Center for Medicine in the Public Interest Fronting for the Drug Industry

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