Last week, a funny thing happened on the way to the mailbox. A memo, meant for Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY – $51.22) attorney Bradford Berenson (who is helping negotiate a private settlement for Lilly with the government), went instead to Alex Berenson of the New York Times.
In 2007, Lilly preempted the legal system by agreeing to settle 8,000 Zyprexa cases to the tune of $750 million. Thousands of suits are still pending. Lilly, a U.S. drug company, made $14 billion in 2007, $4.7 billion from Zyprexa alone, yet it may not be able to pay the lawsuits filed against it because insurers are attempting to rescind the policies. In fact, Zyprexa – once Lilly's Golden Child – may drive the company into bankruptcy, proving yet again that what goes around comes around.
In 1999, Mother Jones reported that the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) got $1.1 million from Lilly. NAMI, reportedly a non-profit dedicated to removing the stigma associated with mental illness, also had a Lilly executive, Jerry Radke, working as a strategic planner at the time; a prime example of one hand washing the other. According to a December, 2003 article in the Times, Zyprexa (which costs almost twice as much as similar drugs and is no more effective) stressed the Kentucky Medicaid program budget so hard it ended up in the red. When Kentucky later attempted to exclude Zyprexa from its list of preferred medications, NAMI fought back by busing protesters to hearings, running full-page ads and faxing protests to state officials. NAMI glossed over the fact that the buses and ads were paid for by Lilly.
Zyprexa's growth has become especially important to Lilly because Prozac – Lilly's former best-seller – is in a gradual decline. Prozac sales are currently being supplanted by Cymbalta, which carries its own (and apparently equal) suicide risk. Interestingly enough, Lilly's second most profitable drug is the diabetic medication Actos ($2.4 billion in 2007). Adding Actos to the Zyprexa lineup is known as covering one's bases.
Some former Lilly employees include George Bush, Sr. and Kenneth Lay (the former CEO of Enron). A current Lilly CEO, Sidney Taurel, was previously an adviser to the Division of Homeland Security and is presently a member of the U.S. Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations, created in 1974.
Speaking of the Homeland Security Act, in 2002 the Times reported that a clause buried in the act protected Lilly (and other pharmaceutical companies) from lawsuits over its use of thimerosal. Thimerosal is a mercury-containing preservative used in childhood vaccines. In 2001, the Institute of Medicine concluded that there was a plausible link between thimerosal and autism. Just when thimerosal lawsuits were starting to bite at Lilly's heels, President Bush, Jr. appointed the above-mentioned Sidney Taurel to a seat on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. However, the clause exempting liability proved to be too much, even for loyal Republicans, and in 2003 the liability waiver was repealed.
The Lilly drug Xigris (used for treating sepsis in the ill and elderly) is another failed attempt to deceive. In 2006, academics participating in a Xigris study acknowledged that Lilly had provided more than 90 percent of the funding for the study and subsequent recommendations. About a fifth of the writers who drafted the guidelines also admitted taking Lilly money.
Many agreed it was unusual for a single drug company to dominate study-funding in that manner, and Naomi O’Grady of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) refused to endorse the sepsis guidelines largely because she insisted Lilly had convened the entire panel. Dr. Sidney Wolfe of Public Citizen added that the guidelines were undoubtedly good for the health of Lilly stockholders, but likely "detrimental to the health of patients".
If Eli Lilly (or is that "LieLie?") is forced into bankruptcy by its own deceptions, people will suffer. The company will simply reorganize under a different name and continue making bad drugs for an unsuspecting public. What is needed is drug reform. But as long as the drug lobby continues to spend billions and the FDA persists in acting like a puppet organization, abuses will continue.
Disclosure: I don't own stock in Eli Lilly & Co.