Here’s the story from AP.
What kind of moron could come up with this scheme? How could it possibly have happened? It seems so wildly harebrained that I wonder if the recipient concocted it to have someone to sue.
Anybody find anything more on this? Any other recipients turn up?
Dang and all I got in the mail this week was free chewing gum samples. 
IIRC, Lily doesn’t have the best track record w/r to patient privacy. Weren’t they the one who accidently sent out a supposedly confidential Prozac newsletter to people via e-mail except that they inadvertantly revealed everyone’s email addy by mistake?
All I know is people in Florida are getting free samples and I’m probably going to have to mortgage my cat for the stuff.
In a related story, there’s been a sudden drop in instances of mail workers going postal.
Anyone know how I can get my mom on that mailing list? :eek:
My dad worked for an insurance company that insured one of the largest advertising firms in the country. One of their “brilliant” campaigns was for a razor blade company. They included sample blades in the Sunday newspaper. You guessed it…a toddler got to the sample and slashed itself to ribbons. Un-fucking-believable.
Noone’s ever sent me free drugs through the mail sob I feel so left out . . .
Why A Duck, if you were semi-serious about the “mortgage the cat” thing, FWIW, the patent on Prozac ran out this year, and you can get the generic drug, fluoxetine, at much lower prices. A number of other SSRIs unfortunately are still under patent (such as, much to my chagrin, venlafaxine).
According to an article in this morning’s paper (origin: the New York Times, the woman’s doctor “admitted signing blank letterhead, to which the Lilly representative added text and delivered to the drugstore for mailing.”
Can you say “malpractice suit?” I knew you could.
(I can just imagine what would have happened if a detail man had asked my father for his signature on blank letterhead. He would have needed a doctor!)
This article from the S. FL Sun-Sentinel has an older date (7/2) than the AP articlw, but has some more interesting info.
The hospital where this physician’s group works says the physicians did it and were “well intentioned”. Wallgreens says they actually wrote out a prescription for it before sending it out. That’s possibly a crime in itself, because pharmacists can’t write prescriptions, only fill them.
In a similiar case, where a patient was sent info, but not a sample, of new HIV drugs ny Eckerd Corp., “Eckerd denies that the company’s so-called “communications programs” violate patients’ privacy rights because only pharmacists see confidential patient information.”
I happen to know that’s bullshit. I work in a hospital and we’ve been trained in rules of patient confidentiality. Even a doctor has no right to look at a patient’s medical information unless the doctor has a medical need to do so, ie, that doctor is involved in that patient’s care.