If you were the head of a drug company...
If you had no conscience (the key fact)...
If one of your drugs was causing people to commit murder...
If MANY law suits against your company were waiting to go to trial...
And if the first such trial was convening...
And if the verdict in that case would influence the outcome of all the other law suits...
What would you do?
This is the story of a medical drug, a famous drug company, trust, betrayal, and mass murder.
After 30 years, the truth is confirmed---Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, secretly paid off plaintiffs in a court case.
The plaintiffs were families of victims killed by a man who went violently crazy after taking Prozac.
The mass shooting took place in 1989, in Kentucky. I covered the case
in 1999, by which time the Lilly payoff was an open secret among some
lawyers, doctors, and reporters.
But NOW we have confessions from the plaintiffs who took Lilly's money.
In the trial, Eli Lilly was exonerated, absolved of any blame for
murders by the jury.
Ahrp.org: "The Louisville Courier Journal reports that thirty years
after Joseph Wesbecker went on a deadly shooting rampage in Louisville
Kentucky, on September 14, 1989, the families and survivors of his
actions have finally come forward to tell the truth.
They were plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Eli Lilly because they had
reason to believe that Prozac, manufactured by Lilly, had been the
trigger that propelled Wesbecker on his violent rampage. Eli Lilly had
paid these plaintiffs $20 million in hush money
to conceal damaging evidence about Lilly's culpability in marketing
defective, deadly drugs from the jury in the Wesbecker- Eli Lilly
trial."
The Louisville Courier Journal: "On the eve of the jury's verdict, which
absolved Lilly of liability, the company made the secret payment
without telling the judge overseeing the case. In exchange for the
payment, the plaintiffs - eight estates and 11 survivors
- agreed to withhold damaging evidence about the arthritis drug Oraflex
that Lilly withdrew from the market. Lilly [had previously] pleaded
guilty to 25 criminal misdemeanor counts for failing to report adverse
reactions that patients suffered from the drug
[Oraflex], and the drug company feared that the Prozac jury would be
more inclined to rule against the drugmaker [on Prozac] if it learned of
it."
In other words, the court, which was willing to hear evidence about
Lilly's Oraflex cover-up, never did hear that evidence, which would have
alerted the jury that Eli Lilly had a track record of concealing
damning truths about its drugs.
AHRP: "Circuit Judge John Potter, the judge in the [Prozac] case,
suspected that Lilly bribed plaintiffs and their lawyers before the jury
verdict. He uncovered evidence of bribery, and fought Eli Lilly for
years but failed to obtain [proof of] the terms of
the [Prozac payoff] deal. Lilly succeeded in keeping its criminal
action from a judicial proceeding. As is Eli Lilly's norm and practice;
it trashed the judge for his pursuit of the truth."
The Louisville Courier Journal: "The drugmaker that produces Prozac, the
antidepressant that Joseph Wesbecker's victims blamed for his deadly
shooting rampage 30 years ago at Standard Gravure, secretly paid the
victims $20 million [in 1994] to help ensure a
verdict exonerating the drug company. Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly
vigorously shielded the payment for more than two decades, defying a
Louisville judge who fought to reveal it because he said it swayed the
jury's verdict."
"Wesbecker began taking Prozac about a month before his murderous spree
that killed eight and wounded 12 in the print shop attached to the
Courier Journal. All but one of the victims sued Eli Lilly, the company
that manufactured the popular but controversial
drug."
"On Sept. 14, 1989, Wesbecker, a pressman who had been placed on
long-term disability leave for severe mental illness, entered Standard
Gravure around 8:30 a.m., carrying a bag full of weapons, including a
semiautomatic rifle. Over the next 30 minutes, Wesbecker
walked through the building, firing more than 40 rounds at those he
encountered before shooting himself in the [head] with a handgun. It is
the worst mass shooting in Kentucky's history."
