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About Me
Alison Bass is a Pulitzer Prize nominee and author of Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial, which won the NASW Science in Society Award. She was a longtime medical and science writer for The Boston Globe and has also written for The Miami Herald, Psychology Today and MIT's Technology Review, among other publications. A series she wrote for The Boston Globe on psychiatry was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and she has received many other journalism awards. In 2007, she won a prestigious Alicia Patterson Fellowship to write Side Effects. Bass teaches journalism at Mount Holyoke College and Brandeis University.
Category Archives: drug marketing
Plot twists in Soderbergh’s new movie Side Effects strain belief
Share I went to see Steven Soderbergh’s new film, Side Effects, with anticipation and dread. The movie, after all, carries the same name as my 2008 book, Side Effects and from what I could tell of the trailers, its plot … Continue reading
One solution to prescription drug overdoses: make Oyxcontin and similar drugs safer
Share In my previous blogs about West Virginia’s shockingly high rate of prescription drug overdoses — the Mountain State has the second highest rate of overdoses in the nation — I focused on “the culture of disability” that created this … Continue reading
Posted in biotech industry, drug marketing, medical devices, opiods, pharmaceutical industry, prescription drug abuse, public health, Uncategorized
Tagged drug formularies, Medicare, Oxycontin, pharmaceutical companies, prescription drug overdoses, Vicodin, West Virginia, West Virginia University
3 Comments
Why West Virginia has second highest rate of prescription drug overdoses in the nation
Share Did you know that West Virginia has the second highest rate of deaths from prescription drug overdoses in the country? I didn’t, until I moved to the Mountain State to live and work and became curious as to what … Continue reading
Posted in antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs, drug marketing, health care costs, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, prescription drug overdoes, public health
Tagged CDC, Charleston Gazette, drug commercials, Massachusetts, Oxycontin, prescription drug overdoses, universal health care, West Virginia, West Virginia University
5 Comments
Martin Keller, principal investigator of Paxil study 329, retires from Brown University
Share I just learned that Dr. Martin Keller, principal investigator of the controversial Paxil study 329, has retired from his position as a professor of psychiatry at Brown University — see here. As Pharmalot notes, Keller quietly retired June 30 in … Continue reading
Calls for action against authors of controversial Paxil study are getting louder
Share In the wake of GlaxoSmithKline’s record-breaking $3 billion settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, a number of psychiatrists and researchers have redoubled their efforts to get Paxil study 329 retracted. As mentioned here and in other news accounts, the … Continue reading
Posted in antidepressants, clinical trials, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, ghostwriting, National Institutes of Health, pharmaceutical industry, scientific journal retractions, scientific misconduct, university industry collaboration
Tagged antidepressants, Brown University, Department of Justice, GlaxoSmithKline, Health Care Renewal, Martin Keller, oneboringoldman, Paxil
2 Comments
New York AG’s office should take a bow for GlaxoSmithKline’s record-breaking fine
Share I was glad to see that the New York Times‘ reporters covering GlaxoSmithKline’s $3 billion settlement tipped their hat to former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. After all, it was his crew and specifically a pioneering attorney by … Continue reading
Posted in antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs, clinical trials, drug marketing, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, scientific journal retractions, scientific misconduct, suicide rates, whistleblowing
Tagged clinical trial, Eliot Spitzer, fraud, GlaxoSmithKline, New York Attorney General's office, New York Times, Paxil, whistleblowing
4 Comments
Vertex pharmaceutical executives cash in on false hopes
Share Senior executives at Vertex Pharmaceuticals made millions of dollars each by selling company stock in the days after the Cambridge-based pharmaceutical reported promising clinical trial data on an experimental drug for cystic fibrosis. And then weeks after they cashed … Continue reading
Fast-moving bill in Congress would weaken FDA oversight of new drugs and devices
Share Congress is moving quickly to pass a bill that would authorize higher industry fees for the FDA in exchange for speeding up the approval of some drugs and medical devices and eliminating restrictions on financial conflicts of interest among … Continue reading
Institute of Medicine report concludes that the FDA is not doing adequate job of assessing drug benefits and risks
Share Two weeks ago, I headlined my blog with this question: Is the FDA violating its own mandate to approve safe drugs? Four days later, the national Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a 233-page report concluding that FDA’s current approach … Continue reading
Posted in antidepressants, clinical trials, drug marketing, FDA, media coverage, National Institutes of Health, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, Uncategorized
Tagged British Medical Journal, FDA, Institute of Medicine, Nature, NIH, noncompliance with 2007 law, postmarketing studies, safety of drugs
1 Comment
Is the FDA violating its own mandate to approve safe drugs?
Share Is the Food and Drug Administration violating its own mandate to approve safe drugs? That was the question that Donald Light, co-author of The Risk for Prescription Drugs and a long-time medical sociologist, posed at a talk yesterday at … Continue reading
Posted in antidepressants, biotech industry, clinical trials, continuing medical education, drug marketing, FDA, health care costs, medical devices, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, scientific misconduct, suicide rates, Uncategorized
Tagged antidepressants, clinical trials, Congress, Donald Light, FDA, Massachusetts Legislature, me-too drugs, off-label use, pipeline, safety and effectiveness of drugs
2 Comments