Johnson & Johnson to Pay $1 Billion to Settle Risperdal Marketing Probe

Johnson & Johnson will pay more than $1 billion in civil and criminal penalties to the federal government and individual states to settle an investigation into the marketing practices of its anti-psychotic drug Risperdal, Bloomberg News Service reported Thursday. The figure would be in line with what Eli Lilly & Co. paid three years ago to settle claims that it marketed a similar anti-psychotic drug, Zyprexa, for illnesses that weren’t approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “These pharmaceutical companies are going to be running, not walking, to the settlement table,” Patrick Burns, spokesman for Taxpayers Against Fraud, a Washington, D.C., consumer group, told New Jersey Press Media. “The numbers are going up very rapidly.”