The Fake Pharmacy of Prescription Dog Food

Would you pay $80 for 17 pounds of this?

An Olathe, Kansas woman is suing over prescription pet food that her lawyer calls a ‘fake pharmacy’. It seems that for five years, Ms. Stevie Kucharski-Berger fed her dog, Theo, a potato and duck dog food prescribed by her vet who made a profit on each sale.

Now Ms. Kucharski-Berger is suing Topeka-based Hill’s Pet Nutrition Inc. over what her lawyer calls a “fake pharmacy” approach to overcharging consumers for ordinary goods.

Good luck to her! Seriously, I hope she wins. That said, it's hard to get a class action lawsuit certified, and the "remedy" offered in too many cases is millions of dollars for the lawyers and coupons for those who join the class. Anyone here think "success" in this case should be getting coupons for Science Diet?

To be clear, no prescription was ever needed for this food contains no drug or ingredient that requires FDA approval. What the Science Diet stuff does come with is a big price increase, which is partly used to pay a kickback to the prescribing vet or  to incentivize stores to carry the goods.

The Kansas case names other prescription dog food manufacturers and retailers and veterinary services that operate in Kansas, including Royal Canin, Iams, and the Banfield Pet Hospital chain which are all owned by Mars, as well as PetSmart, its Chewy.com online retailer, and St. Louis-based Purina.

Some years back, in a post entitled Payola, Pushers and Profits in the Vet Business I questioned how consumers could not see the obvious conflicts of interest when it came to prescription dog food:

The obvious ethical conflicts that exist between veterinary hopitals, vets, drug companies and veterinary trade associations are considered "business as usual" in the world of dog and cat care.

If a human doctor over-vaccinated and over-prescribed meds and services like most vets do, lawyers would be camping in their waiting rooms to serve them legal papers.

If your own doctor said you were over-weight, and he was going to prescribe you food he sold in the lobby, and a Pfizer drug he also happened to sell directly from his desk, you would run screaming into the parking lot. Quack!

But in veterinary care this kind of nonsense is normal, and legal actions are rare because most state consumer laws that govern veterinary care are weak, most lawyers are expensive, recoveries for even a dead pet are likely to be only a few hundred dollars, and state veterinary boards are packed with veterinarians who rarely find for consumers.

This is the way it goes in the world of veterinary care.

Everything is done with a wink and a nod, and most of it is facilitated at the highest levels by the AVMA and AAHA who see nothing wrong with putting payola and paid endorsement at the center of their own business model.