How BBC Duped Doctors, Regulators and British Public interviewing a scientology front company without letting on.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/6317137.stm

Secrets of the drugs trials: Transcript

NB: THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A TRANSCRIPTION UNIT RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT: BECAUSE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF MIS-HEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY, IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS ACCURACY.
PANORAMASECRETS OF THE DRUG TRIALSRECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC ONEDATE: 29:01:07
JEREMY VINE: Hello, I'm Jeremy Vine and this is Panorama. The secret emails you weren't supposed to see. The paper trail that reveals how results of drug trials were glossed over to cover up a link with suicide in teenagers. Now GlaxoSmithKline faces trial for fraud.
When you take your child to the doctor you assume the medicine they are prescribed is safe and will help them get better. If your teenager is depressed, you certainly don't expect the drug they're given to make them want to kill themselves. But we've uncovered the story of how one company tried to hide the fact that it's medicine did exactly that. Just watch this.
Reporter: SHELLEY JOFREMalibu, California. It's not where you'd expect to unravel one of the biggest medical scandals of recent times, but that's exactly what this team of lawyers has managed to do. What they've found affects all of us here in the UK, anyone in fact who takes prescription medicine.
KAREN BARTH MENZIESLawyer, Baum HedlundIt is all about the profits. Even when they have negative studies that show that this drug is going to harm kids they still spin that study as: "remarkably effective and safe for children."
JOFRE: This apartment is crammed full of boxes containing a story that Britain's richest drug company has fought hard to suppress. There's an embarrassment of secrets here that GlaxoSmithKline really doesn't want you to see, and you're about to discover why.
So it's all stuff from the confidential GlaxoSmithKline archives?
BARTH MENZIES: Yeah, the internal documents, the emails back and forth, the decisions that they make from the bottom to the top.
SHELLEY JOFREThese trade secrets are usually protected by law but through a series of legal challenges the lawyers have forced many of them into the open. Buried in all these boxes are details about secret clinical trials programme that GlaxoSmithKline began over a decade ago for its antidepressant Paroxatine, it's a drug that's better known in Britain by its brand name Seroxat. It was hailed in the 90s as a wonder drug when it was launched as a rival to Prosaic to treat depression and anxiety. GSK later promoted it as a cure for everything from stress to shyness. By the new millennium 100 million Seroxat prescriptions have been written worldwide bringing in 2 billion dollars a year. With the adult market also all sewn up, the company then looked for new ways to make money out of Seroxat.
BARTH MENZIES: If they tested Seroxat for children they would get a six month extension on their patent which means enormous profits. It would become the antidepressant, being used worldwide for children in depression.
JOFRE: The documents in these boxes reveal how hundreds of children with depression were recruited from around the world to take part in three large scale clinical trials of Seroxat. The biggest of these was in the US and came to be known as 'Study 329'. Its influence would reach right across the Atlantic to British doctors looking for ways to treat depressed children.










SEROXAT SUFFERERS - STAND UP AND BE COUNTED: How GSK Duped Doctor's, Regulator's and the British Public