Corporate Crime

Corporate crime in the pharmaceutical industry is common, serious and repetitive by Peter C. Gøtzsche, Professor MD, DrMedSci, MSc Nordic Cochrane Centre Rigshospitalet, Dept. 7811 Copenhagen E-mail: pcg@cochrane.dk 14 Dec 2012 A short version of this article has been published in the BMJ: Gøtzsche PC. Big pharma often commits corporate crime, and this must be stopped. BMJ 2012;345:e8462

Abstract Objectives: To study whether large drug companies routinely break the law. Design: Literature review, using Google searches combining the names of the ten largest drug companies with "fraud." Results: I found recent examples (2007 to 2012) of serious crimes committed by each company. The crimes included marketing drugs for off-label uses, misrepresentation of research results, hiding data on harms, and Medicaid and Medicare fraud. Doctors were often complicit in the crimes, as kickbacks were common. The crimes were repetitive. Conclusions: The crimes persist because crime pays. Harder sanctions are thereforee needed, including prison sentences for CEOs and other senior executives. Doctors and their organisations should consider carefully whether they find it ethically acceptable to receive money that may have been partly been earned by crimes that are harmful to patients.

Conflicts of interest: none. Funding: none.

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In recent years, numerous articles and books have described serious cases of research misconduct and marketing fraud committed by drug companies.1-9 When a company has been caught, the standard response from the drug industry is that there are a few bad apples in any enterprise. The interesting question is whether we are seeing a lone bad apple now and then, which might be excusable, or whether the companies routinely break the law. Methods I did ten Google searches on 19 June 2012 combining the names of the ten largest drug companies as of March 201010 with "fraud." There were between 0.5 and 27 million hits for each company and I selected the...