Litigation uncovers what the drug companies do not want known – that their “wonder drugs” are not all they are cracked up to be and can cause some serious adverse reactions, including death. As a consequence, drugs reach the market without their true nature being fully known. With the statistics cited above and the billions of dollars generated from sales, it is no wonder pharmaceutical companies do virtually whatever it takes to ensure their prospective psychotherapeutic drugs are approved for marketing and, once approved, protected with a vengeance. In fact, according to documents obtained in the SSRI litigation, this is little more than a clever advertising gimmick which, through marketing research, has been proven to be an effective means of getting consumers to reach for a bottle of Prozac, or Zoloft, or Paxil.Īpparently, there is no end in sight for drug manufacturers in the business of developing psychotherapeutic drugs. Pfizer (the maker of Zoloft) and SmithKline Beecham (the maker of Paxil) have successfully followed in Lilly’s footsteps utilizing such marketing messages as: “You may be suffering from a chemical imbalance - can help correct this imbalance.” This advertising slogan is parroted by each of the companies despite the fact that there is no scientific evidence to prove that such a chemical imbalance actually exists. 2 If nothing else, the story of Prozac is a remarkable demonstration of what can be accomplished through effective marketing.
Coincidentally, since the approval of Prozac in the United States in 1988, the number of cases of depression have nearly doubled from 14 million to 25 million in 2001. The extraordinary increase in the psychotherapeutic drug market appears to have begun with the advent of the SSRIs, the first of which was Lilly’s Prozac. 1 Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (“SSRIs” - Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil in particular), constitute a large, if not the majority, proportion of the psychotherapeutic class of drugs making it the number one therapeutic class. Psychotherapeutic drugs are the number one class of drugs in the United States with sales of over 23 billion dollars in 2001 (considerably higher than drugs used to treat cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes).
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