Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff sued the company after a nearly four-year investigation revealed that Lilly concealed its knowledge of significant weight gain and obesity associated with the anti-psychotic medication Zyprexa. Investigators also showed that Lilly’s sales representatives illegally promoted the drug for uses not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
According to a review ordered by the UK’s Department of Health, excessive use of the medication causes an estimated 1,800 deaths and almost as many strokes among older people every year. As many as many as 144,000 people suffering from dementia are being given anti-psychotic drugs unnecessarily.
The huge missing “elephant in the room” is the high likelihood that Dr. Nidal Malik Hasan was medicated with potent brain-altering psychiatric drugs. These would be drugs that Dr. Hasan had easy access to and which he was probably prescribing widely to his psychologically traumatized soldier-patients, unaware of the serious dangers to them or to himself. These popular, aggressively marketed, highly profitable drugs are known to cause a number of serious adverse effects including hostility, suicidality, sleep alteration, depression, mania and psychotic episodes.
Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin sent a letter Tuesday to Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressing concern about how antidepressant drugs are being administered troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cardin was concerned that there may be a connection between the use of those medications and the suicide rate among troops.
When asking the question, “Who is responsible?” there is at least one name that stands out. Dr. Joseph Biederman of Harvard University. Biederman is a very high-profile doctor that spear-headed the outbreak of children on psychiatric drugs. Biederman reportedly received $1.6 million from drug makers between 2000 and 2006. However, he failed to report most of this to his university, which may well have considered this to be a conflict of interest.