Today’s Boston Globe brings us the story of Neurontin, a so-called “blockbuster” drug that generated more than $2,000,000,000 per year in worldwide sales for its maker, the Pfizer company.

It turns out that Pfizer deliberately buried the evidence that Neurontin didn’t work as advertised:

“We must delay publication of [study] 224, as its results were not positive,” wrote Pfizer marketing executive John Marino in a September 2000 e-mail to Angela Crespo, senior manager of major markets for Neurontin.

Later that month, Michael Rowbotham, Neurontin team leader, e-mailed Crespo about the problem of Dr. John Reckless, an investigator on the study who was pressing Pfizer to publish the results for ethical reasons. Along with delaying publication for as long as possible “it will be more important how WE write up the study,” Rowbotham wrote. “We are not allowing him to write it up himself.”

No one could have predicted that creating a huge financial incentive for corporations to demonstrate the efficacy of their patent medicines would lead them to put profit over health and science! Who could have imagined such unethical behavior on the part of a giant pharmaceutical company?