From the article, "Grassley and Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., are pushing a bill that would require companies to disclose all payments to physicians over $100."

This would be a good start but wouldn't go nearly far enough. The public also needs to know how much money pharmaceutical companies give to advocacy groups like NAMI and how much this affects these groups' pro-labelling, pro-drugging stance.

From an 8/18 article in the Health section of the New York Times, Senator Grassley is also putting pressure on the NIH over ghostwriting. I hope something comes of that.

The news that GlaxoSmithKline promoted the use of Paxil in children and adults through the ghostwriting of allegedly positive studies about Paxil has been reported before -- first in my book,
Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial. The CASPPER program was part of that campaign to deceive doctors and consumers about the safety and effectiveness of Paxil and was unearthed by both Baum Hedlund (in the discovery process of several lawsuits) and by the New York Attorney General's office, which filed suit against Glaxo for consumer fraud in deceiving doctors and patients about the antidepressant. The NYAG's suit was settled in 2004 with Glaxo agreeing to post the results of all its clinical trials on a publicly available website, not just its ostensibly positive findings. All of this is detailed in Side Effects, which was published last year. For more info on the book and original documents pertaining to Glaxo's misleading promotion of Paxil, go to www.alison-bass.com.

This doesn't surprise me in the slightest ..
If you research GSK , you will find a very dark history...
It disturbs me that this company sells , markets and distributes a huge margin of the worlds drug supplies..
I wouldn't trust any of their products..
What they did with Seroxat/Paxil is sinister..

http://bipolarsoupkitchen-stephany.blogspot.com/2009/08/1500-ghostwriting-documents-available.html

from the PLoS website:

"If you are an editor, author, reviewer, or reader of medical journals, or if you depend on your doctor or health care provider getting unbiased information from medical journals, then the 1,500 documents now hosted on the PLoS Medicine Web site should make you very concerned and angry [1].

Because, quite simply, the story told in these documents amounts to one of the most compelling expositions ever seen of the systematic manipulation and abuse of scholarly publishing by the pharmaceutical industry and its commercial partners in their attempt to influence the health care decisions of physicians and the general public.""