How Much Hush Money Has Big Pharma Paid Out?

     Over one hundred and twenty-seven billion dollars, to be exact.

     According to Violation Tracker, that’s the dollar value of settlements and fines Big Pharma has paid out in 1300 recorded legal proceedings since 2000. There may be thousands of other individual out-of-court settlements that have not been recorded in any overall
database.

     These settlements almost all involve antidepressants because of their undisclosed suicide risks, birth defects, and dangerous withdrawal symptoms. Those horrible “side-effects” have been behind the most successful lawsuits, but illegal off-label marketing and intentional withholding of antidepressant safety information from the public have also prompted successful settlements of lawsuits against Big Pharma firms.

     GlaxoSmithKline paid over three billion dollars in settlements in 2012 for both civil and criminal charges for their illegal promotion of the antidepressant Paxil to adolescents and children. They also had to pay just over one billion dollars to settle eight hundred lawsuits for birth defects caused by Paxil. They paid another three hundred and ninety million to settle the 450 lawsuits against them for individual suicides triggered by Paxil, and yet another one hundred and sixty million dollars to settle the 3200 lawsuits about crippling withdrawal symptoms from Paxil.

     Other notable out-of-court settlements include Forest Pharmaceuticals payment of three hundred and thirteen million dollars in 2010 because of their promoting Celexa for off-label use in pediatric patients and for then obstructing justice. Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against Pfizer, and settled confidentially, for damages from their antidepressants Zoloft and hundreds of other lawsuits claiming birth defects from their antidepressant Effexor.

     $127,000,000,000 – and counting – is a lot of hush money to be paid to keep the true dangers of antidepressants out of the public eye. There are 43,000,000 million Americans taking antidepressants today. That’s ten percent of all adults, and that figure has risen by 65 percent from 1999 to 2014.

     How many of these Americans would have elected not to take antidepressants if they knew Big Pharma had paid that much money to keep hidden their dirty secrets about birth defects, suicides, and withdrawal ordeals after taking antidepressants?

     How many of them would, in fact, still be alive had they known?