Lilly said:
"...Lilly is committed to the highest ethical standards and to promoting our medications only for approved uses..."

This is the company which, as I never tire in pointing out, supplied LSD to the CIA for use on unwitting participants (ie, members of the American public, amongst others), in the latter's mind control program. I strongly suspect that the culture that permitted that transgression of the "highest ethical standards" is still in place, today, (no doubt propped up by the Company's close relationship with the Shrubs), and I don't think Lilly should even begin to pretend to seek "the highest ethical standards," in the circumstances. Not unless the bar, objectively set, for the "highest ethical standards" is set by Lilly itself, and is, therefore, set very low.

I look forward to Eli lecturing us further on "the highest ethical standards": there's real comedic value in the experience. Once I've done vomiting, that is.

Matt

Sounds like Lilly is making the typical biopsych excuse for 'treatments' that harm people: mental illness is much worse than whatever problems the 'treatments' cause that 'patients' are just going to have to buck up and be grateful we live in an age when companies like Lilly have invented such wondrous medicines.

Certainly, I wouldn't minimize the tremendous suffering that gets labeled 'mental illness', and wouldn't presume to judge whatever choices people make to deal with their problems. But I don't buy the biopsych dogma that, for instance, because 'depression' can ruin people's lives and is the proximate cause of a lot of suicide deaths, therefore it's somehow irresponsible to point out that ECT can cause life-ruining brain damage and kill people too.

Lilly's retort, 'The tone and content of the release is a disservice to patients who may currently be taking Zyprexa to treat a life-threatening disease,' (i.e. providing more information about the drug and how it's pushed is somehow bad for the people who take it) sounds to me like a toned-down version of calling critics MURDERERS for potentially deterring people from biopsych 'treatments' by pointing out the likelihood of damaging effects. I don't dispute that running around all psychotic carries a high risk of leading a person to injury or death, but tardive diskinesia, akathesia, neuroleptic malignant syndrome, hyperthermia, diabetes, and the metabolic syndrome also constitute a high risk of injury or death. Hiding or down-playing these risks seems especially baleful when many of the people who are prescribed neuroleptics could potentially control their 'symptoms' with much less dangerous means.

I understand that in medicine, many treatments have serious 'side effects' and this often forces patients to make extremely difficult choices in weighing the potential benefits versus potential risks. For someone with a terminal disease, it may make sense to try treatment that could carry a high risk of causing death. But apparently Lilly doesn't really want zyprexa users to be making informed decisions about the drug based on weighing the benefits against the risks; they just want people to buy the product. Their press release paraphrases the litany of harmful effects, in keeping with the claim from the FAQ section of zyprexadotcom: 'At Lilly, we believe our most important job is to protect patient safety, which means being completely up-front about potential side effects' only now that they're being sued for trying to hide them.

In biopsych dogma, the actual danger of the 'severe mental illnesses' is exaggerated, the risks of the biological 'treatments' are downplayed, and of corse the 'patients' are assumed to be basically incapable of making decisions about their own well-being. In this way, the scales are tipped far towards treatments that, for many people, cause more problems than they solve. Not only does this harm people directly, but getting away with selling billions of dollars worth of products that function so poorly greatly reduces the capitalist incentive to come up with something that works better, or at least harms less.

Wow. Note how Lilly did not really respond to any of the factual allegations in their press release. Instead, they offered the usual set of talking points about "life-threatening disease" and "lifesaving medication." This post, Mr. Dawdy, is right on the money. Nicely done, sir.

Lilly fired back in the same manner, with phone number and all, during the early 1990's when they thought Prozac was in danger from reports of violence and suicide.

They discontinued the phone service after about 6 months, though. I heard rumors that they were so inundated with calls that they quit because they couldn't keep up with the phone messages.

Of course, people don't care really about the meds that schizophrenics take. There is somewhat more interest in the bipolar part, though, because everybody and their brother has now been diagnosed with bipolar. Even the characters in novels are bipolar these days.

If this trial was in regard to Prozac, there might be a little more interest than there was in 1995 during the Wesbecker Prozac civil trial. People don't like the idea of getting shot at when they shop at the malls, attend college or go to work.

Who's it been a boon too Philip? Who is putting up a hand saying it has been a boon to anyone? And can it be proven to have been a specific chemical cure for a specific chemical disease? No. So the only people claiming it is a boon to them, are indoctrinated unfortunates, misled to have faith in the power of suggestion, that this drug has helped them.

Last unmedicated first episode psychosis allowed to simply go to sleep in a solitary cell after commitment? No one in fifty years, the 'disease' must be cured with the chemical straight jacket.

And that new press release from them, which I thank you for providing here...all I can say about that, is that it makes me want to go and read some stories on the make a wish foundation website, because I need to see some HUMANITY, and not just the most evil, fortified, hubristic, lawyer armed, utter pure greed and arrogance and evil, that I can handle for one day seeing lilly's crap there.

