, or get reversed, is to greatly increase the size of the penalties or to start sending some of the executives to jail, if appropriate.”
To read more, visit: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/12/01/glaxosmithkline-to-pay-damages-for-avandia.aspx
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