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.
Across the U.S., pharmaceutical companies have been pleading guilty to criminal charges or paying penalties in civil cases when the U.S.Department of Justice finds that they deceptively marketed drugs for unapproved uses, putting millions of people at risk of chest infections, heart attacks, suicidal impulses or death.
Ironically, the FDA is approving these drugs for use in children at the same time that the Justice Department has been fining drug companies for illegally marketing these drugs to children. The illegal marketing corrupted and contaminated medical practice, encouraging physicians to prescribe off label, eventually leading the FDA to then approve off label prescribing. The studies used to justify this approval have been wholly developed and supervised by these same drugs companies using handpicked doctors who have often been involved in encouraging off label use. Drug companies commonly ghostwrite the research publications that appear under the names of these doctors.
Children who were prescribed Zyprexa from Eli Lilly packed on 19 pounds in three months after starting the drug. Seroquel from AstraZeneca, Risperdal from Johnson & Johnson and Abilify from Bristol-Myers Squibb were not that much better, causing kids to gain 10 to 13 pounds in the same period.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) states it is no wonder that the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), a group that claims to be an advocacy organization for people with “mental illness,” opposed the black box warnings on antidepressants causing suicide for under 18 year olds in 2004, and black box warnings on ADHD drugs causing heart attack, stroke and sudden death in children in 2006, when you look at their biggest source of funding: Pharma.