The 10 Weirdest Drug Stories of the Month

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April 2009 has come and gone, and once again it is time for BNET’s roundup of the top 10 weirdest drug stories of the month. Enjoy!

Bayer has a flock of sheep mow its lawn
About 1450 sheep grazed Bayer’s Richmond, Calif., campus last nonth, eating 115,000 pounds of grass and weeds. It’s a green thing.
Peter Rost to become a TV show?
Call it “Law & Order: Off-Label Marketing.” Pfizer whistleblower Peter Rost alleges a Hollywood film director wants to turn his book into a TV series. I’ll tune in if Rost’s wife (pictured) gets to play herself.
Last century, docs gave tall girls hormones to keep them small
File under “Disgusting things the pharma business should have known was immoral at the time.”
Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler is less influential than Britney Spears
Kindler comes last — 203rd place — on Time’s 100 Most Influential List. Spears came 30th. (Why does the Time 100 have 203 people? God only knows.
Scientist accidently sticks herself with Ebola-filled needle, enrolls in vaccine test
Like being run over by an ambulance — if you’re going to cut yourself on lab equipment the best you can hope for is that you’re working on a cure for the disease you just infected yourself with.
The New York Times checks out the breasts of local drug sales reps
In an article on public health “detailers” being hired from the ranks of pharma companies, the Times wrote: “While the city, unlike the pharmaceutical industry, has not made a practice of hiring former cheerleaders as detailers, most of the detailers at a recent staff meeting were, as it turned out, attractive, vivacious women, often wearing low-cut necklines.”
This month’s least sexy FDA drug approval: head lice
Sciele Pharma gets the nod for a new nit treatment. File under “Not everyone can be working on a cure for AIDS or cancer.”
Allergan has strict parking policy — they’ll boot your car
Be careful where you dump your ride at the Botox maker. One blogger vents at wheel lock rules (pictured).
CNBC reads your laptop at 30,000 feet
Mike Huckman shared a seat with a drug executive who didn’t recognize who he was sitting next to. He got a five-hour deep dive into the guy’s PowerPoint presentation.
Schering-Plough has a 5-year-old secret deal with Centocor
The SEC has extended a “grant of confidential treatment” to an exhibit filed alongside Schering’s 2004 annual report. The secrecy pact lasts until 2017. The original filing indicates only that it is a “Distribution agreement between the Company and Centocor, Inc., dated April 3, 1998.”

Jim Edwards, a former managing editor of Adweek, has covered drug marketing at Brandweek for four years, and is a former Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia University's business and journalism schools. Follow him on Twitter or send him an email.