Merck Move Shows Industry Adrift

Government Scrutiny

That decline has come at a time when government officials, particularly in the U.K., have stepped up their scrutiny of the industry.

During a recent in-depth study, U.K. leaders uncovered plenty that troubled them. For starters, they found that drug companies can specifically design clinical trials to deliver favorable -- but possibly misleading -- outcomes. Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, cited a Merck trial of Vioxx as one example.

"We wondered to ourselves why on earth Merck wants to compare this with naproxen," a drug popularly known as Aleve, Nicholson said. "They did not give us the details initially, and then when we asked and asked, we finally found out they had already carried out major trials against the two major anti-inflammatory drugs ... and found absolutely no advantage of their drug."

Yet another medical expert, the internationally recognized David Healy, said that drug companies often run numerous trials in an attempt to yield any favorable results at all. He said the companies then share only their positive findings and classify the rest of the trials, rather than the drugs themselves, as failures.

"The companies can pick out the pieces of data that suit them," Healy told TheStreet.com. "That's the part that gets the drug through" the regulatory process. "And after that, they only have to show the good bits of data to the rest of the world."

Healy is perhaps best known for highlighting problems associated with the popular class of antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. He has long insisted that the drugs, including Eli Lilly's (LLY Quote) household name Prozac, are less effective -- and less safe -- than many people realize.

Still, such drugs have been blockbusters from the beginning.

In the decade after SSRIs first hit the market, the U.K. committee noted, prescriptions for antidepressants more than tripled. Critics blame the 1992-97 "Defeat Depression Campaign," promoted by psychiatrists but financed in large part by the drug industry itself, for part of that trend.

The campaign "led us to being told that a third of the population were depressed, that we should screen for it, that we should start using antidepressants early, and we did," physician Des Spence told the U.K. committee. "As time has gone on, I have certainly begun to realize that in some ways, yes, there are many people who do have depression, but lots of people are just unhappy, and that is a part of life. So there is a whole generation of people coming up who almost feel that being unhappy is an abnormal state -- which, of course, it is not."

Meanwhile, SSRIs remain wildly popular drugs. Eli Lilly still profits handsomely from Prozac, the first "miracle" antidepressant of its kind, despite negative publicity and -- perhaps more importantly -- generic competition. The same can be said of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK Quote) and its own SSRI, Paxil. Meanwhile, Pfizer continues to count Zoloft as one of its best-selling drugs.