Behavioral Drugs Push Price Index Up

Apparently, the perfect economy is causing high anxiety in some quarters.

A manic surge in the price of drugs used to combat obsessive-compulsive behavior and depression caused the government’s main gauge of producer prices to rise 0.2% in May, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The increase in the producer price index was greater than economists expected, but markets shrugged off the spurt as an anomaly because it was so influenced by one group of products. Without the increase in drug prices, the PPI would have been unchanged from April.

Pharmaceutical industry analysts could not explain why a special group of psychotherapeutic drugs rose nearly 600% in price from April to May.

The Labor Department does not identify individual products counted in its monthly reports. But Mylan Laboratories Inc. of Pittsburgh said that it had substantially raised prices on some of its generic equivalents to the brand-name drugs Ativan and Tranxene, the Associated Press reported. These drugs are mild mood-altering medicines similar to the popular Valium in their effects on the central nervous system.

The only other areas in which prices spiked were energy and tobacco. Prices for cars fell, reflecting the automobile industry’s widespread use of rebates, as did prices for food, especially vegetables.

The rise in energy prices was driven mostly by a 4.3% increase in gasoline in May, compared with the month before. But when compared with gas prices in May of last year, the per-gallon cost of gas was down by more than a dime, to a nationwide average of about $1.09 for unleaded, according to industry data.

A separate report by the Commerce Department released Friday showed manufacturing inventories rose by 0.2% in April, suggesting that slumping exports to Asia could be creating a backup of goods in the U.S. That could prompt businesses to trim production in the months to come.