The Zyprexa Chronicles: Off-Label Fun With CL Psych

During my flurry of work on Zyprexa this week, I have neglected to point readers to the excellent work CL Psych has done the last few days on Zyprexa and Eli Lilly's possible off-label marketing of the drug for use in dementia. Did I say "possible?"

You read this and decide whether Lilly's claim that "Martha," like "Donna" another hypothetical patient, is actually a schizophrenic holds any water. (Hint: It doesn't. It's not even a good lie.)

In addition, he has two other great posts up on Lilly firing up the sales machine to go after the PCP market circa-2001 and how Lilly wanted to reshape how docs treat mood and feeling. I wonder what Lilly's mood is these days and how they are feeling.

I am far from done reporting on these documents. In fact, I will be speaking about them soon, very publicly. More on that later. (Note to faithful Eli Lilly readers: could you get your people to, like, actually return my requests for comment?)

In the meantime, does anyone have any thoughts as to why so many of the hypothetical patients Lilly uses in its PCP campaign are women? There's Martha with dementia. Then, there's Donna, Ashley, Andrea and Cindy all with mild non-psychotic bipolar disorder (aka, BP2). The only man who shows up in the docs I have looked at is "Mark," who is mildly manic.

So is what Lilly trying to say in these documents that Zyprexa is really mother's little helper? Don't laugh. In the 1960s and 1970s, women presenting to a PCP--or GP, as they used to be called--with similar agitation, racing thoughts and mild depression would be put on a benzodiazepine or somethign similar. But doctors determined that those were addictive and out of most doctors' war chests they came. Then came the SSRIs in the 1990s--and they didn't work so swell either. (And, yes, there are serious chemical dependency issues attached to them, along with akathesia, and so on.) And, then the Big Pharma companies want to replace all that joy with an antipsychotic. AstraZeneca has been pushing just as hard on this front with Seroquel as has Lilly with Zyprexa.

I simply cannot wait to see what revelations come out of the Seroquel trial in federal court in Florida. Or the documents.