With new concerns about gabapentin safety and Pfizer’s renewed political influence, the Neurontin scandal is back in focus.
Twenty years after two physicians died by suicide while taking the drug, their stories still expose how corporate marketing and selective science can shape medical reality.
Doctors as Victims
Dr. Doug Alsberge and Dr. Douglas Briggs devoted their lives to medicine.
Both trusted the drugs they prescribed.
Both took Pfizer’s Neurontin for back pain.
And both ended their lives while on the medication.
Doug Alsberge, an occupational medicine specialist near Seattle, was known for his calm manner and love of music and sailing. When back pain worsened, his doctor prescribed a narcotic and Neurontin, promoted at the time as an effective pain reliever.
Neurontin was only approved for epilepsy, but Pfizer’s marketing campaign had doctors using it for everything from anxiety to migraines.
Soon, Doug became restless, sleepless, and agitated. His wife, Debbie, thought his bipolar disorder had resurfaced. But this time, treatment failed.
Doug grew erratic, unable to work or focus. He stopped eating, trembled constantly, and fell into despair.
“We didn’t know his extreme internal restlessness was akathisia, which is linked to suicide in medical journals, or that it was from Neurontin,” said Debbie.
On Palm Sunday in 2003, Doug drove away from home and ended his life. He was 52.
Months later, Debbie read an article connecting Neurontin to suicide. She matched his dosage increases to the changes she’d seen.
“I just stood there in the parking lot outside the pharmacy holding the documents in stunned disbelief,” she said.
Another Life Lost
Across the country, Dr. Douglas Briggs, a family physician near Charlotte, North Carolina, faced a similar path.
A Princeton graduate, father, and community volunteer, he loved medicine and coached soccer in his spare time.
After back surgery, Briggs was prescribed Neurontin for pain. His wife, Robin, a former nurse, soon noticed drastic changes.
“After a few months on Neurontin, his bedside manner became curt,” she said. “He stopped reading his journals and just lay on the couch. He became a different person.”
Dr. Briggs even questioned the Pfizer representative who promoted Neurontin, pressing for evidence it was safe. Still, he stayed on the drug.
“He didn’t know his suicidal thoughts were drug-induced and not his own,” Robin later said.
On Christmas Day 2004, after opening presents with his family, he encouraged his wife and sons to see a movie.
When they returned, they found he had taken his own life. He had been on Neurontin for ten months. He was 54.
Weeks later, a patient arrived distraught at the Briggs home, demanding to know what antidepressant her doctor had been taking. That moment pushed Robin to finally read the Neurontin label for the first time — and begin asking her own questions.
A Profitable Crime
Neurontin was a blockbuster.
Pfizer made hundreds of millions from it — despite admitting to criminal marketing.
In 2004, the company pled guilty to promoting Neurontin for unapproved uses. In 2010, it lost another major case. Yet in 2008 alone, Pfizer earned $387 million from the drug.
How?
Through a calculated campaign of ghostwritten medical papers, paid speaker programs, and misleading clinical data.
Parke-Davis, the drug’s original maker and later a Pfizer subsidiary, even published a special “supplement” to the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine — printed 43,000 times and handed out by sales reps.
It cited studies showing benefits for pain and mood disorders that were never verified by the FDA.
Dr. Scott Reuben of Baystate Medical Center, once celebrated for his pain research, turned out to be a fraud. He never conducted the studies he published — yet his fabricated findings praised Neurontin and other Pfizer drugs.
Reuben was sentenced to six months in prison in 2010.
The U.S. Cochrane Group later retracted some of the false Neurontin studies, but by then, the damage was done.
Thousands of doctors had already prescribed the drug off-label to millions of patients.
Regulators Look Away
When suicide reports began piling up, the FDA took years to act.
After hundreds of deaths, the agency finally added a warning to all epilepsy drugs in 2008.
But Dr. Robert Temple, then associate director at the FDA, downplayed the link.
“These are the sorts of people who are complicated to think about because they tend to be at risk already,” he told the Boston Globe.
He referred to Neurontin’s off-label users without mentioning that none of those uses were approved.
His comment seemed to blame the patients, not the drug.
The “Son of Neurontin”
Despite criminal penalties and ongoing lawsuits, Pfizer didn’t stop.
It launched Lyrica, a chemical cousin of Neurontin, and promoted it just as aggressively — for fibromyalgia, nerve pain, and mood disorders.
Pfizer did so even while under a federal Corporate Integrity Agreement, a formal pledge to obey marketing laws.
It broke that agreement twice and earned a third one in 2009 for similar misconduct.
As journalist Martha Rosenberg notes, “Does anyone think CIAs are a deterrent?”
Image Makeover During COVID
Two decades after the Neurontin scandal, Pfizer found redemption through the COVID-19 vaccine.
Once branded a corporate villain, it became a symbol of scientific salvation.
Politicians praised CEO Albert Bourla.
Media stories shifted from drug fraud to global health leadership.
But Pfizer’s past tells a darker story.
In a single week in 2010, the company faced at least seven major crises:
Pediatric Geodon trials halted after overdosing concerns
A congressional investigation into Rapamune off-label marketing
The leukemia drug Mylotarg withdrawn after fatal results
Researcher Scott Reuben sent to prison
Osteoarthritis drug tanezumab trials suspended for worsening joint damage
A Blue Cross lawsuit seeking repayment for overbilled drugs
A Supreme Court rejection of Pfizer’s appeal in Nigerian child-death trials linked to the antibiotic Trovan.
Pfizer was already under a five-year integrity agreement at the time — and still managed to violate it.
The company also acquired Warner-Lambert, under criminal investigation for Neurontin, and later Wyeth, carrying lawsuits over its hormone drug Prempro and the Fen-Phen heart scandal.
The Cost of Forgetting
In the years since COVID, much of the public has forgotten Pfizer’s history.
The company now benefits from political favor and public trust, even as new lawsuits over gabapentin and Lyrica continue.
Meanwhile, families like the Alsberges and Briggs live with the consequences of a system that rewards profit over truth.
“We must have the full and accurate facts about a drug’s risks to make good decisions,” said Debbie Alsberge. “We cannot do that if pharmaceutical companies are allowed to taint trials and bury harmful evidence.”
Pfizer may now be seen as a partner in public health, but for those who remember the Neurontin scandal, its reputation tells a different story — one of hidden data, repeated misconduct, and lives destroyed in the pursuit of profit.
Keyword Summary (for search snippet)
Pfizer’s Neurontin scandal resurfaces as gabapentin risks return to headlines, reminding patients of corporate deception and the human cost of profit.
For more information about Pfizer’s dark history, read Son of Neurontin Meets the Fibromyalgia Epidemic.
This news story was inspired by current events and Martha’s book, Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Lies, featured on C-SPAN and praised by Library Journal, Public Library of Science, the Times Literary Supplement and Vice. You may wish to connect with Martha at her substack.
