NJPIRG launched its campaign to rein in deceptive prescription drug marketing by documenting the depth of the problem with our report, “Turning Medicine Into Snake Oil: How Pharmaceutical Marketers Put Patients at Risk.”

This major report received national and international coverage, and opened doors for us to build alliances with health care providers around the country. One of the report’s recommendations, a “clinical trial results registry,” is proposed in A2951, a NJPIRG-backed bill sponsored by Assemblyman Dr. Herb Conaway.

We will be working with Assemblyman Conaway to pass this legislation, known as the Prescription Drug Right-To-Know Act, in the fall.

“Patients have a right to know about the safety and effectiveness of the drugs they take,” said NJPIRG Legislative Advocate, Abigail Caplovitz. “Doctors and patients should know about a drug’s track record upfront—not after it has been prescribed.”

A clinical trial results registry is a simple idea: doctors and patients can go to one place and get all the clinically important information from all the clinical trials done to show a drug is safe and effective. Surprisingly, compiling this information right now is very difficult, and patients are often uninformed on clinical trial results.

Our report described cases of clinical trial data being suppressed and misrepresented in dramatic ways by the drug marketers, including well-known drugs like Paxil and Vioxx. The report also indicated that this was not an isolated problem—the FDA identified over 82 studies that drug marketers had misrepresented.