Center for Medicine in the Public Interest Fronting for the Drug Industry [1]
Submitted by Anne Landman [2] on
The pharmaceutical industry [3]-funded front group [4] Center for Medicine in the Public Interest [5] (CMPI) is helping its corporate funders fight health care reform by disseminating misinformation and orchestrating campaigns to generate fear [6] about health care reform. CMPI arose out of the Pacific Research Institute [7], a corporate front group that worked [8] with Philip Morris [9] in the past to fabricate academic support for the tobacco industry [10]. CMPI has been sponsoring anti-Obama Tea Party [11] protests, producing attack ads against health care reform and creating Web sites that feature "horror stories" [12] about citizens in countries that offer universal health care. CMPI is headed by Peter Pitts [13], the head of global health care for the international corporate public relations firm Porter Novelli [14], which specializes in helping drug companies evade FDA marketing restrictions by using stealth marketing techniques [15], like creating fake, unbranded "public service ads" [16] nominally to raise awareness of diseases, but that really drive people to drug-company funded Web sites [17] that advertise drugs.