Eli Lilly, Zyprexa, and the Bush Family: the diseasing of our malaise

[Guest guest]

Eli Lilly, Zyprexa, and the Bush Family:

> the diseasing of our

> malaise

 

> Big Pharma

 

> By Bruce Levine

>

 

> http://zmagsite.zmag.org/May2004/levine0504.html

 

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>

> More than one journalist has uncovered corrupt

> connections between the Bush

> Family, psychiatry, and Eli Lilly & Company, the

> giant pharmaceutical

> corporation. While previous Lillygates have been

> more colorful, Lilly’s

> soaking state Medicaid programs with Zyprexa—its

> blockbuster, antipsychotic

> drug—may pack the greatest financial wallop.

> Worldwide in 2003, Zyprexa

> grossed $4.28 billion, accounting for slightly more

> than one-third of Lilly’

> s total sales. In the United States in 2003, Zyprexa

> grossed $2.63 billion,

> 70 percent of that attributable to government

> agencies, mostly Medicaid.

>

> Historically, the exposure of any single Lilly

> machination—though sometimes

> disrupting it—has not weakened the

> Bush-psychiatry-Lilly relationship. In

> the last decade, some of the more widely reported

> Eli Lilly intrigues

> include:

>

> a.. Influencing the Homeland Security Act to

> protect itself from lawsuits

> b.. Accessing confidential patient records for a

> Prozac sample mailing

> c.. Rigging the Wesbecker Prozac-violence trial

> A sample of those who have been on the Eli Lilly

> payroll includes:

>

> a.. Former President George Herbert Walker Bush

> (one-time member of the

> Eli Lilly board of directors)

> b.. Former CEO of Enron, Ken Lay (one-time member

> of the Eli Lilly board

> of directors)

> c.. George W. Bush’s former director of Management

> and Budget, Mitch

> Daniels (a former Eli Lilly vice president)

> d.. George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Advisory

> Council member, Sidney

> Taurel (current CEO of Eli Lilly)

> e.. The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (a

> recipient of Eli Lilly

> funding)

> In 2002, British and Japanese regulatory agencies

> warned that Zyprexa may be

> linked to diabetes, but even after the FDA issued a

> similar warning in 2003,

> Lilly’s Zyprexa train was not derailed, as Zyprexa

> posted a 16 percent gain

> over 2002. The growth of Zyprexa has become

> especially vital to Lilly

> because Prozac—Lilly’s best-known product, which

> once annually grossed over

> $2 billion—having lost its patent protection,

> continues its rapid decline,

> down to $645.1 million in 2003.

>

> At the same time regulatory agencies were warning of

> Zyprexa’s possible

> linkage to diabetes, Lilly’s second most lucrative

> product line was its

> diabetes treatment drugs (including Actos, Humulin,

> and Humalog), which

> collectively grossed $2.51 billion in 2003. Lilly’s

> profits on diabetes

> drugs and the possible linkage between diabetes and

> Zyprexa is not, however,

> the most recent Lillygate that Gardiner Harris broke

> about Zyprexa in the

> New York Times on December 18, 2003.

>

> Zyprexa costs approximately twice as much as similar

> drugs and Harris

> reported that state Medicaid programs—going in the

> red in part because of

> Zyprexa— are attempting to exclude it in favor of

> similar, less expensive

> drugs. Harris focused on the Kentucky Medicaid

> program, which had a $230

> million deficit in 2002, with Zyprexa being its

> single largest drug expense

> at $36 million. When Kentucky’s Medicaid program

> attempted to exclude it

> from its list of preferred medications, the National

> Alliance for the

> Mentally Ill (NAMI) fought back. The nonprofit

> NAMI—ostensibly a consumer

> organization—bused protesters to hearings, placed

> full-page ads in

> newspapers, and sent faxes to state officials. What

> NAMI did not say at the

> time was that the buses, ads, and faxes were paid

> for by Eli Lilly.

>

> Ken Silverstein, in Mother Jones in 1999, reported

> that NAMI took $11.7

> million from drug companies over a three and a half

> year period from 1996

> through 1999, with the largest donor being Eli

> Lilly, which provided $2.87

> million. Eli Lilly’s funding also included loaning

> NAMI a Lilly executive,

> who worked at NAMI headquarters, but whose salary

> was paid for by Lilly.

> Though NAMI’s linkage to Lilly is a scandal to

> psychiatric survivors—whose

> journal MindFreedom published copies of Big Pharma

> checks to NAMI—the story

> didn’t have the widespread shock value that would

> elevate it to Lillygate

> status.

