Counterpuch--The Pills Your Mother Gives You...Death, Depression and Prozac

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Mon, 11 Apr 2005 03:31:49 -0400

 

 

[sSRI-Research] The Pills Your Mother Gives You...Death,

Depression and Prozac

 

 

 

Counterpuch--The Pills Your Mother Gives You...Death, Depression and

Prozac

 

Sat, 02 Apr 2005

 

http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/05/04/02.php

 

Alexander Cockburn, co-editor of Counterpunch, the bi-weekly

muckraking newsletter that prides itself: " We have all the right

enemies " takes a swipe at Prozac, Eli Lilly and its battalion of heavy

hitters who have successfully shielded Prozac from the impact of its

severe adverse effects--such as suicidal / homicidal violent

outbursts, most recently in Minnesota.

 

Cockburn suspects: " The minute the high command at Eli Lilly,

manufacturer of Prozac, saw those news stories about [Jeff] Weise you

can bet they went into crisis mode, and only began to relax when

Weise's websurfs of neo-Nazi sites took over the headlines. Hitler

trumps Prozac every time, particularly if it's an Injun teen ranting

about racial purity. How many times, amid the carnage of such

homicidal sprees, do investigators find a prescription for

antidepressants at the murder scene? Luvox at Columbine, Prozac at

Louisville, Kentucky, where Joseph Wesbecker killed nine, including

himself. You'll find many such stories in the past fifteen years. "

 

" Each burst in the sewage pipe brings a new challenge to Lilly's sales

force, which has had some heavy hitters down the years, including

George Herbert Walker Bush (onetime member of the Lilly board of

directors); former Enron CEO Ken Lay (onetime member of the board);

George W. Bush's former director of the Office of Management and

Budget, Mitch Daniels (a former senior vice president); George W.

Bush's Homeland Security Advisory Council member Sidney Taurel (a

Lilly CEO); or the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (a recipient

of Lilly funding). "

 

But in India, he notes, the marketing of depression as a problem that

can be resolved by a drug, is met with ridicule: " In 2000, when

hundreds of farmers in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh were

committing suicide because of neoliberal policies that had destroyed

their livelihoods, the state government announced it was sending out a

team of shrinks to determine why the farmers were depressed. The

implication was that these people were mentally unstable. But in India

credulity about the causes of depression is not so far advanced. The

plan provoked a storm of ridicule, and in the elections that followed

the Andhra Pradesh government, darling of Western neoliberals, was

duly trounced.

 

Where is America's healthy skepticism?

Why are liberals more inclined to be believers in chemical solutions

to human problems??

 

Contact: Vera Hassner Sharav

212-595-8974

 

 

Weekend Edition COUNTERPUNCH

April 2 / 3, 2005

But the Pills Your Mother Gives You...

Death, Depression and Prozac

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

New Dehli, India.

 

Jeff Weise, teen slayer of ten, including himself, at the Red Lake

Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, was on Prozac, prescribed by

some doc. How did the consultation go? " Here Jeff, take these, they

may help you get over life's little problems, like the fact that when

you were 8 your dad committed suicide and when you were 10 your cousin

was killed in a car wreck that left your mom with partial paralysis

and an injured brain. And let's face it, Jeff, most likely you'll

never get off the res. You're here for the rest of your life. " Cut to

a shot of the doc holding up a Prozac bottle, like the kindly fellow

in the white coat and mirrored headband in 1950s Lucky Strike ads,

telling us that Luckies were a fine way to soothe a raspy throat.

 

The minute the high command at Eli Lilly, manufacturer of Prozac, saw

those news stories about Weise you can bet they went into crisis mode,

and only began to relax when Weise's websurfs of neo-Nazi sites took

over the headlines. Hitler trumps Prozac every time, particularly if

it's an Injun teen ranting about racial purity. How many times, amid

the carnage of such homicidal sprees, do investigators find a

prescription for antidepressants at the murder scene? Luvox at

Columbine, Prozac at Louisville, Kentucky, where Joseph Wesbecker

killed nine, including himself. You'll find many such stories in the

past fifteen years.

 

By now the Lilly defense formula is pretty standardized:self-righteous

handouts about the company's costly research and rigorous screening,

crowned by the imprimatur of that watchdog for the public interest,

the FDA. And of course there's the bogus comfort of numbers; if

Lilly's pill factory had a big sign like MacDonald's, it could boast

Prozac: Billions Served.

 

Each burst in the sewage pipe brings a new challenge to Lilly's sales

force, which has had some heavy hitters down the years, including

George Herbert Walker Bush (onetime member of the Lilly board of

directors); former Enron CEO Ken Lay (onetime member of the board);

George W. Bush's former director of the Office of Management and

Budget, Mitch Daniels (a former senior vice president); George W.

