More Big Pharma Fraud?

This just sent to me by email:

"The death of the newborn was probably due to respiratory failure as a
consequence of perinatal brain damage."--  Yale Department of Pathology. 
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OpEdNews - January 4, 2007 at 04:08:24

Criminal Prosecution of Lilly Sought Over Zyprexa

by Evelyn Pringle

http://www.opednews.com/articles/
genera_evelyn_p_070104_criminal_prosecution.htm

California Attorney, Ted Chabasinski, is calling for the criminal 
prosecution of Eli Lilly executives for hiding the adverse effects of 
Zyprexa, based in part on articles last month in the New York Times 
which quote internal company documents that revealed that Lilly knew 
about the adverse effects for a decade but kept the information hidden.

Mr Chabasinski, appeared by teleconference in US District Court for 
the Eastern District of New York, on January 3, 2007, before Judge 
Jack Weinstein, on behalf of MindFreedom, a non-profit human rights 
organization, in response to a motion by Lilly basically filed to 
keep the incriminating information hidden, to defend the public's 
right to know the contents of the secret Lilly documents concerning 
Zyprexa.

Mr Chabasinski told the judge that the documents are evidence of 
Lilly executives' "criminal behavior" and "willingness to kill people 
for profit."

The court granted MindFreedom's request for more time to respond to 
Lilly's motion, and another hearing is set for January 16, 2007. 
Meanwhile Judge Weinstein said that he was taking "no position" about 
those people who were not named but who already have copies of the 
Lilly files on Zyprexa.

Prior to the hearing, in a letter to the judge, Mr Chabasinski 
pointed out that while the underlying case in which the documents 
were under seal is civil, the documents reveal criminal behavior on 
the part of Lilly's executives. "They have chosen a course of 
action," he told the judge, "lying about and hiding the real effects 
of Zyprexa, that they knew would lead to the injury and death of 
literally thousands of people."

"If this isn't criminal," he stated, "I don't know what is."

The company documents also show that Lilly engaged in a massive 
illegal off-label marking campaign to get primary care physicians to 
prescribe Zyprexa for uses never approved by the FDA to increase 
profits.

The whole saga began when Dr David Egilman, MD, MPH, revealed the 
documents to Alaskan attorney, Jim Gottstein. Dr Egilman reviewed the 
documents and learned of Lilly's illegal conduct a few years ago when 
he served as an expert in a lawsuit. However, the case was settled 
out of court, and Dr Egilman was effectively muzzled when the judge 
granted Lilly's request to keep the documents secret with a court order.

To settle the lawsuit, Lilly agreed to pay close to $700 million to 
roughly 8,000 Zyprexa victims or their family members, with the 
provision that each person would sign a confidentiality agreement not 
to discuss Zyprexa or the terms of the settlement agreement in return 
for the money.

Being Lilly obviously planned to keep the information about Zyprexa a 
secret, as a physician, Dr Egilman likely found himself between a 
rock and a hard place. If he did not find a way to warn the public, 
at best he would be guilty of negligence, and at worst considered 
complicit in Lilly's elaborate scheme to use the court system to keep 
the information hidden so as not to effect the booming sales of its 
top selling drug bringing in over $4 billion a year.

Mr Gottstein obtained the documents for use in another lawsuit, and 
after seeing that Lilly knew 10 years ago that Zyprexa caused drastic 
weight gain and diabetes and realizing the extent of the off-label 
marketing of the drug, he turned the documents over to the New York 
Times, obviously in hope that the Times would warn the public and 
medical professionals who were prescribing Zyprexa for every ailment 
known to mankind, without knowledge of the serious health risks 
associated with the drug.

Since the New York Times' articles were published, Lilly's legal team 
has been working day and night right through the holiday season 
trying to use the court system to muzzle the messengers and get the 
incriminating information back under seal.

In reviewing all the legal paperwork including letters, injunctions, 
and motions flying around on the internet, its worth noting that not 
once do Lilly attorneys, or the judges handling the case, refer to 
the underlying illegal conduct disclosed in the documents that Lilly 
is working so hard to keep hidden.

The drug maker has been able to obtain injunctions ordering Mr 
Gottstein to return the documents and requiring him to provide the 
names of all persons and organizations that he provided them to or 
discussed them with. The injunctions bar further disclosure and 
specifically name individuals and organizations who are believed to 
have copies of the documents.

Mr Chabasinski is representing author, Judi Chamberlin, and 
MindFreedom International, who are both named in a December 29, 2006, 
temporary injunction. "As everyone is aware at this point," Mr 
Chabasinski says, "there are thousands of copies of the documents in 
question circulating on the Internet and in the hands of innumerable 
people."

He says Lilly knows full well that any attempt to recover the 
documents is a "futile gesture" and there is no way to keep them 
secret. "While the injunction purports to be an attempt to recover 
the documents," Mr Chabasinski wrote in the letter to the judge, "it 
is clear that its real purpose is to intimidate Lilly's critics, and 
the court should refuse to cooperate with this."

