In response to an earlier article on this issue, reader Larry Bone wrote and asked this author, "Is the corruption on this so widespread that no one would dare prosecute?"
"It is criminal behavior," he points out, "on a huge scale that is being virtually totally ignored by the authorities responsible for the public safety."
"I just feel," Mr Bone wrote, "that there has to be an attorney or someone in a judicial or ethical capacity who would have the guts, and persistence to prosecute Lilly."
"It seems incredibly ridiculous," he states, "let alone obscene, that such blatant wrongdoing seemingly continues to be ignored by the legal authorities with jurisdiction over these sorts of cases."
"If these companies believe they have done nothing wrong," he says, "then let them prove their innocence in court."
Ellen Liversridge also wants a criminal investigation of Lilly. She lost her 30-year-old son, Rob, to the adverse effects of the drug. "He gained almost 100 pounds while taking Zyprexa," Ellen says.
"Rob lapsed into a coma," she recalls, "and died of profound hyperglycemia four days later on October 5, 2002."
"I believe that the people who did this should have a criminal trial," Ellen says. "Enron executives went to prison for wiping out people's life savings," she points out.
"Lilly executives should go to prison," she says, "for knowingly being responsible for people's deaths, shattered families; ruined and grieving families."
Ellen has nothing but praise for the New York Times and its source. "I am grateful to Jim Gottstein for making available this awful truth and hope it results in justice being done."
"If there can ever be justice for a crime as heinous as this," she adds.
Daniel Haszard, of Bangor Maine, feels the same way. In 1996, he was prescribed Zyprexa off-label to supposedly treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and he remained on the drug for 4 years.
Although he paid $250 a month for the drug, Mr Haszard says the drug did not relieve his symptoms of PTSD at all and in early 2000, he was diagnosed with diabetes.
He was shocked to hear the diagnosis, he said, because there was no history of diabetes in his family. Just as thousands of other Zyprexa victims, Mr Haszard did not make the connection between his diabetes and the drug until he saw a commercial for a law firm in December 2005.
Zyprexa causes diabetes, he says, and public health programs are left to pick up the tab for the medial expenses. According to Mr Haszard, "there are now 7 states going after Lilly for fraud and restitution," related to the promotion of Zyprexa for off-label use and the concealment of its risks.
Dr Stefan Kruszewski, MD, a Harvard trained, certified psychiatrist in adult, adolescent, and geriatric psychiatry, from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, also finds Lilly's conduct appalling.
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'.