Bush's Homeland Security Advisory Council member Sidney Taurel (a

Lilly CEO); or the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (a recipient

of Lilly funding).

 

At the turn of this year there was a five-alarm incident when the

British Medical Journal went back to the 1994 Wesbecker suit against

Lilly, reminding the world that the company had been involved in some

shifty footwork involving a back-door payoff to the plaintiffs in a

deal that successfully excluded from Judge John Potter's courtroom the

regulatory case history of Oraflex, a highly compromised Lilly

product, which displayed the company's supposed disclosures to the FDA

in an unpleasing light.

 

Lilly rose to the challenge, successfully persuading gullible

journalists that the real story concerned a lonely freelancer writing

for BMJ and not a powerful pharmaceutical company with a huge

advertising budget. The press dutifully shifted its focus from Lilly's

outrageous efforts to suppress evidence to the narrow question of

whether a piece of evidence had really been in the public record in

the years since 1997, when Judge Potter changed his verdict to

" dismissed as settled with prejudice, " very far from the victory Lilly

had been claiming.

 

That's the trouble with time, as Paul Krassner joked about

Waldheimer's Disease, which is when you get old and forget you were a

Nazi. But it's never too late to review the origins of the Depression

Industry in the late 1980s, and the saga of what happened after three

Lilly researchers concocted a potion in the mid-1970s they christened

fluoxetine hydrochloride, later known to the world as Prozac.

 

Long years of rigorous testing? When Fred Gardner and I investigated

the selling of depression and Prozac in the mid-1990s, we found that

clinical trials excluded suicidal patients, children and the elderly

although once FDA approval was granted, the drug could be prescribed

for anyone. According to Dr. Peter Breggin, the well-known

psychiatrist who analyzed the FDA's approval of Prozac, it was based,

ultimately, on three studies indicating that fluoxetine relieved some

symptoms of depression more effectively than a placebo, and in the

face of nine studies indicating no positive effect. Only sixty- three

patients were on fluoxetine (fluoexetine hydrochloride was branded as

Prozac in the mid 70s) for a period of more than two years. By 1988

the National Institute of Mental Health had not only put the

government stamp of approval on corporate-funded depression research

but had created a mechanism whereby government money and personnel

could be employed to stimulate demand for corporate products.

 

Psychiatrists--a breed whose adepts, so stated a study published in

the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 1980, commit suicide at twice

the national rate--have been central to the entire enterprise. The

process linking their sorcery to the corporate bottom line has a

robust simplicity to it. As Prozac came off Lilly's research bench and

headed for the mass production line psychiatrists labored to formulate

a multitude of bogus pathologies to be installed in the Diagnostic and

Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, whose chief editor in the

1980s was Robert Spitzer MD, an orgone box veteran and adept

copywriter skilled at minting new ailments for late twentieth-century

America and sanctioning treatment, medication, state funding for the

requisite pills (no expensive consultative therapy) and reimbursement

by insurance companies.

 

When detailed research showed likely linkage of Prozac to violent

acts, Lilly-liveried psychiatrists were there to douse the flames of

doubt. In 1991 the FDA's Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee

met to decide whether Prozac should carry a warning label about links

to suicide. Five out of the ten panel members (eight of whom were

shrinks) had active financial interests in the drugs the committee was

investigating, and all voted against requiring a warning, their

obvious conflicts duly sanitized by the toothless FDA. Other shrinks

in the hire of the drug companies urged ever wider application of

Prozac to remedy social angst, including plans for compulsory

Prozac-dosing of youngsters.

 

In 2000, when hundreds of farmers in the Indian state of Andhra

Pradesh were committing suicide because of neoliberal policies that

had destroyed their livelihoods, the state government announced it was

sending out a team of shrinks to determine why the farmers were

depressed. The implication was that these people were mentally

unstable. But in India credulity about the causes of depression is not

so far advanced. The plan provoked a storm of ridicule, and in the

elections that followed the Andhra Pradesh government, darling of

Western neoliberals, was duly trounced.

 

No such happy chance in the United States, where government is in the

pay of drug companies and prescriptions for antidepressants have long

since taken over from political manifestos that would cure depression

by collective social action. How they must have cheered at Eli Lilly

when the Senate wiped out Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy statutes,

fostering family violence, heightened crime and a vast new potential

market for Prozac and kindred potions at the stroke of a pen.

 

(A shorter version of this column originally ran in the issue of The

Nation that went to press on Wednesday of this week.)

 

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