Former Pfizer employee says unit pushed drug illegally
Pfizer Inc.'s Warner-Lambert unit created a list of 13 ailments its epilepsy medicine Neurontin could treat, as part of its promotion of the drug for unapproved uses, a former employee testified.
"I was trained from day one" to market the drug illegally, David Franklin said in federal court in Boston Tuesday. Franklin, who worked as a medical liaison at the Parke-Davis division of Warner-Lambert, said he encouraged doctors to prescribe Neurontin for uses beyond those approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
"My job was to promote Neurontin and motivate doctors to experiment" on patients, he testified. After being hired as a medical liaison, "I was selling drugs," he said. The uses promoted were from the "snake-oil list" of 13 medical conditions, said Franklin, a microbiologist.
Franklin was the first witness in the trial over claims by the family of Susan Bulger, 39, who hanged herself after taking the drug. The Bulger family said Pfizer promoted Neurontin for unapproved uses and failed to warn it could increase the risk of suicide until forced to do so by the government.
The suit is the first of about 1,200 over Neurontin to go to trial. Franklin filed a federal whistle-blower complaint in 1997 alleging the company illegally marketed the drug for attention deficit disorder, pain and other unapproved uses. The suit resulted in a $430-million settlement by Warner-Lambert with the Justice Department.
Franklin received about $25 million as his share under the federal False Claims Act, the government said at the time.
The FDA in December required all makers of epilepsy drugs, including Neurontin, to add a suicide-risk warning to their labels.
In his opening, Pfizer's lawyer William Ohlemeyer said Neurontin didn't cause Bulger's suicide, and her doctors didn't prescribe the drug because of off-label marketing.
The Bulgers' lawyer, Mark Lanier, told the jury the company wanted a "blockbuster" medicine generating $1 billion in annual sales rather than one to treat only epilepsy that would bring in only $50 million.
"The company made a conscious decision to do something illegal - marketing this drug off-label," Lanier said in his opening statements Tuesday.
Bulger's family, of Peabody, Mass., sued Pfizer and its Warner Lambert unit in 2007, more than three years after Bulger's husband and daughter, 4, found her body in their basement. Ronald Bulger said he gave his wife four Neurontin pills an hour before she killed herself.
