Back in 2001, TAP Pharmaceuticals, a joint venture of Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT) and Takeda Pharmaceuticals, pleaded guilty to illegal marketing and pricing of its prostate cancer drug Lupron, and agreed to a $875 million settlement. This was the largest health care fraud settlement to date, and the first in what has become a wave of federal prosecutions against drug companies for such fraud. (The settlement reimbursed government programs, but not consumers and private health plans. A $150 million national class action settlement, in which PAL was involved, provided reimbursement to those private parties.)

As reported today by BNA Health Care Daily, a TAP account manager who was convicted of perjury for testimony given to the grand jury in the government case, will serve 5 months in federal prison:

BOSTON–A former regional account manager for TAP Pharmaceutical Products Inc., convicted of perjury in 2004, was sentenced Oct. 30 to five months in prison (United States v. Richardson, D. Mass., No. 02-cr-10211, sentencing 10/30/07).

Joanne Richardson, whose conviction was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in 2005 (No. 169 HCDR 9/1/05 a0b1j9h8c2), also was fined $3,000 and ordered to spend two years on supervised release, including five months of home detention, following her prison term.

Richardson had been found guilty in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts of making false declarations to a grand jury investigating TAP’s business practices.

Earlier this year, U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young threw out a sentence of six months in prison, imposed in 2004, finding that her attorney had ineffectively represented her by failing to note on appeal a change in the status of mandatory sentencing guidelines. The new sentence was imposed by U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr.

In seeking to avoid imprisonment, Richardson argued that her conviction was for lying about the conduct of coworkers who subsequently were acquitted, and that several notable public figures, including former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis Libby, had avoided incarceration for similar offenses.

In October 2001, TAP pleaded guilty to illegally pricing and marketing its cancer drug, Lupron, as part of an $875 million settlement to resolve criminal and civil charges of wrongdoing. However, 11 former TAP sales executives and managers were found not guilty of defrauding the government and paying kickbacks after a three-month trial in July 2004.

Stephanie Saul at the New York Times did a great article today, “Sleep Drugs Found Only Mildly Effective, but Wildly Popular” The article dispels the myths concerning the effectiveness of the expensive brand-name prescription sleep aids whose television ads blanket the airwaves every night, including Lunesta (made by Sepracor [NYSE:SEPR]), Ambien and Ambien CR (made by Sanofi Aventis [NYSE:SNY]) and Rozerem (made by Takeda Pharmaceuticals).

We made many of the same points as this article last year when we gave the makers of Lunesta and Ambien/Ambien CR one of our Bitter Pill Awards, specifically the While You Were Sleeping Award: For Overmarketing Insomnia Medications to Anyone who’s ever had a Bad Night’s Sleep.

Some of the key points that the article made:

• American consumers spend $4.5 billion a year for sleep medications.
• As a group, Ambien, Lunesta and Sonata reduced the average time to go to sleep 12.8 minutes compared with fake pills (placebo), and increased total sleep time 11.4 minutes. Hardly results so impressive that they warrant $4.5 billion in annual spending.
• Two older drugs, Halcion and Restoril, caused people to fall asleep 10 minutes faster and slept 32 minutes longer than the placebo group.

So the newer drugs caused people to fall asleep a whopping 2.8 minutes faster than the older drugs, yet the older drugs increased sleep time almost three times more than the newer. And the price difference? Accordingo to the article, Lunesta and Ambien CR ring in at about $4.00 a pill, generic Ambien at about $2 a pill, and Sonata at $3.50 a pill. The older (now all generic) drugs? 30 to 50 cents. So the older drugs are about equally effective, yet about 1/4 to 1/10th of the price.

As we said last year upon giving the While You Were Sleeping Award:

Ads for insomnia medications are promising trouble-free sleep to an increasingly stressed and sleepless nation. But in doing so, these ads are creating a host of problems: exposing people to dangerous side effects, causing addiction, costing patients and insurers billions of dollars, encouraging them to pop a pill rather than find the root cause of their insomnia, and promoting the dangerous notion that the solution to life’s problems is in a prescription bottle, rather than in changing our behavior, habits and lifestyle.

Last year, the Times ran an excellent article by Jane Brody about alternatives to prescription sleep medications, “Help for Chronic Insomnia Isn’t Always Found in a Pill.”

Stephanie Saul’s article, and the research she reports on, hopefully will begin to encourage people to question the claims in ads for prescription sleep aids, and to explore both the drug-free alternatives and the broader causes behind their lack of sleep.