>

> In 2002, Eli Lilly flexed its muscles at the highest

> level of the U.S.

> government in an audacious Lillygate. The event was

> the signing of the

> Homeland Security Act, praised by President George

> W. Bush as a “heroic

> action” that demonstrated “the resolve of this great

> nation to defend our

> freedom, our security and our way of life.” Soon

> after the Act was signed,

> New York Times columnist Bob Herbert discovered what

> had been slipped into

> the Act at the last minute and on November 25, 2002,

> he wrote, “Buried in

> this massive bill, snuck into it in the dark of

> night by persons unknown…was

> a provision that—incredibly—will protect Eli Lilly

> and a few other big

> pharmaceutical outfits from lawsuits by parents who

> believe their children

> were harmed by thimerosal.”

>

> Thimerosal is a preservative that contains mercury

> and is used by Eli Lilly

> and others in vaccines. In 1999 the American Academy

> of Pediatrics and the

> Public Health Service urged vaccine makers to stop

> using mercury-based

> preservatives. In 2001 the Institute of Medicine

> concluded that the link

> between autism and thimerosal was “biologically

> plausible.” By 2002, thim-

> erosal lawsuits against Eli Lilly were progressing

> through the courts. The

> punchline of this Lillygate is that, in June 2002,

> President George W. Bush

> had appointed Eli Lilly’s CEO, Sidney Taurel, to a

> seat on his Homeland

> Security Advisory Council. Ultimately, even some

> Republican senators became

> embarrassed by this Lillygate and, by early 2003,

> moderate Republicans and

> Democrats agreed to repeal this particular provision

> in the Homeland

> Security Act.

>

> In early 2003, “60 Minutes II” aired a segment on

> Lillygate and Prozac. With

> Prozac’s patent having run out, Eli Lilly began

> marketing a new drug, Prozac

> Weekly. Lilly sales representatives in Florida

> gained access to

> “confidential” patient information records and,

> unsolicited, mailed out free

> samples of Prozac Weekly. How did Eli Lilly get its

> hands on these medical

> records? Regulations proposed under Clinton and

> later implemented under Bush

> contained a provision that gave health-care

> providers the right to sell a

> person’s confidential medical information to

> marketing firms and drug

> companies. Despite many protests against this

> proposal, President Bush told

> Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson

> to allow the new rules to

> go into effect.

>

>

>

>

>

> Perhps the most cinematic of all Lillygates

> culminated in 1997. The story

> began in 1989 when Joseph Wesbecker—one month after

> he began taking

> Prozac—opened fire with his AK-47 at his former

> place of employment, killing

> 8 and wounding 12 before taking his own life.

> British journalist John

> Cornwell covered the Louisville, Kentucky trial for

> the London Sunday Times

> Magazine, ultimately writing a book about it.

> Cornwell’s The Power to Harm

> (1996) is not only about a disgruntled employee

> becoming violent after

> taking Prozac, but is also about Eli Lilly’s power

> to corrupt the judicial

> system.

>

>

> Victims of Joseph Wesbecker sued Eli Lilly, claiming

> that Prozac had pushed

> Wesbecker over the edge. The trial took place in

> 1994, but received scant

> attention as the public was transfixed by the O.J.

> Simpson spectacle. While

> Eli Lilly had been settling many Prozac violence

> cases behind closed doors

> (more than 150 Prozac lawsuits had been filed by the

> end of 1994), it was

> looking for a showcase trial that it could win.

> Although a 1991 FDA “blue

> ribbon panel” investigating the association between

> Prozac and violence had

> voted not to require Prozac to have a violence

> warning label, by 1994 word

> was getting around that five of the nine FDA panel

> doctors had ties to Big

> Pharma—two of them serving as lead investigators for

> Lilly-funded Prozac

> studies. Thus, with the FDA panel now known to be

> tainted, Lilly believed

> that Wesbecker’s history was such that Prozac would

> not be seen as the cause

> of his mayhem.

>

> A crucial component of the victims’ attorneys’

> strategy was for the jury to

> hear about Eli Lilly’s history of reckless

> disregard. Victims’ attorneys

> especially wanted the jury to hear about Lilly’s

> anti- inflamatory drug

> Oraflex, introduced in 1982 but taken off the market

> three months later. A

> U.S. Justice Department investigation linked Oraflex

> to the deaths of more

> than 100 patients and concluded that Lilly had

> misled the FDA. Lilly was

> charged with 25 counts related to mislabeling side

> effects and pled

> guilty—but in 1985, the Reagan-Bush Justice

> Department saw fit to fine them

> a mere $25,000.

