Former FDA Chief Charged with Lying About Stocks

Copyright © 2006 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

The former head of the Food and Drug Administration is scheduled to appear today in court. Lester Crawford will be responding to charges from the Justice Department. The charges say he deliberately lied about owning stocks and stock options in companies regulated by the FDA while he headed that agency.

NPR's Joanne Silberner has more.

JOANNE SILBERNER: In order to move from acting FDA commissioner to the permanent seat in 2005, Lester Crawford worked hard to fight off questions about the agency's failure to act on the morning-after pill and accusations of financial improprieties, among other things. When he finally became commissioner he sounded like he was looking forward to the job.

Dr. LESTER CRAWFORD (Former Commissioner, Food and Drug Administration): So you never have very much fun unless you tackle something very big, or if you never fail unless you tackle something very big too.

SILBERNER: Crawford resigned just two and half months after winning the position. He said only that it was time to step aside. But those financial questions came back to haunt him. The Department of Justice is accusing him of stock improprieties. For example, that he claimed he had sold his shares in food company, Cisco, when he had not. And that he owned shares in PepsiCo while considering regulatory changes to reduce the popularity in high fat foods like soft drinks and Fritos.

His lawyer, Barbara Van Gelder, has worked out a deal with the Department of Justice. And today…

Ms. BARBARA VAN GELDER (Attorney): Dr. Crawford will go to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where he will plead guilty to two misdemeanors relating to errors and omissions that he found when he was reviewing his public disclosure forms after he retired from the FDA.

SILBERNER: Van Gelder says Crawford takes responsibility for signing financial disclosures that contained errors, but he never intended to gain financially from owning stocks of companies he regulated.

Ms. VAN GELDER: As in many families and in marriages, not everybody looks at their statements every month, and many of these stocks were held by his wife.

SILBERNER: But critics say the head of the FDA should have been more careful. Michael Jacobson is executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Mr. MICHAEL JACOBSON (Executive Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest): Owning stock in food and drug companies when you're commissioner and deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration is shocking. You know, this is high school ethics. You don't own stocks in companies that you regulate.

SILBERNER: Jacobson doesn't know for sure if owning stocks in food companies influenced Crawford.

Mr. JACOBSON: Well, he did virtually nothing about obesity. And I mean one doesn't know if that's because he owned stock in PepsiCo or if he's part of an administration that doesn't want to regulate anything.

SILBERNER: Jerry Avorn of Harvard Medical School is also not sure of any direct profiteering. Avorn is the author of Powerful Medicine, a book critical of the FDA. Avorn says if the agency head isn't forthright, how sensitive can other FDA decision-makers be to conflicts of interest?

Dr. JERRY AVORN (Author, Powerful Medicine): This is the same agency in which people have raised questions about why it seemed to be so cavalier that people who were getting very large consulting fees for drug companies could sit on advisory committees deciding about the fate of those companies' products.

SILBERNER: Crawford's attorney, Barbara Van Gelder, says her client won't dispute the charges. She's expecting that the judge will set a fine and decide on a sentence of zero to six months on each misdemeanor charge.

Joanne Silberner, NPR News, Washington.

Copyright © 2006 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.