Remember being fifteen, and swearing if your acne didn’t go away, you’d kill yourself? Well up until recently, there was a way to do both at once! Alas, pharma giant Hoffman-La Roche, Inc. announced it will not longer be selling Accutane, the nuclear option of acne medications. The drug itself, isotretinoin, will still be available in a generic formulation, but it’s not the same.
For one, things were just getting fun; a quick Google search for “Accutane” and “lawsuit” reveals a cottage industry of mesothelioma-esque proportions. According to Lawyers.com, “[i]f you have suffered a Accutane®-related injury, or if you are a close family member of someone who died as a result of taking Accutane®, you may be able to file an Accutane® lawsuit.” Yeah, the stuff was that toxic; in addition, it may be linked to depression (not only ironic in general, but extra funny considering the fact that an alternate formulation sells under the brand name Amnesteem, no kidding). But most fun are the birth defects.
The risk of birth defects is so severe that the FDA has, since 2006, made women being prescribed isotretinoin participate in iPledge. iPledge is essentially a cross-my-heart-hope-to-die-no-wait contract stating that the participant will use at least two kinds of birth control (classified primary and secondary by the FDA in what could in other contexts might serve as the I9 ID list for a bar bathroom liaison), and requiring various kinds of checking in by the dermatologist, pharmacist, and the woman’s endometrium itself (“ALL CLEAR!!”). Of course, this turns out to be problematic for a number of reasons, not the least being that it constantly refers back to the outcry over the Bush-era CDC’s “pre-pregnant” guidelines, which stated essentially that any woman who can have a baby just might at any moment, because women are capricious and their ovaries are just sending eggs flying down the tubes like a paintball gun of babies.
Of course, iPledge undoubtedly benefitted Hoffman-La Roche as well. The registry allowed the company to throw up its hands and saying, “Hey not our fault, you iPledged. Or uPledged. Or something,” when confronted by the enraged mom of a flipper baby. But damn if that flipper baby wouldn’t have perfect pores. Alabaster, even.
Photo by �Cаvin �
C.A.B. Fredericks
C.A.B. Fredericks has worked at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, and the Cardiovascular Research Foundation, among other places; he’s currently Online Editor for Brooklyn’s Slice magazine (the one that’s about literature ...
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More on these topics:
Accutane, acne treatment, flipper babies, iPledge, isotretinoin, recall, spay and neuter your sex partners
acne free says:
It's ridiculous how making money many times prevents companies from caring about the severity of side effects caused by their drugs that they say will help.
slacker says:
accutane was originally developed as a chemotherapy drug. It's a retinoid, meaning that it's derived from vitamin A. Vitamin A is actually toxic. The adverse affects of accutane are actually symptoms of vitamin a toxicity. Usually this is seen in individuals who have taken too high of a dose, or been on the drug for too long. Some individuals have adverse reactions from the onset of treatment, but this is extremely rare. Regarding the birth defects, it has been known that isotretinoin (accutane) has teratogenic properties pretty much ever since it was first developed. Unlike the correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, this has never been kept a secret by the manufacturers. Believe me, I'm the last one to defend big pharma, but all of the blame for the "flipper" babies and other adverse reactions can be laid at the feet of doctors for over prescribing the drug and not warning their patients about the problems, or patients just simply not heeding their doctors advice. Accutane was originally reserved for extreme cases of cystic acne vulgaris, but in the last two decades doctors began casually subscribing it for even mild cases of acne. And pending lawsuits should never be a yard stick for how safe a drug is. Class action lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies is a cottage industry in and of itself. there's a lawsuit against Bayer re:Aspirin on the books right now.