" Hope in a Bottle " - Components of Purdue Pharma Stealth Marketing Campaign for Oxycontin Revealed by Legal Documents from Tennessee

Introduction: Disinformation and Stealth Marketing CampaignsBack in the distant past the US government made some attempt to hold big health care corporations to account for misleading marketing practices.  We learned a lot about these practices from documents revealed in the resulting litigation, and in particular, about stealthy, deceptive systematicmarketing,lobbying, andpolicy advocacy campaigns on behalf of big health care organizations, often pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies.  For example, in 2012 wefound out about the stealth marketing campaign used by GlaxoSmithKline to sell its antidepressant Paxil.  This includedmanipulating andsuppressing clinical research,bribing physicians to prescribe the drug, use ofkey opinion leaders as disguised marketers, and manipulation ofcontinuing medical education.  Other notable examples included Johnson and Johnson ' s campaign to sell Risperdal (lookhere),  and the infamous Pfizer campaign to sell Neurontin (lookhere andhere).  We also found that stealth marketing seemed to be partially responsible for the growing popularity of narcotics (opioids) starting in the 1990s (lookhere).The organization and complexity of stealth marketing, lobbying and policy advocacy campaigns have often been sufficient to characterize them asdisinformation.  For example, we characterized the campaign by commercial health insurance companies to derail the Clinton administration ' s attempt at hea...

Source: Health Care Renewal - July 8, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: deception disinformation narcotics perverse incentives propaganda public relations Purdue Pharma stealth marketing Source Type: blogs