Sen. Grassley Busts Yet Another Texas Psych Researcher

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has gone and done it again: poked into a major psych researcher's payouts from Big Pharma, compared it against other required disclosures, and found some underreporting going on. This time out the bustee is none other than University of Texas psych researcher John Rush, who recently blasted off to Singapore to become a muckety-muck at Duke's new medical school in he land of caning, and is one of the big shots in depression research. He was one of the principal investigators on the NIMH STAR-D study of depression treatment. Grassley's broad point in going after Rush and other researchers is that if they and their universities are going to take pharma money on the one hand and federal research dollars on the other, then they'd better be accurate in disclosing what they take from private industry or someone should lose some federal research dollars.

Rush's haul and subsequent underreporting isn't anything like what Grassley unearthed from the Harvard child psychiatrists, but it's cute that Rush was getting money from Lilly.

"While a psychiatrist at UT-Southwestern, Dr. Rush disclosed $3,000 in payments from Eli Lilly in 2001, a year the company reported paying him nearly $18,000, according to records obtained by Mr. Grassley. Two years later, Dr. Rush received a federal grant to run a clinical training program related to medical ethics.

"Between 2000 and 2007, Dr. Rush failed to report another $12,000 from various drug companies, the records show."

It's interesting that his Lilly money came in 2001, a year that Prozac went off patent and three years before Cymbalta, the company's next anti-depressant, went on the market. I wonder what drug Rush was pimping for.

Rush was also director of the infamous and riddled-with-corruption Texas Medication Algorithm Project. He recently left his post there.

Rush is the second UT psych researcher to get Grassley's attention in recent weeks. The other was Karen Wagner, who took $160,000 in consulting fees from GlaxoSmithKline, but only reported $600 to the university.