The remarks came in a Prempro trial under way in Nevada, in which three women are suing the drugmaker because they claim the hormone replacement therapy caused their breast cancer. And so former sales rep Brett Hendricks, who worked for Wyeth in Las Vegas from 1981 to 2002, says he was trained to minimize cancer risks to boost business.

“That’s how we were trained,” Hendricks said, according to The Reno Gazette-Journal. “To offset any bad publicity, we would redirect and emphasize the benefits of the product and say the benefits far outweighed any problems that might be out there.”

Over the years, he said, when reports came out suggesting there was an increased risk of breast cancer for women using Premarine or the follow-up Prempro pill, the drugmaker would call emergency meetings to teach sales reps how to respond to doctors’ concerns. Salesmen were directed to tell docs that most studies didn’t show an increase of breast cancer, Hendricks said.

But Wyeth lawyers sought to discredit Hendricks by pointing out that he was fired in 2002 for showing photographs to some docs of a woman in a bathing suit with stickers of a certain medication on her body. And he later worked as a consultant for the plaintiffs’ lawyers - at $100 an hour.

Hendricks said he had been named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by the Reno law firm White, Meany and Wetherall, and reached an agreement with the lawyers to be dropped from the suit in exchange for providing info about how sales reps worked. Hendricks calculated that he’d been paid about $7,500 by the law firm since the agreement was reached.