DrugWonks.com Gets Slammed

Evelyn Pringle has a piece out today slamming and otherwise ripping apart former FDA official Peter Pitts and Robert Goldberg who author the drugwonks.com blog, a pro-pharma site if there ever was one. In fact, Pringle has dug up so much on these guys that she's written about them in two parts, here and here.

For the uninitiated, the site is one that always rises to the defense of, for example, anti-depressants and makes wild claims such as that a decrease in anti-depressant use in America has driven up the suicide rate, when the evidence is that anti-depressant use has increased despite black box warnings on the drugs and despite the fact that there's pretty solid evidence in the clinical literature that suicide rates and anti-depressant use are statistically independent phenomena, at least on a culture-wide level.

I'm not sure why Pitts and Goldberg are worthy of so much time and space as their influence on the Net is small and their traffic isn't particularly robust (I highly doubt claims Pitts has made on the site about the number of readers it has), but it's always fun to watch some pharma whores get smacked around. One concern I do have is that in neither piece is it clear to me that Pringle contacted either Pitts or Goldberg to ask them to answer questions. Journalistically, that's lame. Even pharma whores should be allowed to explain themselves.