I need to go look at a sunset or some dying kids or something to just life back in perspective, because right now its very easy to wish harm on these evil men and women.

bill: i have actually interviewed a few patients who felt zyprexa saved them. that's what they told me. so i am just trying to be fair to the notion that the drug has worked for some people. that's it.

My daughter used to write letters to Make a Wish Foundation all of the time, while she was without friends in junior high and high school, a cast off in the social scene due to 100 lb weight gain on Zyprexa, being called the beast, and having to leave school due to EPS of her eyes rolling up in her head and staying there. 6 years on Zyprexa in my opinion, damaged her brain, and the over the top re addition of it by a psych ward at a whopping 40mg per day was the final blow. I am biased, because I lived with side effects that drug gave to my daughter and her withdrawals were AWFUL.

I wish someone would give her a Make-A-Wish because she deserves it after what she's been through.

I would like Lilly to send her to Disneyland and not have it a PR promo, have it be a fucking public apology, then give her a trust fund for care for the rest of her life.

I called Lilly and a Lilly injury lawyer and they wouldn't acknowledge the weight gain, or any reports of medication induced aggression, or withdrawal psychosis. There is a very small fine print in the packaging insert that says Zyprexa causes a "Schizophrenic reaction".

I am personally frustrated that the entire focus has remained on diabetes; because there is so much more to using that drug that can happen with negative consequence.

So, as a parent, I look back nearly a decade of shit gone down while my daughter was on ZYprexa and there's nothing I can do about it, but take the hit and hope my daughter has a life, but she will never have her teen years back, and she sure remembers being called a beast in junior high, and walking down the stairs with the nurse in front of everyone with her eyes rolled up.

Some people died from Zyprexa use, and what about those who haven't but had souls removed? she's only 20!

The Zyprexa documents speak for themselves. They show evil at work at the expense of innocent people. All of this is my opinion.

I also must say it is very upsetting to read Lilly's self-defense, and this seriously causes me so much grief it's hard to read, to the point that it causes sobbing. I could write a very detailed book regarding Zyprexa use and my daughter, what happened on each dosage, and how each hour of withdrawal torture went. But it is so hard to think about, that this is what I want people to know. It's heart wrenching, seeing a child suffer on a drug not approved for use in children and then to read Zyprexa docs. Ethics and oaths, who ever seemed to care.

Lilly's obsequious PR makes me feel violent. Violent. This emotion will not bring my son back but it makes me continue to work on a criminal trial for his death and the death of over a thousand others. My friends who also lost their sons don't read this column and perhaps I should wean myself off as well, as it and all the other stories that pour in are very hard to take.

sorrowful--i've never been so upset reading the zyprexa chronicles as i was yesterday with the 2003 email post. this is real life to so many people and to see it come alive from behind the scenes from VP's and future CEO's is a smack in the face to us that is undeserved, and horrific.i've never had news affect me this way before, and it was quite devastating to know evil, just basic evil in the form of industry revenue was at the hand of my child.

you know personally reading this defense stuff from lilly was as if someone knocked on my door and laughed in my face, for a decade.

i cannot imagine what my daughter would feel if she read the Lilly defense crap.

UnderTheThresher, you said:
"I understand that in medicine, many treatments have serious 'side effects' and this often forces patients to make extremely difficult choices in weighing the potential benefits versus potential risks."
Wouldn't it be nice if the docs would TELL us about these side effects so we actually COULD make an informed decision. The next time I hear the words "dry mouth" I'm going to smack someone.

By the way, how did you come up with your handle? Do you mean thresher, as in the farm equipment or Thresher as in the submarine that went down off the coast of Portsmouth, NH many years ago? Just curious.
Sherry

Sherry, I totally agree: anyone warning about dry-mouth had better be trying to offer me a bong hit.

Actually, my in above post I meant to contrast the situation 'in medicine' with the situation in psychiatry, which is not really medicine: it's drug-dealing and social suppression that generally falls short of its own hype about using a 'medical model.' (E.g. using drugs that don't work to control conditions that aren't diseases in violation of the rights of people to refuse.) If people really could make a free and informed decision about using zyprexa (or nearly any other psych drug), Lilly would probably go bankrupt.

Props for remembering the USS Thresher, which sank with the loss of all aboard.

But my 'nom de guerre' is a reference to the huge machines that roll seemingly inexorably across landscape, over everything thing in their paths, and with brutal modern efficiency beat the wheat and force it through a series of screens to separate the grain from the chaff. It seems to me that the function of psychiatry has a lot to do with creating and enforcing the dichotomy between society's winners and losers, and I tend towards the view that history is the story of the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors.

Also, check out the animated movie "The Secret of NIMH" (yes, that NIMH, but it's about animated rodents) sometime when you're feeling like there's not enough irony in your diet. And, coming soon (or at least eventually), underthethresher.com.