The Case for Giving Eli Lilly the Corporate Death Penalty

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

In addition to targeting the misbehaving elderly, Lilly also targeted annoying kids. New York Times reporters Gardiner Harris and Alex Berenson, who have been covering Eli Lilly and Zyprexa for several years, reported on January 14, 2009, "The company also pressed doctors to treat disruptive children with Zyprexa, court documents show, even though the medicine's tendency to cause severe weight gain and metabolic disorders is particularly pronounced in children ... The children receiving Zyprexa gained so much weight during the study that a safety monitoring panel ordered that they be taken off the drug."

Mainstream reporters were so appalled by Lilly's recent actions that some voiced caustic commentaries about the relatively small price Lilly paid for its transgressions. CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson (January 15, 2009) noted, "Eli Lilly has pled guilty to marketing the sometimes dangerous drug Zyprexa in ways never proven safe or effective ... Lilly has agreed to pay $1.4 billion, including the largest criminal fine ever imposed on a corporation. Ironically, that's about as much as the company's Zyprexa sales in the first quarter last year." However, the mainstream media failed to provide the context of Lilly's horrendous history which goes back decades.

The New York Times 2009 article did at least go back as far as 2006, reminding readers of the Times exclusive on another Zyprexa scandal. In December 2006, a whistle blower handed over to the Times hundreds of internal Lilly documents and e-mail messages among top company managers that showed how Lilly had downplayed Zyprexa's association with weight gain and metabolic disorders such as diabetes.

A Rolling Stone piece earlier this year ("Marketing Lilly's Zyprexa, a Phony ‘Miracle' Drug") details how Lilly minimized Zyprexa's relationship with dramatic weight gain. In 1995, prior to FDA approval of Zypexa , Lilly's own panel of experts concluded that Zyprexa produced an average weight gain of 24 pounds in a single year (one in six patients gained more than 66 pounds); that kind of weight gain can elevate blood-sugar levels and cause diabetes. This data, however, was not submitted by Lilly to the FDA.

Lilly-Zyprexa scandals didn't just start in 2006. A 2003 Lilly-Zyprexa scandal involved Medicaid and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), ostensibly a consumer organization. That year, Zyprexa grossed $2.63 billion in the United States, 70 percent of that attributable to government agencies, mostly Medicaid. Zyprexa cost approximately twice as much as similar drugs, and state Medicaid programs, going in the red in part because of Zyprexa, were attempting to exclude it in favor of similar, less expensive drugs. When Kentucky's Medicaid program attempted to exclude Zyprexa -- its single largest drug expense -- from its list of preferred medications, NAMI 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 Lilly.

The Lilly-NAMI financial connection had already been exposed by Ken Silverstein in Mother Jones in 1999. Silverstein 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 Lilly, which provided $2.87 million. Lilly's funding also included loaning NAMI a Lilly executive, who worked at NAMI headquarters but whose salary was paid for by Lilly.

Beyond Zyprexa, in 2002 fingers were pointed at Lilly for tampering with the Homeland Security Act. On November 25, 2002, soon after George W. Bush signed the Act, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert discovered what had been slipped into it at the last minute, "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."

While it was recently revealed that research published in 1998 that linked vaccine use to autism was fraudulent, in 2002 the harmfulness of thimerosal (a preservative that contains mercury and used by Lilly and other drug companies in vaccines) was not clear. Specifically, in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Public Health Service had urged vaccine makers to stop using thimerosal, and in 2001 the Institute of Medicine concluded that the link between autism and thimerosal was "biologically plausible." So in 2002, drug companies such as Lilly which had used thimerosal in vaccines were nervous about what scientists and the courts would ultimately determine.

See more stories tagged with: eli lilly, pharmaceutical companies, prozac, zyprexa, thimerosal

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

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »