• New York Times, Monday, October 4, 2010 10:55 AM

On their way to becoming the top-selling class of prescription drugs in the U.S., antipsychotic drugs have also become the single biggest target of the False Claim Act, which once was aimed at military contractors but now is being used to curtail illegal marketing of pharmaceuticals, Duff Wilson reports.

But despite the stepped-up enforcement and recent settlements by Eli Lilly and Pfizer, the industry continues to market antipsychotics aggressively. Wilson wonders how drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration for about 1% of the population have become the industry's biggest sellers and finds a simple answer.

"It's the money," Dr. Jerome L. Avorn, a Harvard medical professor and researcher, tells him. "When you're selling $1 billion a year or more of a drug, it's very tempting for a company to just ignore the traffic ticket and keep speeding."

Wilson goes on to detail exactly how the companies have skirted the law. But the CEOs of both Eli Lilly and Pfizer aver that their companies' wayward days are behind them. "That was a blemish for us," says Eli Lilly's John C. Lechleiter. "We don't ever want that to happen again."

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