Sydney used to cover things like music, environmental justice and Occupy for The L Magazine in Brooklyn. She has also contributed to the Washington Square News, Brooklyn Magazine and NPR's All Songs Considered. Outside of writing, Sydney is an ardent fan of sunflower seed butter and the old version of Final Cut Pro.
Four pharmaceutical executives stand with their backs to a darkened Las Vegas auditorium. Smoke machine fog billows at their heels while a platform slowly rotates them to face thousands in the audience. A song from the Space Jam soundtrack plays, stage lights brighten, and suddenly a giant model pill dispenser is revealed on stage. Cue sparklers.
Y’all ready for this?
This is not a parody of corporate conduct. It’s Exhibit 28A, a video (above) uploaded by the Department of Justice last week from court documents pertaining to the "largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history." The scene itself is from the real and not-so-distant past, at GlaxoSmithKline's 2001 sales launch for its asthma medication Advair, which the company promoted as first-line therapy for mild asthma patients. The study that conclusion came from, however, had been flatly rejected by the FDA, and later received a black box warning as the result of deaths in halted clinical trials. The US complaint alleged that GSK continued to market the product as such anyway—as recently as 2010—while providing kickbacks for high-prescribing physicians to boot.
Last week, GlaxoSmithKline agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges and pay a total of $3 billion to resolve allegations pertaining to several other drugs, the illegal marketing of them, and the obscuring of clinical data from the FDA. "Today’s multibillion dollar settlement is unprecedented in both size and scope," Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole said in a press conference.
The investigation unearthed at least a decade's worth of physician kickbacks, fraudulent marketing, and various other kinds of legal (and ethical) boundaries breached, though this kind of behavior seems par for the course across the industry: Last year, Johnson & Johnson, pleading guilty to bribing foreign doctors, agreed to fork up $70 million in fines. As of April, Bristol-Myers Squibb has been subpoenaed by the SEC (likely for something similar), and Merck, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, and AstraZeneca have said they are also cooperating with investigations, according to the New York Times.
Meanwhile, as Forbes highlighted, the market hasn't blinked—GSK's stock prices are dandy. Still, the evidence is up and available on the web for anyone to peruse: emails detailing how physicians are to be plied with basketball tickets, a flier for a GSK-sponsored yacht trip, payments made to Dr. Drew Pinsky (yes,the Dr. Drew) as he marketed off-label uses of anti-depressant Wellbutrin, and a physician assistant's request for a deep tissue massage. Deep-sea fishing, kayaking, snorkeling, sailing, horseback riding, and balloon rides were just a few of the recreational activities offered to physicians at "Paxil Forum" events held at resorts in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and California in 2000 and 2001.
So, see for yourself: A compilation of some of the most gagworthy snippets from one of Big Pharma's biggest frauds.
It's a Sunday night at San Francisco's Bottom of the Hill—a glowing, dimly lit stakeout of a rock venue—and I've never seen anything quite like it: A guy in the audience who'd hobbled into the crowded room on crutches is now standing near the front of the stage, bouncing up and down, holding those crutches over his head.
The band that apparently has the power to heal the sick—or at least make him forget about the pain until after the show—is post-punk foursome the Men, and the song is a track off their latest album, Open Your Heart. Lanky bassist/producer Ben Greenberg also bounces; guitarists/vocalists Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi lunge their instruments at negative space; drummer Rich Samis rolls and flicks his head in furious rhythm. A third of the room is a mosh pit. I desperately fish around in my bag for the earplugs I've left at home, then realize that tinnitus is inevitable.
It's okay—I've made my peace. Back in Brooklyn, the Men enjoyed a reputation for two things: First, being one of the loudest yet most versatile bands around. Second: Not giving a fart about how anyone (i.e. bloggers) tried to pigeonhole their sound according to one of many noise, psychedelic, or classic rock reference points. The result, maybe, is the rare energy of shows like these, and albums that can slap an indie listener out of background-music worship. The lost frequencies are worth it.
For an industrial chemical released into the environment at more than 1 million pounds a year, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that bisphenol A also shows up in humans. Four years ago, researchers discovered that BPA, which is used in plastic manufacturing, was present in nearly 93 percent of the US population's urine.
So it's disturbing that a growing body of scientific literature suggests that BPA disrupts the body's hormones. Exposure to the chemical has been associated with risk for obesity, breast cancer, prostate cancer, cardiovascular disease, infertility, diabetes, thyroid dysfunction, and neurological problems.
Breakups inspire change. For some people, that means a haircut. For Sonny Smith, the prolific Bay Area-based troubadour and playwright behind infectious folk-pop outfit Sonny & the Sunsets, it was a country album.
Before Longtime Companion, the Sunsets enjoyed a reputation for easily digestible quirk and ineffably satisfying pop songs. Their last full-length album, Hit After Hit, gathered praise within the critical indie bubble for the sweet, unadorned straightforwardness at which Smith is a seasoned pro. In addition to a decade of creative residencies, work on short films, and musical collaborations with the likes of Miranda July, Neko Case, Jolie Holland, and Wilco's Leroy Bach, one of Smith's most ambitious projects was to create 100 fictional bands and 100 fictional 7" records—for which he then wrote the music. All 200 songs ended up on a jukebox at the gallery show displaying the 100 works of album art.
When Smith emailed the Sunsets' old record label with a pained country album that he had written over the end of a decade-long relationship, however, the label said "no, thanks."
Any of you catch the #ShellFAIL party video last week? The one where the oil company allegedly threw a rager atop the Seattle Space Needle to celebrate its new Arctic drilling ventures, only to have a model rig that served drinks malfunction and shoot crude-colored liquid all over a terrified elderly woman? What about that related website, arcticready.com, and its corporate campaign to take advantage of global warming? Play any “Angry Bergs”?
Of course, as was quickly revealed, these were actually masterpieces of viral fakery, instigated by a collaboration of Occupy, the Yes Men, and Greenpeace. Even so, the original video of the squirting rig has logged upwards of 700,000 YouTube viewers—all of whom are likely to now know a little bit more about Shell's controversial plans to drill in the Arctic circle, off Alaska's north coast.
Meet Logan Price, 28, the protester and carpenter who was in on the prank—and who originally posted the video, pretending he'd obtained it by sneaking into a private event. You might be familiar with his work: Price also questioned President Obama on alleged WikiLeaks-source Bradley Manning in a video that made the internet rounds in April of 2011. According to Price, the Shell stunt was developed to protest the drilling plans from a distance after a federal judge in Anchorage granted the company a restraining order blocking Greenpeace from interfering with its operations.
Price spoke with Mother Jones about planning the hoax, training the volunteers, figuring out how to milk the stunt for maximum publicity.
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