• Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Monday, January 18, 2010 10:48 AM

In a complaint filed in federal court in Boston on Friday, the U.S, Justice Department accused Johnson & Johnson of paying "tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks" to Omnicare, a nursing-home pharmacy company, to get it to boost sales of drugs such as the anti-psychotic Risperdal to nursing-home patients, Jonathan D. Rockoff reports. J&J says its conduct was "lawful and appropriate."

The kickbacks took place from 1999 to 2004, the government says, and include payments for the pharmacy's physician prescriber data, which Omnicare had previously provided at no charge. It also accuses J&J of paying rebates based on Omnicare's success in switching patients from competitors' drugs.

Drug makers commonly pay rebates on the prices of drugs sold to middlemen, and the practice is legal unless government programs like Medicaid don't get the benefit of the rebate. Prosecutors allege that J&J tried to disguise rebates as the physician-prescriber-data payments.

Natasha Singer, meanwhile, reports in the New York Times that J&J's dilatory recall of several hundred batches of popular over-the-counter medicines is tarnishing its decades-old reputation as the gold standard in handling such crises.

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