As for Lilly's payment of $700 million to settle the lawsuit, Mr 
Chabasinski told the judge, "when a company is making billions of 
dollars from some drug, a few hundred million
dollars is simply a cost of doing business."

"But if drug company executives know they may face long prison terms 
for their willingness to kill people for profit," he states, "they 
will think more than twice about what they do."

"If executives can go to prison for stealing their companies' money," 
he told the judge, "surely those who steal people's lives deserve at 
least the same fate."

Mr Chabaskinski says Lilly's biggest worry is that the documents will 
be reviewed by some prosecutor and that the real purpose of the 
injunction is to frighten people into giving up their First Amendment 
right to petition the government for redress of grievances, "which in 
this situation," he says, "means putting these documents into the 
hands of as many potential prosecutors as possible."

He points out that Lilly has created a massive public health problem 
by convincing doctors to prescribe Zyprexa to many thousands of 
people, whose drug-caused disabilities will now drain the public 
health system for years to come. "It is not in the public interest," 
he told the court in the letter, "to keep documents secret when it 
will have the effect of making it much more difficult to prevent the 
disability of thousands of people."

The pursuit of Mr Gottstein by Lilly attorneys could almost be 
likened to being chased around the country by a group of terrorists. 
Lilly wants the court to charge him with criminal contempt complete 
with sanctions.

Their conduct is clearly an abuse of the legal system, funded by the 
ill-gotten profits of Zyprexa, to run up costs for Mr Gottstein, by 
harassing him and anyone that he may associate with. At the court 
hearing on January 3, 2007, Lilly attorneys asked the judge to issue 
an order requiring Mr Gottstein to travel to New York City for a 
deposition within 5 days, and:

"Requiring Mr Gottstein to immediately produce ... copies of any and 
all documents and information including, but not limited to, all 
computer(s), hard-drives, other electronic storage media, hardcopy 
documents, emails, e-documents, text messaging, instant messaging, 
phone records and voice mails, that refer or relate to Zyprexa".

And talk about chilling the freedoms of the First Amendment, Lilly 
wants the court to force Mr Gottstein to produce: "Communications he 
had with anyone relating to these documents, including but not 
limited to, his dissemination of or discussions relating to the 
documents".

Lilly also asked for the order to include individual reporters and 
the top experts on psychiatric drugs in the US, in demanding that Mr 
Gottstein's disclose his communications with "any person, 
organization or entity who received these documents including, but 
not limited to, Terrie Gottstein, Jerry Winchester, Alex Berenson, 
Dr. Peter Breggin, Dr. Grace Jackson, Dr. David Cohen and Bruce 
Whittington, Dr. Stefan Kruszewski, Laura Ziegler, Judy chamberlin, 
Vera Sherav, robert Whitaker, Steve Shaw, Will Hall, Singeha Prakash, 
or anyone associated with the Alliance for Human Research Protection 
or MindFreedom; and his efforts to retrieve these documents from the 
individuals to whom they were improperly disseminated."

Lilly is also requesting that if anything responsive to their request 
has been deleted or destroyed in computers, that Mr Gottstein be 
required to haul "any and all relevant computers" to New York City 
for the deposition, and permit "forensic examination and recovery of 
such documents."

In addition to the big bucks being made by thinking up ways to harass 
Mr Gottstein, Lilly attorneys at the Pepper Hamilton Law Firm are 
making money hand over fist by scouring the internet looking for more 
people to harass. On December 30, 2006, they were apparently working 
overtime on the Saturday of the biggest holiday weekend of the year, 
when they began threatening a private citizen, Eric Whalen, in emails 
ordering him to remove the Lilly documents from his web site stating:

"You are facilitating the violation of a Federal Court order. Please 
immediately remove the link to the file "ZyprexaKills.tar.gz" (or its 
mirror), including all cached materials, or we will take further 
legal action against your website."

In another email, they told Mr Whalen, "You have been on notice now 
for several hours that you are operating in violation of a Federal 
Court Order, and you have thus far, refused to assure your compliance."

"You must take the link down immediately," they wrote, "or we will 
take further legal action to shut down your website, and seek all 
available remedies."

In his own defense, Mr Whalen replied to the emails and stated: "The 
documents linked to on my website were downloaded from an anonymous 
source. As far as I know I'm not under any court order. Dissemination 
of the contents of the documents is clearly in the public interest. 
Is there a legal basis for you[r] request?"

To avoid having my name added to the dastardly list above and the 
risk of being subjected to the harassment tactics of Lilly attorneys, 
I hereby declare for the record, that I did not receive copies of the 
Lilly documents from Mr Gottstein.

Evelyn Pringle
evelyn-pringle@sbcglobal.net

Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for OpEd News and investigative 
journalist focused on exposing corruption in government and corporate 
America.

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