The Case for Giving Eli Lilly the Corporate Death Penalty

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet. Posted March 3, 2009.

How then did a drug-company protection provision get inserted in the Homeland Security Act? Here's my bet for one of Herbert's "persons unknown." In June 2002, then President George W. Bush had appointed Lilly's CEO, Sidney Taurel, to a seat on his Homeland Security Advisory Council. Ultimately even some Republican senators became embarrassed by the drug-company protection provision, and by early 2003, moderate Republicans and Democrats agreed to repeal that particular provision from the Act.

The year 2002 was a banner one for "Lillygates," with "60 Minutes II" ultimately airing another juicy Lilly scandal. Lilly's patent for Prozac had run out, and the drug company began marketing a new drug, Prozac Weekly. Lilly sales representatives in Florida gained access to patient information records, and, unsolicited, mailed out free samples of Prozac Weekly. Though they primarily targeted patients diagnosed with depression who were receiving competitor antidepressants, at least one such Prozac Weekly sample was mailed to a sixteen-year-old boy with no history of depression or antidepressant use. Law suits followed.

The most cinematic of all Lilly scandals began in 1989 and culminated in1997. One month after Joseph Wesbecker began taking Lilly's antidepressant Prozac, he opened fire with his AK-47 at his former place of employment in Louisville, Kentucky, killing eight people and wounding twelve before taking his own life. British journalist John Cornwell covered the trial for the London Sunday Times Magazine and ultimately wrote a book about it. Cornwell's The Power to Harm is not simply about a disgruntled employee becoming violent after taking Prozac; the book is about Lilly's power to corrupt a judicial system.

Victims of Joseph Wesbecker sued Lilly, claiming that Prozac had pushed Wesbecker over the edge. The trial took place in 1994 but received little attention as America was obsessed at the time by the O.J. Simpson spectacle. While Lilly had been quietly settling many Prozac violence suits, the drug company was looking for a showcase trial that it could actually 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 drug companies -- two of them serving as lead investigators for Lilly-funded Prozac studies. Thus with the FDA panel now known to be tainted, Lilly wanted a Prozac trial it could win, and it 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 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 one hundred patients, and concluded that Lilly had misled the FDA. Lilly was charged with 25 counts related to mislabeling side effects and plead guilty.

In the Wesbecker trial, Lilly attorneys argued that 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 Lilly's superb system of collecting and analyzing side effects, Judge Potter said that Lilly itself had opened the door to evidence to the contrary, and he ruled that 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 why victims' attorneys remained silent about Oraflex. In a manipulation Cornwell described as "unprecedented in any Western court," 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, and in 1997 Lilly quietly agreed to the verdict being changed from a Lilly victory to "dismissed as settled."

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Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and author of Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007).His Web site is www.brucelevine.net

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