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Confessions of a Whistleblower

Insider Peter Rost blows the lid off the dirty-dealing pharmaceuticals industry.

FIVE YEARS AGO Dr. Peter Rost was at the top of his game. As a vicepresident of marketing at the world’s largest drug company, the fast-rising executive was pulling a six-figure salary. He and his family had a comfortable life. Unfortunately for him, Dr. Rost also had a conscience. While an executive at Pharmacia—which would soon be taken over by pharmagiant Pfizer—Dr. Rost filed a false claims suit, alleging that the company was defrauding Medicare by illegally marketing its profitable growth hormone as an anti-aging drug. Rost asserted that employees who didn’t play along were terminated and that distributors and doctors had received tens of thousands of dollars in kickbacks. When the case was unsealed in 2005, Rost was fired. Now embroiled in a suit against Pfizer for wrongful dismissal, Rost is speaking out. The M.D.’s new book, The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman, details the perils of going up against today’s powerful multinationals.

HUSTLER: Why did you decide to write a book?

DR. PETER ROST: I wanted to tell my story. When I lost my job, all my friends probably wondered what the heck happened. So writing the book was my way of telling everybody the full story. I became a whistleblower because I couldn’t just walk away. This was about winning. This was about proving who was right and who was wrong.

According to your book, most drug industry executives care more about profit than health. Why aren’t you one of them?

Usually, you don’t have to make the choices I had to make. As long as you’re middle management, you don’t see too much of the stuff that’s going on. But as soon as you enter the senior level, a lot of things cross your desk that make you go, “Wow!” At that point you have to decide: Do you want to stay ethical, or do you want to play the game? I figured if the misconduct is something you can go to jail over, that’s pretty black and white. I didn’t think anybody would have a problem with me trying to stop those things. I guess I was wrong. Listen, nobody wants to become a whistleblower. It’s like that song “Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” Don’t let them grow up to be whistleblowers, because there’s absolutely no benefit to it.

What would have happened to you if you hadn’t blown the whistle?

I was in charge of marketing for Pharmacia’s growth hormone Genotropin, which the company was marketing as an anti-aging drug. Nobody told me about that when I took the job. And when I found out, I realized if we got caught, it might not be just a fine; it could be jail time. Some drugs are considered so dangerous— growth hormones, for instance—that Congress has put into play special laws that make it a felony to distribute them for purposes that the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t approved. But companies don’t go to jail; people do. Nobody’s responsible for business practices already going on when you join the company. But once you discover unethical or illegal practices, you really have only three choices: You can quit, you can join the conspiracy, or you can take action. If you join the conspiracy, you are going to be liable. Since I didn’t want to quit or go to jail, I had to take action.

Why isn’t the FDA cracking down on these violations of their rules?

Basically, the FDA regards the drug companies as clients. It’s less and less a regulatory agency and more and more a partner with the drug companies. It’s just as hard to get a drug off the market as it is to get a drug on the market because it means the FDA has to admit they screwed up. Basically, nobody’s looking out for the American people. That’s because the American people aren’t the ones paying for the political apparatus—the corporations are.

What about whistleblower protection laws? Do they work?

It’s true we have all these wonderful laws. But once the company has broken those laws, once they have retaliated against you for blowing the whistle, you have to go to court and prove they did something wrong. That can take years. Justice delayed is justice denied. Pfizer fired me, so I sued them. But by the time the litigation is taken care of, years will have passed. In the meantime you have to support yourself and move on with your life. The hard part about the drug business is that it’s a rather small sector. There are only about ten or so major drug companies. Everybody knows everybody. It’s like the mob. You talk, you’re dead. You don’t work again.

What kind of retaliation did you experience at Pfizer?

When I worked at Pfizer, the first thing that happened was they moved away my employees one by one. I had a group of about 70 people, and they all disappeared. Eventually, it was just me and my secretary. At the very end we were the only ones left in an entire building that had housed maybe 500 people. Then guys with hard hats came in and tore down office walls around us, and we were left in the middle. Finally, they put me in a corner office, right next to corporate security.

Why weren’t you fired right away?

