Alaskan attorney, Jim Gottstein, says that after being served with a mandatory injunction, he has returned the internal Eli Lilly documents that he obtained in litigation and provided to the New York Times to the court.
Information from the documents related to Lilly's antipsychotic drug, Zypexa, was highlighted two days in a row in front-page articles in the Times
The documents reveal the illegal marketing schemes used by Lilly to make Zyprexa its best-seller, which the company has managed to keep hidden for years by entering into out of court settlements in civil lawsuits which included confidentiality clauses and by getting judges to place the documents under protective orders to shield them from public view.
For instance, the documents under seal here are from a case where Lilly entered into an out-of-court settlement in June 2005, and agreed to pay $690 million to cover claims by about 8000 Zyprexa victims. But in order to get paid, the plaintiffs were required to sign a confidentiality clause and basically keep their mouths shut about Zyprexa from then on.
Its really comical the way Lilly keeps acting all indignant over the disclosure of these documents as if they contain brand new charges, when the company has been under federal and state investigations related to its off-label marketing of Zyprexa for several years already. The company is also facing Medicaid fraud charges in lawsuits all over the county.
In 1996, Zyprexa was approved for the treatment of adults with schizophrenia, and a few years later, it was approved for short-term treatment of adults with manic episodes associated with bipolar disorder.
Yet despite these extremely limited approved uses, Zyprexa went on to become the top selling antipsychotic worldwide with an estimated 20 million people having used the drug and Lilly's best-selling product, with $4.2 billion in sales in 2005, which translates into 30% of its total revenues.
The documents provided to Times, span a decade and clearly show that the company promoted off-label the sale of Zyprexa for uses not approved by the FDA as being safe and effective. They also reveal that Lilly knew about Zyprexa's link to drastic weight gain and diabetes for years but failed to inform prescribing doctors and consumers.
In fact according to the Times, Lilly knowingly distributed false information to doctors about the risks as late as 2001. On December 21, 2006, the Times reported that the information provided to doctors about the blood-sugar risks of Zyprexa did not match data circulated inside the company after a review of Lilly's clinical trials.
The Times quotes a Lilly report from November, 1999, that shows that after examining 70 clinical trials, Lilly found that 16% of patients taking Zyprexa for a year had gained over 66 pounds. But instead of making these findings public, the company used data from a smaller group of trials that showed roughly 30% of Zypexa patients gained 22 pounds.
Mr Gottstein is not involved in the case in which the judge issued a protective order In re: Zyprexa Products Liability litigation, MDL No. 1596, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York (MDL 1596), "in any manner whatsoever," he says.
He is the leader of, "The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights), a public interest law firm devoted to the defense of people facing forced psychiatric drugging against their will.
Currently, Mr Gottstein represents an Alaskan patient and says the injunction will prevent him from using the Lilly documents to show that the side effects of Zyprexa are well-established by the company's own clinical trials and therefore, his client should not be forced to take such drugs against his will.
In Myers v Alaska Psychiatric Institute, 138 P.3d 238 (Alaska 2006), a case argued by Mr Gottstein last summer, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that Alaska's forced drugging procedures were unconstitutional because they did not require the court to find such drugging to be in the person's best interests, and that there were no less restrictive alternatives.
In order to present the evidence in the case he is handling now, Mr Gottstein is looking to the Alaskan courts to issue a ruling that says his client's right to avoid forced drugging outweighs Lilly's right to keep the information about risks hidden.
He says the documents are highly relevant to a court inquiry, now required in Alaska, before a court can make an informed decision about whether to order forced drugging for his client.
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'.
