by Barbara Minton
(HealthSecrets.com) So far the largest single pharmaceutical fraud settlement in history occurred in 2012, when GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) plead guilty and paid $3 billion in criminal and civil fines for a list of bad behavior that included bribery of doctors with luxury vacations and lucrative engagements, fabrication of drug safety data and lying to the FDA, defrauding Medicare and Medicaid of billions of dollars, and using deceptive practices to sell potentially dangerous drugs. Now this appears to be just the tip of the iceberg, as the whistleblower in that case recently revealed that GSK and other pharmaceutical companies preyed on the most vulnerable among us, the children of the extremely poor and foster children.
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Underprivileged children seldom benefit from psychotropic drugs
Whether it be a teacher, counselor, social worker, school psychologist or other expert, the awareness is there that both children of the extremely poor and foster children struggle to cope with trauma that psychotropic drugs cannot heal. Yet the push has been on at GSK and other members of Big Pharma, such as Eli Lilly and Pfizer, to drive sales of antidepressants, antipsychotics and other psychotropic drugs to this group, often for uses never approved by federal regulators.
A Denver Post investigation released in April found that foster children were prescribed the potent mood altering drugs at a rate 12 times higher than the rate they were prescribed to other children on Medicare in Colorado during 2012. Dosages and rates of multi-drug prescriptions were also elevated among underprivileged children in the state.
In Colorado, nine of the top 10 most prescribed drugs for foster children in the Medicaid program were psychotropics. In contrast, only one psychotropic drug was among the top 10 drugs most prescribed to the general pool of Medicaid children.