How to Stop Illegal Marketing: The Innovators

WASHINGTON (TheStreet) -- Pfizer(PFE Quote) recently made headlines when it was slapped with the largest criminal/civil fine in history and had to pay $2.3 billion for improperly marketing its drugs.

Pfizer's primary alleged misdeed was promoting its drugs for off-label use, i.e., uses that were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Off-label uses are not without risk; anyone who reads the fine print in pharmaceutical advertisements knows that prescription drugs can have serious, even fatal, side effects. However, the more ways there are to use a drug the more money its manufacturer can expect to make, so off-label uses offer pharmaceutical companies opportunities for profit that they wouldn't have if they restricted their sales to what the FDA permits.

Why was the fine levied against Pfizer so large? Because the company has been down this road before. According to Business Week, this is the fourth settlement that Pfizer or one of its subsidiaries has entered into with the government since 2002. The fines in the previous cases totaled only about $513 million -- a drop in the bucket compared with the profits that Pfizer rakes in from off-label sales. Business Week quoted Assistant Attorney General Tony West as saying that this most recent fine "represents yet another example of what penalties will be faced when a pharmaceutical company puts profits ahead of patient health." West apparently hopes that this latest settlement, coupled with the five-year integrity agreement that Pfizer signed with the Health and Human Services Department, will be enough to keep the company on the straight and narrow going forward.