In an article published Tuesday in the journal PLoS Medicine, the authors laid out three possible areas of liability, including the federal anti-kickback statute, which can carry prison time plus fines of up to $250,000.
Researchers at major universities, including Brown, Emory, Harvard, Stanford, Tufts, and Yale, have been accused in recent years of signing their names to medical-journal articles that were written by others, articles that promoted the benefits of various medications and were produced under the auspices of pharmaceutical companies trying to boost their products. Last year The Chronicle reported that a University of Pennsylvania psychiatry professor accused five other academics of signing an article that was ghostwritten for the maker of the antidepressant Paxil and made unsupported claims for it.
"By lending his name, the author is contributing to fraud," says Bijan Esfandiari, one of the authors of the PLoS Medicine article. "And the ghostwriter is involved in the conspiracy as well."
Mr. Esfandiari is a lawyer with the firm of Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman in Los Angeles. ("For 25 years we have championed death and injury claims for thousands of clients nationwide," reads the firm's Web site.) His co-authors are Xavier A. Bosch, a professor in the department of medicine at the University of Barcelona, and Leemon McHenry, a lecturer and specialist in bioethics in the philosophy department at California State University at Northridge.
The entire story is here.
