As a sales rep for drug manufacturers Questcor, Lisa Pratta always suspected the company’s business practices weren’t just immoral but illegal, too, as she explains in “False Claims — One Insider’s Impossible Battle Against Big Pharma Corruption” (William Morrow).
But this was the final straw.
At a patient event in Freehold, NJ, in August 2011, a young woman walking with a cane asked Pratta if the drug she sold, Acthar, could help with her multiple sclerosis. When the woman mentioned she was a mother to two babies and also had been diagnosed with lymphoma, Pratta broke down.
“I couldn’t say anything,” Pratta tells The Post. “I just went to the ladies’ room and cried.
“And that was the turning point. I knew my days of keeping my mouth shut were over.”
Pratta began working for Questcor in 2010 as the sales rep in the Northeast region for Acthar, a drug which helped relieve autoimmune and inflammatory disorders. “If prescribed correctly, Acthar could help people walk again. And talk again,” writes Pratta.
But, she adds, “Questcor made more money when it was prescribed incorrectly.”
They would do anything to sell Acthar.
From paying doctors to prescribe it to using bogus research studies proclaiming its miraculous efficacy, they were so successful that Achtar’s price rose from $40 per vial in 2000 to nearly $39,000 in 2019 — an increase of 97,000%.
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