Dumping Depo at Home

Mother Jones

 

For most people who recognize its name, the drug Depo-Provera conjures up images of women in far-off villages, lining up outside their huts for quarterly birth-control shots.  The drug’s side effects are so nasty that the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t approved it for contraceptive use in the United States, so the Upjohn Corporation markets it aggressively to women in some 80 foreign countries (See MJ, November 1981 and May 1982).

 

But doctors are quietly taking advantage of a legal gray area to dump the drug on women here as well.  Depo-Provera is FDA-approved for use in treating renal and kidney cancer, so that leaves doctors technically free to prescribe it for any reason at all including contraception.

 

Sybil Shainwald, the immediate past president of the National Women’s Health Network (NWHN), estimates that 20,000 American women are now using Depo-Provera to avoid pregnancy, to alleviate premenstrual syndrome, or to treat the uterine disorder endometriosis.  The drug not only causes cancer in lab animals but has also been linked, according to the 1985 Physician’s Desk Reference, to hair loss, weight gain, menstrual irregularity, decreased sex drive, and depression.

 

Shainwald says many Depo-Provera users in this country are poor, minority, or mentally incapacitated; and she claims that none of the women on the NWHN registry were told of the drug’s dicey side effects.  Stan Nelson, executive director of the Hope school in Springfield, Illinois, acknowledges that Depo-Provera is used “all over” by mental institutions that are anxious to regulate the menstrual cycles of patients.

 

Upjohn has asked FDA Commission Frank Young, a Reagan appointee, to overrule the FDA Board of Inquiry and approve Depo-Provera for contraceptive use.  Upjohn spokeswoman Elizabeth Clark says approval would “make [Depo-Provera] safer” by allowing the pharmaceutical giant to provide information about its use.

 

But since Depo-Provera is already being used as a contraceptive, Upjohn’s interest in FDA approval may be more a legal safeguard than anything else.  The drug’s victims are filing malpractice suites against private physicians who have been prescribing the drug as a contraceptive, and against Upjohn for distributing it to family planning clinics.  Shainwald says the suites are already hard to win because “you can’t catch the doctor if you get cancer in 1990.”  They could be that much harder to win if the drug is approved for contraception by the FDA.