>

> In the Wesbecker trial, Lilly attorneys argued that

> the Oraflex information

> would be prejudicial and Judge John Potter initially

> agreed that the jury

> shouldn’t hear it. However, when Lilly attorneys

> used witnesses to make a

> case for Eli Lilly’s superb system of collecting and

> analyzing side effects,

> Judge Potter said that Lilly had opened the door to

> evidence to the contrary

> and ruled that the Oraflex information would now be

> permitted. To Judge

> Potter’s amazement, victims’ attorneys never

> presented the Oraflex evidence

> and Eli Lilly won the case. Later, it was discovered

> that—in a manipulation

> Cornwell described as “unprecedented in any Western

> court”—Eli Lilly cut a

> secret deal with victims’ attorneys to pay them and

> their clients not to

> introduce the Oraflex evidence. However, Judge

> Potter smelled a rat and

> fought for an investigation. In 1997, Eli Lilly

> quietly agreed to the

> verdict being changed from a Lilly victory to

> “dismissed as settled.”

>

>

>

> Looking back further to 1992, Alexander Cockburn, in

> both the Nation and the

> New Statesman, was one of the first to connect the

> dots between the Bush

> family and Eli Lilly. After George Herbert Walker

> Bush left his CIA director

> post in 1977 and before becoming vice president

> under Ronald Reagan in 1980,

> he was on Eli Lilly’s board of directors. As vice

> president, Bush failed to

> disclose his Lilly stock and lobbied hard on behalf

> of Big Pharma—especially

> Eli Lilly. For example, Bush sought special tax

> breaks from the IRS for

> Lilly and other pharmaceutical corporations that

> were manufacturing in

> Puerto Rico.

>

> Cockburn also reported on Mitch Daniels, then a vice

> president at Eli Lilly,

> who in 1991 co-chaired a fundraiser that collected

> $600,000 for the

> Bush-Quayle campaign. This is the same Mitch Daniels

> who in 2001 became

> George W. Bush’s Director of Management and Budget.

> In June 2003, soon after

> Daniels departed from that job, he ran for governor

> of Indiana (home to Eli

> Lilly headquarters). In a piece in the Washington

> Post called “Delusional on

> the Deficit,” Senator Ernest Hollings wrote, “When

> Daniels left two weeks

> ago to run for governor of Indiana, he told the Post

> that the government is

> ‘fiscally in fine shape.’ Good grief! During his

> 29-month tenure, he turned

> a so-called $5.6 trillion, 10-year budget surplus

> into a $4 trillion

> deficit—a mere $10 trillion downswing in just two

> years. If this is good

> fiscal policy, thank heavens Daniels is gone.”

>

>

> There is one Eli Lilly piece of history so bizarre

> that if told to many

> psychiatrists, one just might get diagnosed as

> paranoid schizophrenic and

> medicated with Zyrprexa. Former State Department

> officer John Marks in The

> Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and

> Mind Control, The Secret

> History of the Behavioral Sciences (1979)—along with

> the Washington Post

> (1985) and the New York Times (1988)—reported an

> amazing story about the CIA

> and psychiatry. A lead player was psychiatrist D.

> Ewen Cameron, president of

> the American Psychiatric Association in 1953.

> Cameron was curious to

> discover more powerful ways to break down patient

> resistance. Using

> electroshock, LSD, and sensory deprivation, he was

> able to produce severe

> delirium. Patients often lost their sense of

> identity, forgetting their own

> names and even how to eat. The CIA, eager to learn

> more about Cameron’s

> brainwashing techniques, funded him under a project

> code-named MKULTRA.

> According to Marks, Cameron was part of a small army

> of the CIA’s

> LSD-experimenting psychiatrists. Where did the CIA

> get its LSD? Marks

> reports that the CIA had been previously supplied by

> the Swiss

> pharmaceutical corporation Sandoz, but was

> uncomfortable relying on a

> foreign company and so, in 1953, the CIA asked Eli

> Lilly to make them up a

> batch of LSD, which Lilly subsequently donated to

> the CIA.

>

>

>

> The most important story about Eli Lilly is that

> Lilly’s two current

> blockbuster psychiatric drugs—Zyprexa and

> Prozac—are, in scientific terms,

> of little value. It is also about how Lilly and the

> rest of Big Pharma have

> corrupted psychiatry, resulting in the increasing

> medicalization of

> unhappiness. This diseasing of our malaise has

> diverted us from examining

> the social sources for our unhappiness—and

> implementing societal solutions.

