Corporate Crime Reporter
http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/steven-brill-johnson-johnson-americas-admired-lawbreaker/[excerpt]
America is consumed by high profile crime.
Which raises the question.
Why not high profile corporate crime?
That proposition will be put to the test next year.
Steven Brill – founder of the American Lawyer magazine and Court TV – has written a gripping account of a corporate crime – titled America’s Most Admired Lawbreaker.
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/miracleindustry/americas-most-admired-lawbreaker/That would be Johnson & Johnson.
When asked why America’s Most Admired Lawbreaker can’t be as riveting as the People v. OJ Simpson, Brill doesn’t miss a beat.
“It can be,” Brill told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week.
“I did sell the movie rights to it,” he says matter of factly. “It is going to be made into a serial on one of the television outlets. That’s all I can tell you. Probably in six months to a year you will see it. It is harder to get eyeballs to it than OJ, but I think we are going to succeed.”
In America’s Most Admired Lawbreaker, Brill tells the story of the biggest and the most admired corporation in the world’s most prosperous industry – healthcare – a company known for “consumer products from Band-Aids to baby powder, Neutrogena to Rogaine, Listerine to Visine, Aveeno to Tylenol and Sudafed to Splenda.”
“But the real money — about 80 percent of its revenue and 91 percent of its profit,” Brill writes, “comes not from those consumer favorites, but from Johnson & Johnson’s high-margin medical devices: artificial hips and knees, heart stents, surgical tools and monitoring devices – and from still higher margin prescription drugs targeting Crohn’s disease (Remicade), cancer (Zytiga, Velcade), schizophrenia (Risperdal), diabetes (Invokana), psoriasis (Stelara), migraines (Topamax), heart disease (Xarelto) and attention deficit disorder (Concerta).”
Brill focuses Johnson & Johnson’s corporate crime of selling Risperdal off label.
In November 2013, a Johnson & Johnson unit, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, pled guilty to marketing Risperdal for unapproved uses – namely to the elderly. Risperdal was approved only to treat schizophrenia. but sales representatives promoted Risperdal to physicians and other prescribers who treated elderly dementia patients by urging the prescribers to use Risperdal to treat symptoms such as anxiety, agitation, depression, hostility and confusion.
