DRUGSOn March 10, 2012, lawyers for Ian,^2 a sixty-six-year-old
resident of Melbourne, Australia, filed a statement of claim
in federal court. He was suing the drug manufacturer Pfizer,
claiming that their Parkinson’s medication, Cabaser, made
him lose everything he had.
He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2003.
His doctor prescribed Cabaser, and in 2004 Ian’s dose
was doubled. That’s when the problems began. He started
gambling heavily on video poker machines. He was retired,
and received a modest pension of about $850 per month.
Each month he fed the entire sum into the machines, but it
wasn’t enough. To pay for his compulsion, he sold his car
for $829, pawned much of what he owned for $6,135, and
borrowed $3,500 from friends and family. Next, he took out
loans for over $50,000 from four financial institutions, and on
July 7, 2006, he sold his home.
In all, this man of modest means gambled away over
$100,000. He was finally able to stop in 2010, when he read
an article about the link between Parkinson’s medication and
gambling. He stopped taking Cabaser, and the problem went
away.Why do some people who take Parkinson’s medication engage in
destructive behavior, but most do not? It’s possible they were born with
a genetic vulnerability. People who gambled frequently in the past are
more likely than others to experience out-of-control gambling after
they start Parkinson’s medication, suggesting there are certain person-
ality features that put people at risk.
Another risk of Parkinson’s medication is hypersexuality. A Mayo
Clinic case series—the tracking of patients with a certain type of illness
or treatment—described a fifty-seven-year-old man treated with L-dopa
who “would have sexual intercourse twice daily and, when possible, even
2 To protect privacy, we have disguised or created composites of individuals and
their cases throughout the book.