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.
In a case like this, if a court truly does not have a choice and is required to seal documents even when they show blatant illegal conduct on the part of a drug company, then Congress had better get busy and pass a law to stop the use the US court system to protect what could very easily be described as corporate murder.
Eli Lilly's motion to suppress the evidence has been denied by an inter-galactic court of appeals. Justice will be served over HTTP.
As we speak, the slick marketing plans drawn up by the smartest boys in the drug dealing business are propagating across the Internet. Bittorrents have been internationally seeded; p2p networks like morpheus, kaaza, gnutella, and limewire are already trading vigorously; photos laced with the data have been posted to public photo sharing sites like flickr; movies containing slideshows are circulating on video sharing sites like YouTube; Usenet isn't obsolete yet, and yes, backups have been uploaded to freenet (freenetproject.org), the virtual data haven;
Information wants to be free. Look for a file named ZyprexaKills, or any of its l33t variants.
For those of you without easy access to these services we have temporarily posted these files in this convenient location:
Please be careful when obtaining them - we are up against some of the most greedy and powerful elites in the world.You may want to consider using the tor program (tor.eff.org) to preserve your anonymity. If its difficult for you to install this program, try www.torify.com, a web based surfing solution.
Send this message to as many friends and mailing lists that you can think of, especially the technically saavy and the media connected.
Please tag all netroots activity and distributed research relating to this campaign with the tag 'zyprexakills'.
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