When we fall sick, we place our faith in the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry, trusting that they have our best interests at heart.
The US court finding that Johnson & Johnson, a global household name, ran “false, misleading and dangerous” campaigns to create a market for its highly addictive opioid painkillers, frequently with the collaboration of doctors, shatters that trust.
Since 2000, Oklahoma, the state in which the company has been fined $572 million, has seen 6,000 residents killed by overdoses and thousands more left addicted.
Johnson & Johnson plans to appeal the judge's decision but other firms stand accused and there are fears this is just the tip of a nationwide opioid crisis in which the pharmaceutical industry has overplayed the benefits and underplayed the dangers of certain drugs.
In the US, 400,000 lives have been lost. No doubt lawyers around the world are preparing similar actions on behalf of clients in other territories.
This scandal would be sufficient to undermine confidence in the household names we trust were it a one-off, but it is not. Over the past decades, dozens of pharmaceutical companies have agreed settlements worth billions of dollars with the US Department of Justice, for offences including failure to disclose safety data and bribery.
Johnson & Johnson itself has been here before. In 2013 it paid $2.2 billion to resolve criminal and civil allegations that it had offered “kickbacks” to doctors and pharmacists to push other drugs.
Nor is this the first time misinformation about medical treatments and health issues have put patients' lives in jeopardy. In 1998, a since-discredited study by a doctor called Andrew Wakefield claimed to have found a link between the measles vaccine and autism. Nevertheless, fears about the injection, stoked by the anti-vaccine movement, still prevail and are thought to be partly responsible for the current measles outbreak.
We owe it to ourselves and those we care about to understand the risks and benefits of the drugs being prescribed. Patient information leaflets are a starting point but with the internet, it is now possible to dig much deeper, searching databases such as Pubmed for the details of trials.
The cost of drug development is large and companies will develop new drugs only if they think there is a profitable market for them. Like all companies, they have a duty to their shareholders to maximise profits –but not at the expense of people’s lives.
