In the Journals

Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry special section on “The Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals”

The latest Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry includes a special section on “The Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals: Cultural and Pharmacological Efficacies in Context,” edited by Allison Schlosser and Kristi Ninnemann.  The editors set out the stakes of the section in their Introduction:

“How is psychopharmaceutical efficacy defined, and by whom? How do individuals experience these drugs and interpret their effects in

Features

Lucre and the law: A money narrative of who stands to gain from suing a pharmaceutical company

This article is part of the series:

The courtroom is a modern and fairly small space, with room for perhaps 100-120 people in the gallery. At the start of proceedings on January 10, the gallery was quite full. By the next day fewer than half the seats were occupied. Most of those remaining appear to be connected to the legal teams of the two sides. This is …

Features

The banality of corporate corruption: Janssen’s reimbursement department takes the stand. (Risperdal on trial, cont’d.)

This article is part of the series:

When I first began interviewing pharmaceutical company executives on site, I was baffled by the size of their “government affairs” or similarly named departments. I understood that regulatory matters were complex and important to the process of drug licensing, but did management of that task require entire departments of full-time employees? The reason for this remained unclear to me until …

Features

A matter of trust: clinical trial evidence vs. physicians’ judgment in the courtroom. (Risperdal on trial in Texas cont’d.)

This article is part of the series:

(A disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own, and I do not speak for my department or university.)

In my first post on the Risperdal suit that commenced in Austin this week, I said that the outcome of the case potentially concerns much more than the $579 million plus penalties that Johnson & Johnson might have to return to …

Features

The Risperdal trial in Texas, cont’d: Establishing not just facts, but the yardstick by which facts are to be measured, and other matters

This article is part of the series:

I.          Marketing = Education

The first evidence brought before the jury on the afternoon of January 10 was the deposition of a former Janssen product manager, Thomas Anderson, who was one of two marketing managers responsible for launching Risperdal in 1993. The exhibit placed before the jury was a document from the early planning days, entitled “Building a Consensus.” The …