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Court Allows Eli Lilly To Bury Zyprexa Documents
By Evelyn Pringle (about the author) Page 2 of 4 page(s)
In a December 17, 2006, letter to the court in the New York case, Mr Gottstein stated: "In large part, this state of affairs has been created by the lies told by the manufacturers of psychiatric drugs."
"My impression is," he wrote, "that Eli Lilly's lies about Zyprexa form the basis of the plaintiffs' claims in MDL 1596, but that is not PsychRights' focus."
"PsychRights' focus," he explained, "is helping people avoid being forcibly drugged pursuant to court orders, where the courts have been, in my view, duped by Eli Lilly and other pharmaceutical company prevarications."
"In my view," Mr Gottstein concluded, "the proper disposition of the question would be in favor of my client's right to inform the court of the extreme harm caused by Zyprexa, which Eli Lilly has successfully hidden for so long, while making its billions off the pill."
A court hearing was held in Brooklyn, New York, on a December 18, 2006, on a motion by Lilly, asking the court to order Mr Gottstein to the return the documents to the court, and to bar him from disseminating them any further.
According to the transcript, Lilly also asked the court to require Mr Gottstein to "preserve all emails and all correspondence of any kind, whether it's voice mail, written letters, emails, so that we can pursue a contempt proceeding against both he and Dr Egilman."
Even though the Lilly documents prove that the company knew that Zyprexa was causing diabetes, and kept pushing the drug anyways, potentially harming millions more patients, the judges gave Mr Gottstein hell and threatened to find him in contempt for doing nothing more than warning the public about the side effects of Zyprexa after Lilly concealed the information for a decade.
There is not one single word in the transcripts about Lilly knowingly injuring and killing people with Zyprexa or illegally pushing the drug to unwitting victims for off-label use.
Instead, Judge Brian Cogan, granted Lilly's motion, and told Mr Gottstein's attorney that his client, "deliberately aided and abetted Dr Egilman in getting these documents released from the restriction that they were under, under the protective order. He knew what he was doing, and he did it deliberately."
Judge Cogan went on to tell the attorney, "your client should be on notice that of this moment, he is under a mandatory injunction to return those documents ... to take them down from any websites that he may have posted them on, and to take any reasonable effort to recover them from any sites or persons to which he has delivered them."
On December 18, 2006, at an earlier telephone conference in Brooklyn, Judge Roane Mann also did not utter one word about Lilly's illegal conduct, but instead admonished Mr Gottstein for not playing fair with poor Eli Lilly in making the information about Zyprexa public, stating:
"I personally am not in a position to order you to return the documents. I can't make you return them but I can make you wish you had because I think this is highly improper not only to have obtained the documents on short notice without Lilly being advised of the amendment but then to disseminate them publicly before it could be litigated. It certainly smacks as bad faith."
These judges apparently believe that an expert, such as Dr David Egilman, who is hired to review documents in a case and subsequently learns that people are being seriously injured and killed, should be forced to keep that knowledge a secret if a judge issues a protective order.
There is something very wrong with this picture. It begs the question of how can an ethical doctor not speak if he knows that patients are being harmed
The reason always cited for the need to keep documents under seal is the claim that the information contains trade secrets. However, just as Lilly has done here, drug companies have for too long been abusing the process by using protective orders to hide illegal conduct by concealing documents that show the company is illegally promoting the off-label use of a drug or that a drug can cause serious injuries or that a drug does not work.
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