They were probably afraid of the fact that I had filed a false claim suit related to the illegal marketing practices. If they had fired me in the middle of my litigation, the government might have intervened. That could have cost them millions. But once the government decided they wouldn’t get involved, and we would have to run the case on our own—which happens in about 80% of the cases—I got fired.

What’s your advice to other whistleblowers?

Don’t do it. Nobody’s going to thank you. However, if you’re in a situation where you don’t have a choice, where you could be blamed, then you have to take action. Number one, make sure you’re not alone.Make sure you have other people who can corroborate your information, because then it becomes a much more solid case. Number two, save every piece of document you can get your hands on, and make sure you take it with you. Number three, get a really good lawyer. And number four, get a new job before the whole thing blows up.

You also used your position to argue for drug re-importation. Why is it good, and why isn’t it happening?

I realized that if I was ever going to have an impact, this might be the last chance I’d have. So I decided to talk about re-importation of lowerpriced drugs [from Canada and Europe]. This has been done safely in the rest of the world, yet here we claim we can’t do it, which is ridiculous. We know that drugs save millions of lives. We also know that people who can’t afford drugs use them much less. In the U.S. we pay twice as much for healthcare per person, and we pay almost twice as much for drugs.

Diabetes Care magazine recently quoted a study on older adults with diabetes. Twentyeight percent reported forgoing food or other essentials to pay for insulin. And according to the University of Michigan Health System, “nearly half of patients who have a prescription for any of the cholesterol-fighting drugs called statins fail to fill their prescription often enough or stop filling it altogether, and they stopped more often the more they had to pay.” These drugs don’t work if you don’t take them all the time. Re-importation is obviously a step in the right direction. Corporate lobbyists are blocking it because they want to protect their employers’ huge profits.  But for capitalism to work, you need to have free competition. If you close down the borders to foreign cars, for example, American cars are going to be a lot more expensive and probably not the same quality. We have healthy competition in most sectors—except the drug business. People are not allowed to legally import drugs from other countries. So the drug companies have a monopoly on importing drugs.

What should the situation be?

If we had a market where re-importation was legal, a wholesaler would be able to buy the drug directly from Pfizer in New York, or they would be able to import the same package from Pfizer U.K. or a wholesaler in the U.K. or Canada, for example, and sell it to the local pharmacy, where you would be able to buy it for half the price you’re paying now. Let me also point out that half of the largest pharmaceutical companies are foreign corporations (Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Roche, Sanofi-aventis). They take out big ads in American newspapers and tell us that re-importation is not safe when they know full well that it’s been done safely and cost-effectively in their own home markets for 20 years. Most of the drugs are made in Europe, after all. And it’s been proven that importing drugs in tamper-proof ways is as safe or safer than shipping within the U.S. Why should we allow foreigners to close the U.S. market and gouge American taxpayers?

Is there a way to get around the re-importation ban?

If you go to any pharmacy in Canada, you’re going to get safe drugs, but most people can’t actually travel to Canadian pharmacies, so they have to go to the Internet. That’s a Wild West situation. You have no idea where the drugs are from, if they’re counterfeit or something else. So that can make the situation worse if you’re not careful. The best site to use if you want to buy Canadian or European drugs safely is PharmacyChecker.com. They track safety and prices. Another good one is the site of the Canadian International Pharmacy Association: Ciparx.ca. There you can verify if a pharmacy is a member and adheres to certain standards.

You end your book on a pretty strong note, proclaiming that real change “will require a second American revolution.”

Five years ago, if I could’ve heard myself today, I wouldn’t have believed it. But quite frankly, once you start working in the system and you see how things operate, you realize the whole thing is pretty much just a show. They make people feel like they have a choice and that they can have an impact, but the truth is, most decisions are already made. For the corporations and the politicians in their pockets, it’s a question of manipulating the people to follow the decision that’s been made. That’s why Americans have to get out the vote, and they have to do their homework. Find out who supports drug re-importation. In Congress, you have both Republicans and Democrats in favor of it, and you have people in both parties against it. Support the ones who are looking out for the interests of the American people.

Photo Credit: Juliana Thomas & Rebecca D'Angelo

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