Major Drugmaker BUSTED Paying Illegal Kickbacks To Doctors

Drug maker AbbVie has been hit with a complaint, they paid illegal kick backs to doctors for prescribing their medicine. Ring of Fire’s Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discuss this issue.

Support us by becoming a monthly patron on Patreon, and help keep progressive media alive!

Spread the word! LIKE and SHARE this video or leave a comment to help direct attention to the stories that matter. And SUBSCRIBE to stay connected with Ring of Fire's video content!

Support Ring of Fire by subscribing to our YouTube channel

Be sociable! Follow us on:

Follow more of our stories at

Subscribe to our podcast

crazy news just about every day. Look, drug maker AbbVie has been hit with a complaint, they alleged ... they paid illegal kick backs to doctors for prescribing their medicine. How many times have we seen this story? And every time we see this story the industry says, "oh, no, we didn't do that." Here's what you find. They find doctors are sent on vacations; doctors are given actual cash advances; doctors are given free medicine to be able to hand out or to sell; doctors are given these dinners where they bring 'em in and they talk about how great their product is. And oh by the way, "Doc, would you like another drink? And how was the steak?"

We have laws against this. There are laws against this but it seems as if the laws are always ignored. This is another situation with a drug called Humira. Humira was what ...

Rheumatoid arthritis.

Rheumatoid arthritis, yeah.

This is a repeat of that, isn't it?

It is, you could take the name AbbVie out of the title here and replace it with Merck or Pfizer or any of the other big ones because they all do this. We had discussed a few months ago just how pervasive this problem really is in medicine and it's almost to the point where patients need to second guess what their doctors are prescribing. I know that's a scary thought and it's not all doctors, but when you have so much money coming in from big pharma, even after they've lobbied and donated to campaigns, there's still so much left over to hand out to these doctors just so they get the edge on the prescriptions with something like Humira cuz there's a million different rheumatoid arthritis drugs out there. But they want Humira to be the blockbuster right now so that's what they push.

Let me put it into perspective, okay? I could go through virtually every major lawsuit that this firm has handled where a pharmaceutical is on the market killing people. And every time we see that this same story will be part of the story. Let's take testosterone ... okay, testosterone killing people by the dozens from stroke and heart attack. What they did with those doctors is they had junkets for 'em. There's no other way to describe it. It might be a ... the junket might be in the same city, but it's at a resort and we're gonna send you here to the resort to educate you about the problems of low testosterone, right?

So they get there on Friday afternoon, they leave on Sunday. In between they have three or four parties, the dinners are spectacular, the little gifts they give away are spectacular, all of the deatilers come in, the detailers are the sales people working in that area and they give their little presentations and we wanna meet you a little later doctor. What we find out, yeah, that's going on when the company knows. Absolutely the companies absolutely know in almost every case that they're having to do that because the pharmaceutical is defective. Whether it's testosterone that we've talked about, whether it is ... there's Invokana, they did the same thing with Invokana. They did the same thing with two or three different birth control pills when there was no need at all to have another birth control pills but you would have these doctor junkets where you convince the doctor ... yeah, this is a great example, isn't it? You convince the doctors that Yaz is different, Yaz is gonna clear up people's complexion, it's gonna help 'em lose weight ... this is what they were telling the doctors.

And it was a lie. But the doctor is willing to buy into that because they're having a good time, they're making a little extra here, a little extra there. What's your take?