Law & Order: The Pfizer Episode! "Doped" Sketches the Kopchinski-Bextra Settlement
Chung-chung! NBC on Friday night aired an episode of Law & Order that appears to have been inspired in part by Pfizer’s $2.3 billion Bextra settlement. I’m not the only one who noticed the “ripped from the headlines” quality of “Doped,” the eighth episode of season 20. CafePharma is already buzzing about it.
In the show, a pharmaceutical sales rep is driving a minivan full of kids when she veers out of control and drives 20 blocks in the wrong direction through Manhattan. She kills herself and most of the kids in a head-on collision. Thus far, the storyline borrows from the infamous real-life Taconic Parkway crash.
Spoiler alert: the drug rep and her boss were working on a whistleblower case against their company, maker of a cancer drug that doesn’t really work. The boss dopes the rep’s coffee with booze and propofol, rendering her incapable behind the wheel.
The motive? The pair were to share “$50 million” in whistleblowing fees from the case, but the good-hearted rep wanted to give it all away to cancer research, angering her greedier boss-conspirator. By amazing coincidence, Pfizer whistleblower John Kopchinski won $52 million for bringing the Bextra case to the government’s attention.
The characters in the show engaged in an extended dialog about drug company whistleblowers and the power of Big Pharma’s donations to politicians. Not all viewers liked it. At TV.com:
sandman_jill: I am getting sick and tired of Dick Wolf spewing his liberal bias crap into the show. This was the most blatant atrocity on this show, where Jack McCoy states thta pharmaceutical companies are “the reason we can’t get a healthcare reform bill passed”. Pure and unadulterated BS.
Sandman_Jill has a point, given Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler’s backing of the Obama bill and the $80 billion deal he helped cut to get the bill through.
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.
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