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During my entire 30-plus-year career as a behavioral/developmental pediatrician in private practice, I have attended only one drug company-sponsored dinner where I was paid for just showing up.

In 2003, I received a letter from Eli Lilly and Company, inviting me to hear a former Columbia Medical School classmate - what an amazing coincidence - talk about Strattera (atomoxetine), Lilly's new drug for the treatment of ADHD/ADD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and non-hyperactive inattention). The dinner would be at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco, one of the city's fanciest venues. As an additional inducement, I was offered a $500 "consulting fee" and a continuing medical education (CME) credit in return for listening to this one-hour presentation.

I had been to enough industry-sponsored CME lectures to know that the session would have a biological/medication slant that I don't share. Plus, the presentations were often insultingly simplistic and capped off by an obvious sales pitch. Still, I was intrigued; what would I have to do for my $500? After a bit of a struggle, I arranged to have the money donated to the Omega Boys Club of San Francisco. Then I went to the dinner.

In the lobby, I saw a colleague, a friendly chap with a very strong biological/medication orientation, and we decided to sit together. After a leisurely, wine-accompanied repast, the lecture began, presented by my former classmate, Phil Buber (my pseudonym for him).

I remembered Phil as a nice, unassuming, somewhat lumbering guy, but not one of my med school's brighter stars. He did a decent job covering the symptoms of childhood ADHD: six of nine behaviors required for diagnosis on the impulsive/hyperactive side and/or six of nine behaviors on the inattentive side as enumerated in American psychiatry's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), Edition IV.

Phil proceeded to give a perfunctory description of non-drug behavioral approaches to treatment. Then, right on schedule and according to script, he disparaged the medications currently in use for ADHD. Coming from a drug company shill, this should have been a surprise, but to the cognoscenti in the audience, it was not. We all knew that Lilly had been touting Strattera as the first effective, non-stimulant medication for the treatment of ADHD/ADD. The best known of the stimulants - Ritalin, Adderall, and the newer Concerta - had grown into a $2 billion a year industry. They were all variations of amphetamine, a potentially abusable and addictive drug. Strattera was the first non-amphetamine brought to market for ADHD.

Even though there was contradictory evidence on the long-term risks of Ritalin-type drugs, Phil exploited the specter of later amphetamine addiction. (Later that year, Lilly's national campaign, which was directed at parents, would attempt to cash in on that same worry. Subsequent research concluded that childhood intake of amphetamines neither led to nor prevented future drug abuse or addiction.) He droned on about the benefits of Strattera and exaggerated the risks of Adderall and Concerta, but I had already made up my mind about the drug, whose structure and pharmacology reminded me of the tricyclics (more about them later). If I were going to prescribe medication, I would stick to the stimulants. However, I knew my dinner partner was a pioneer and a risk taker, inclined to try new drugs with his patients.

We were still sitting together when Phil went around the room, polling the doctors in attendance on our attitudes about Strattera. He asked me, "So, Larry, what do you think about using atomoxetine with your patients?"

"Well, Phil, I'm a bit conservative when it comes to new drugs," I said. "So, I'll tell you what. When my friend here tells me in five years that Strattera works and has fewer side effects than Concerta, I might be ready to prescribe it." The group laughed uneasily.

Strattera's backstory, which reflected marketing choices rather than an effective alternative, was the most intriguing - and instructive - thing about it. Atomoxetine, its generic version, had languished on the Eli Lilly shelves for more than a decade. In the 1980s, testing had shown it to be an adequate treatment for depression, but Lilly had just introduced its blockbuster product, Prozac, which seemed to be a bit more effective and also better tolerated. Consequently, Lilly didn't need another antidepressant to compete with its very, very successful product.

But then, a fortuitous set of circumstances coalesced in the late 1990s: ADHD diagnosis rates and treatments soared, and parents, desperate to treat their "chemically imbalanced" offspring, worried about the potential long-term side effects of amphetamines on their children.

Lilly also had another ace in its deck. It had recruited Harvard University's preeminent academic child psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Biederman, and his team to take on atomoxetine research. Dr. Biederman, winner of many academic awards, was arguably at the time the single most powerful and influential psychiatrist in America. He later became embroiled in conflict-of-interest scandals that were covered by major American media outlets, and his reputation has since suffered. But at that particular moment, he was at the height of his powers. All Biederman had to do was whisper the name of a new drug at a medical conference, and tens of thousands of prescriptions for that drug would be written by MDs across the nation.