>

> Much of the scientific community now acknowledges

> that the advantage of

> Prozac and Prozac-like drugs over a sugar-pill

> placebo is slight—or as

> Prevention and Treatment in 2002 defined it,

> “clinically negligible.” When

> Prozac is compared to an active placebo (one with

> side effects), then Prozac

> is shown to have, in scientific terms, zero value.

> Moreover, many doctors

> and researchers now warn us about the dangers of

> Prozac. Psychiatrist Joseph

> Glenmullen’s Prozac Backlash (2000) documented

> “neurological disorders

> including disfiguring facial and whole body tics

> indicating potential brain

> damage...agitation, muscle spasms, and

> parkinsonism,” and he stated that

> debilitating withdrawal occurs in 50 percent of

> patients who abruptly come

> off Prozac and Prozac-like drugs.

>

>

> Just as Prozac and other SSRI drugs are no longer

> seen by many scientists as

> an improvement in safety and effectiveness over the

> previous class of

> antidepressants, psychiatry’s highly touted Zyprexa

> (and other “atypical

> antipsychotics”) turns out to be no great advance

> over the older problematic

> anti-ps ychotics such as Haldol. Journalist Robert

> Whitaker, in Mad in

> America (2002), details how Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa

> research was biased against

> the inexpensive Haldol and how claims of improved

> safety of Zyprexa are

> difficult to justify. Whitaker reports that in drug

> trials used by FDA

> reviewers, 22 percent of Zyprexa patients had

> “serious” adverse effects as

> compared to 18 percent of the Haldol patients.

>

> The United States and other nations that have bought

> psychiatry’s and Big

> Pharma’s explanations and treatments turn out to

> have worse results with

> those diagnosed as psychotic than those nations who

> are less enthusiastic

> about drugs and who care more about community. In

> 1992, the World Health

> Organization (WHO), in a repeat of earlier findings,

> found that so-called

> underdeveloped nations, which emphasize community

> support rather than

> medications, have better results with those

> diagnosed as psychotic than

> nations, which stress drug treatments. In nations

> such as the United States,

> where 61 percent of those diagnosed as psychotic

> were maintained on

> antipsychotic medications, only 37 percent had full

> remission. While in

> India, Nigeria, and Colombia, where only 16 percent

> of patients diagnosed as

> psychotic were maintained on antipsychotic

> medications, approximately 63

> percent of patients had full remission.

>

> While scientists are not certain about the reasons

> for these WHO findings,

> two possible explanations are: (1) psychiatric

> drugs, even for the most

> disturbed among us, are not the greatest long-term

> solution; (2) community

> support, crucial to our mental health, does not lend

> itself to

> commercialization. Thus, in areas such as mental

> health, radically

> commercialized societies such as the United States

> are backward societies.

>

> Though some mental health professionals insist that

> atypical antipsychotics

> such as Zyprexa are a great advance, I’ve met few

> Zyprexa users who agree. A

> few years ago, a well-read man with a professorial

> manner in his early 60s,

> diagnosed by several other doctors as paranoid

> schizophrenic, came to see

> me. He had, at various times, taken several types of

> antipsychotic drugs and

> told me, laughing loudly between each sentence, “I’m

> crazy on drugs and

> crazy off drugs. Haldol helped me sleep and Zyprexa

> helped me sleep, but I

> hated the Haldol and when I was on Zyprexa, I

> couldn’t take a shit for three

> weeks. Now I don’t take any drugs and I can’t sleep

> and I am a big

> pain-in-the ass, but I can remember better what I

> read.” A few weeks later

> he told me, “It’s all friendly fascism. Yes,

> friendly fascism. Was it you

> who told me—or was it I who told you—that fascism is

> about the complete

> integration of industry and government under a

> centralized authority?

> Friendly fascism, right? I suppose I say ‘friendly

> fascism’ too much, but

> you’re not Ashcroft and neither am I, right? Don’t

> you agree that it’s all

> friendly fascism?” Then he flashed a giant smile and

> said one more time,

> “Friendly fascism, right, Bruce?”

>

>

>

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> ----

> Bruce E. Levine, PhD, is a psychologist and author

> of Commonsense Rebellion:

> Taking Back Your Life from Drugs, Shrinks,

> Corporations and a World Gone

> Crazy (New York-London: Continuum, 2003).