[drugawareness] Eli Lilly, Zyprexa, & the Bush Family

[Guest guest]

atracyphd2

Wed, 23 Jun 2004 15:52:40 EDT

[drugawareness] Eli Lilly, Zyprexa, & the Bush Family

 

For those of you that were not on our e-group when all of the information on

NAMI receiving drug money came out in Mother Jones several years ago, here it

is again along with all of the connections I discuss in my book on the Bushes,

Eli Lilly and the CIA.

 

And do not miss the information on how much Zyprexa brought in last year and

how much of that was tax money paying for it - 70%!!!!! Do you see why I keep

saying the drug companies could care less if the antidepressants get banned at

this point? They have made the majority of their profit with so many of the

patents running out and know that an abrupt withdrawal from the

antidepressants can cause withdrawal mania, so why not drop everyone and make

more money on

these far more expensive antipsychotics?

 

Ann Blake Tracy, Ph.D.

Executive Director, International Coalition For Drug Awareness

Author: Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? - Our Serotonin Nightmare

& audio tape on safe withdrawal: " Help! I Can't Get

Off My Antidepressant! "

 

Order Number: 800-280-0730

Website: www.drugawareness.org

 

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The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill [NAMI] (a recipient of Eli Lilly f

unding) Â 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.Â

 

http://www..zmag.org/ZMagSite/May2004/levine0504.html

 

 

 

 

 

By Bruce Levine

 

 

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. Â

 

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:Â

 

 

Influencing the Homeland Security Act to protect itself from lawsuitsÂ

 

Accessing confidential patient records for a Prozac sample mailingÂ

 

Rigging the Wesbecker Prozac-violence trial A sample of those who have been

on the Eli Lilly payroll includes:Â

 

 

Former President George Herbert Walker Bush (one-time member of the Eli Lilly

board of directors)Â

 

Former CEO of Enron, Ken Lay (one-time member of the Eli Lilly board of

directors)Â

 

George W. Bush’s former director of Management and Budget, Mitch Daniels (a

former Eli Lilly vice president)

Â

George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Advisory Council member, Sidney Taurel

(current CEO of Eli Lilly)Â

 

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.Â

 

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.Â

 

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.Â

 

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.â€Â

 

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.Â

 

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

“confidentialâ€

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.Â

 

 

 

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.Â

 

 

 

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 panelâ€

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.Â

 

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.Â

 

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 courtâ€â€”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.â€Â

 

 

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.Â

 

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 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,â€

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.â€Â

 

 

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 Candidateâ€: 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.Â

 

 

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.Â

 

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.Â

 

 

 

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

antipsychoticsâ€) 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.Â

 

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.Â

 

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.Â

 

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?â€

 

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).Â