At one point, Biederman's team had promoted tricyclics - older, non-stimulant antidepressant drugs - as alternatives for ADHD when stimulant drugs failed to improve behavior, side effects were too great, or there was a risk of abuse. However, in the 1980s, after several reports of children suddenly dying while taking desipramine (one of the tricylics), use of these types of compounds for ADHD essentially ended.

I had not been surprised when an article by Biederman and his team appeared in the July 2002 Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry on the use of atomoxetine as a treatment for ADHD. I was surprised, however, to learn that on the very same day the article was released to the press, Biederman hosted a Wall Street news conference under the auspices of Eli Lilly.

The timing and blatant nature of the pecuniary partnership between America's leading academic child psychiatrist and a Fortune 500 mega-corporation had left me feeling sad, angry, and alone. Where were other doctors, patients, the public, and the press? Why weren't they speaking out about this obvious conflict of interest?

I never got a confirming report from my dinner-meeting colleague on Strattera. Indeed, in the ensuing years, despite a massive marketing campaign directed at both physicians and patients, Lilly failed to get Strattera approved as a first-line ADHD drug by any of the major pediatric or professional child psychiatric organizations. In a head-to-head competition with Concerta, Strattera was found to be only six-tenths as effective as Concerta in ameliorating the symptomatic behaviors of ADHD. It was especially poor in addressing the inattentive behaviors (daydreaming) of the non-hyperactive form of ADHD. (The study was funded by Janssen, maker of Concerta.)

Nonetheless, while the risk of abuse in a child under 13 is essentially zero, parents fear stimulant drugs' reputation, and Lilly's marketing of Strattera as a non-stimulant alternative had some impact. It ultimately occupies only around 5 to 7 percent of the ADHD medication market. While that may not sound like much, 5 percent represents $500 million annually in what is currently a $9 billion market for ADHD medicines overall.

There are many complex and related reasons why, in 2012, the U.S. comprised 4 percent of the world's population but produced and used 70 percent of its legal stimulants. On balance, however, drug companies were - and continue to be - the largest single influence. Not only do they fund ADHD research and professional education, they market to doctors, teachers, parents, and, ultimately, even the children of this country.

Of course, drug companies have always promoted their products to doctors, albeit with significant restraints. A century ago, organized medicine began to separate itself from the patent-medicine makers of the time, garnering in the process a newfound respect from the general public. This shift was influenced by the 1910 Flexner Report on the state of American medical schools. By the 1920s, drug company ads in doctors' journals were carefully scrutinized before being run. (This was well before the FDA demanded certain standards of effectiveness and safety in pharmaceutical products.)

There were also innocuous promo inducements. In the 1950s and early 1960s, my father - a general practitioner in Queens, New York - let me go through his professional mail looking for drug company boxes and trinkets. I'd find packets of writing pads, a ballpoint pen, sometimes a weird and cheap artifact with the name of the drug and the company on it. I'd play with them for a while, then toss them out.

But by the 1980s, the relationship between doctors and the drug industry was changing. During the Reagan administration, with the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, academic medical researchers and for-profit corporations were encouraged to integrate their efforts. The act allowed businesses, nonprofits, and universities to claim ownership of discoveries that had been funded by federal money; previously, patents to scientific breakthroughs achieved with federal sponsorship had to be transferred to the government.

For me, the first signs of change came in the mid-1990s, with Shire Pharmaceuticals' introduction and marketing of Adderall. Shire, a company based in the United Kingdom (technically on the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel for tax purposes), was and continues to be the most aggressive and dominant marketer of legal amphetamines in the United States.

Typically, Shire's approach has been to buy smaller drug companies outright. Take, for example, Richwood Pharmaceuticals. In early 1994, Richwood - a company started by Roger Griggs - acquired a defunct New Jersey manufacturing plant. Twenty years earlier, the plant had produced Obetral, an amphetamine product used for the treatment of obesity. Under pressure from the FDA, women's groups, and trial lawyers, the market for diet pills was shut down, and Obetral went into obscurity.

Not surprisingly, a change in the national education laws in 1991, which for the first time included ADHD as a covered diagnosis for services and accommodations, led to an upsurge in its diagnosis. Mr. Griggs, whose purchase of the plant had likely been inspired by this development, brought back the former obesity drug and renamed it Adderall. Enter Shire, which bought Richwood Pharmaceuticals for $186 million in 1997.

That same year, I began noticing ads in the major professional journals promoting Adderall as a long-acting stimulant over Ritalin, a methylphenidate product that had been a mainstay ADHD treatment since the 1960s. Ritalin itself had replaced Benzedrine, one of the first legal amphetamine products like Adderall. Methylphenidate, the active ingredient in Ritalin, while not identical to amphetamine, is very similar in both structure and action.

Ritalin became the predominant stimulant prescribed by doctors for two reasons. First, Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis), the makers of Ritalin, organized some modern research that established its short-term effectiveness; Benzedrine was supported by only a few original studies carried out by Charles Bradley, a pediatrician who, in 1937, was the first to note stimulants' effects on children's behavior. Second, Ritalin wasn't an amphetamine. Simple as that.

Parents and doctors had known about amphetamines' risks of abuse and addiction since the 1930s. With Ritalin, doctors could tell their patients' parents that their children weren't taking an amphetamine, which technically, it wasn't, even though the positive effects, side effects, and risks were essentially the same for both drugs when tested in large groups of children and adults.

Thirty years later, Ritalin was the most widely known and frequently reviled of the stimulant-type drugs for children, and part of Shire's advertising campaign was strikingly analogous to the earlier Ciba-Geigy approach. This time, Adderall was marketed as the "not-Ritalin." On a much, much larger scale, doctors could tell parents that this was Adderall, not Ritalin, and everyone could heave a sigh of relief. At least it's not Ritalin!

As someone who knew how similar the two drugs were, I found the switcheroo ironic, almost amusing. But I considered another part of the Shire marketing campaign to be supremely disingenuous. Shire compared Adderall's length of action, which varied from about four to eight hours (depending on the individual), to Ritalin's, which was generally three to four hours. Length of action was quite important, because in the 1990s, there were no real long-acting (ten- to twelve-hour) stimulants as there are today (Concerta, Adderall XR, Vyvanse, Metadate CD, etc.).

Absent this feature, many children required multiple daily doses. In schools across the country, children lined up in potentially stigmatizing and embarrassing queues around lunchtime for their second dose of the day. A long-acting drug that covered at least the school day (six hours) would therefore have great appeal. So, in comparing Adderall's length of action to Ritalin's, Shire executed a masterpiece of marketing.

However, the company didn't mention the Dexedrine Spansule, a stimulant product made up of dextroamphetamine, the active isomer of amphetamine. (All molecules have right- and left-sided mirror images; in ADHD treatment, only the right-sided molecules are active in the brain.) This drug had been available for thirty years and consistently delivered about six to eight hours of more focused, steady behavior. It was also cheaper than Adderall.

Nevertheless, thanks to a relentless advertising campaign in professional journals, regular visits by Shire drug reps to doctors' offices, and a barrage of professional medical educational speakers on the benefits of this new preparation, Adderall quickly passed Ritalin as the most frequently prescribed brand-name stimulant drug in America. Generic methylphenidate (cheaper than Ritalin or Adderall) remained the overall most prescribed drug for ADHD.

Over the years, Shire has become associated with virtually every kind of stimulant and delivery system available. When long-acting Concerta came out, Shire quickly followed with Adderall XR. Another of Shire's drug-company acquisitions had developed Daytrana, a skin patch, which allowed methylphenidate to be absorbed transdermally instead of being swallowed, an obvious benefit for younger children who couldn't be depended upon to swallow pills intact. But Daytrana turned out to be problematic and never really sold well, in part because of persistent skin irritation at the site of the patch and the fact that children could remove the patch themselves if they wanted to.

Shire was much more successful with their 2007 purchase of New Rivers Pharmaceuticals, which developed a compound molecule called lisdexamfetamine, a drug initially created to make abuse more difficult. Shire named it Vyvanse. With Vyvanse, the amphetamine molecule is linked to the amino acid lysine, which renders the amphetamine inactive until digestive enzymes cleave the chemical bond and free it up. In other words, the pill has to be swallowed in order to be effective. The risk of abusing the drug is greatly diminished because, if crushed and snorted (the most common method), its amphetamine component doesn't work.

Yet Shire has never highlighted the anti-abuse aspect of Vyvanse; I suspect they are concerned they'd be criticized for having promoted and sold the most widely misused and abused of the stimulants, Adderall. Instead, they've heavily marketed Vyvanse as "the longest lasting" of the long-acting stimulants. In fact, Vyvanse may last all of an hour or two longer than Concerta or Metadate CD.