Side Effects May Include Lawsuit
While the balance between efficacy and risks of antipsychotic medications remains questionable, how these drugs became so ubiquitous and profitable is not — huge “pharmaceutical money” drives billions of dollars yearly. Pharmaceutical manufactures and advertising giants are literally “making a killing”
Making a Killing: The Untold Story of Psychotropic Drugging
Big Pharma got behind antipsychotic medications with fervor in the 1990s, when antipsychotics were promoted as the “standard of care” for the most profoundly serious and debilitating mental illnesses, like hallucinatory schizophrenia, and recast them for much broader uses, according to previously confidential industry documents that have been produced in a variety of court cases.
Anointed with names like Zyprexa, Geodon, Abilify and Seroquel, such antipsychotic drugs have recently been increasingly prescribed and administered to an exceptionally broad swath of patients, from preschoolers to retirees.
Today, more than a half-million youths take antipsychotic drugs, and fully one-quarter of nursing-home residents have been prescribed such drugs — despite clear and reprehensible risks! Please notice that recent government warnings clearly say the drugs may be fatal to some older patients and have unknown effects on children.
Just where does the psychosis really lie?
“It’s the money,” says Dr. Jerome L. Avorn, a Harvard medical professor and researcher. “When you’re selling more than $1 billion a year of a given drug, it’s very tempting for a company to just ignore the traffic ticket (cost of wrongful death lawsuits) and keep speeding.”
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