You need to understand that a diagnosis of "severe mental illness" is a
far cry from "killing eight people and wounding 12 people." The two
factors are not automatically connected as cause and effect. If they
were, we would see a dozen mass murders every
day. That said, according to press reports, Wesbecker did have
thoughts about committing violence before he was started on Prozac, and
even made threats to commit murder. But he didn't kill anyone until
after taking Prozac. And the charge against Prozac
was: it was the chemical trigger that pushed Wesbecker over the edge
from thought into horrific action. (In that regard, see the brief
collection of studies I cite below.) In any event, no argument about
motivations for murder justifies Eli Lilly's $20 million
bribe to the plaintiffs. Lilly wanted an absolute slam dunk in the
Wesbecker trial, to protect itself from many other law suits where, no
doubt, the role of Prozac in suicide and murder was more vivid.
You also need to understand the status of Prozac in the years leading up
to the rigged 1994 trial in Kentucky that falsely exonerated Eli
Lilly. I'm talking about media coverage, psychiatric literature, the
court system, and the mindset of the public. Prozac
was precariously perched on a ledge. Would it gain universal
acceptance? Would it be exposed as a gross danger? At the time of the
Kentucky court case, there were roughly 100 other law suits against the
drug heading toward trial. The outcome of the Kentucky
Wesbecker case would send a powerful signal to lawyers and plaintiffs
about the odds of winning judgments against Eli Lilly and Prozac. If
Lilly were exonerated in Kentucky (and it was, through payoffs), lawyers
in other such cases would back off. They would
see little point in trying to prove Prozac was a grave danger.
Here is some background about Prozac in those years. It illustrates how
great the threat was to Eli Lilly's blockbuster antidepressant
then---and, by comparison, how little any concern is allowed into the
public arena now.
On February 7th, 1991, Amy Marcus' Wall Street Journal article on the
drug carried the headline, "Murder Trials Introduce Prozac Defense." She
wrote, "A spate of murder trials in which defendants claim they became
violent when they took the antidepressant Prozac
are imposing new problems for the drug's maker, Eli Lilly and Co."
Also on February 7, 1991, the New York Times ran a Prozac piece
headlined, "Suicidal Behavior Tied Again to Drug: Does Antidepressant
Prompt Violence?"
In his landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Breggin mentions that the
Donahue show (Feb. 28, 1991) "put together a group of individuals who
had become compulsively self-destructive and murderous after taking
Prozac and the clamorous telephone and audience response
confirmed the problem."
Breggin also cites a troubling study from the February 1990 American
Journal of Psychiatry (Teicher et al, v.147:207-210) which reports on
"six depressed patients, previously free of recent suicidal ideation,
who developed intense, violent suicidal preoccupations
after 2-7 weeks of fluoxetine [Prozac] treatment. The suicidal
preoccupations lasted from three days to three months after termination
of the treatment. The report estimates that 3.5 percent of Prozac users
were at risk. While denying the validity of the study,
Dista Products, a division of Eli Lilly, put out a brochure for doctors
dated August 31, 1990, stating that it was adding 'suicidal ideation'
to the adverse events section of its Prozac product information."
An earlier study, from the September 1989 Journal of Clinical
Psychiatry, by Joseph Lipiniski, Jr., indicates that, in five examined
cases, people on Prozac developed what is called akathisia. Symptoms
include intense anxiety, inability to sleep, the "jerking
of extremities," and "bicycling in bed or just turning around and
around." Breggin comments that akathisia "may also contribute to the
drug's tendency to cause self-destructive or violent tendencies ...
Akathisia can become the equivalent of biochemical torture
and could possibly tip someone over the edge into self-destructive or
violent behavior ... The June 1990 Health Newsletter, produced by the
Public Citizen Research Group, reports, 'Akathisia, or symptoms of
restlessness, constant pacing, and purposeless movements
of the feet and legs, may occur in 10-25 percent of patients on
Prozac.'"
There are other studies: "Emergence of self-destructive phenomena in
children and adolescents during fluoxetine [Prozac] treatment,"
published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent
Psychiatry (1991, vol.30), written by RA King, RA Riddle,
et al. It reports self-destructive phenomena in 14% (6/42) of children
and adolescents (10-17 years old) who had treatment with fluoxetine
(Prozac) for obsessive-compulsive disorder.
July, 1991. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Hisako Koizumi,
MD, describes a thirteen-year-old boy who was on Prozac: "full of
energy," "hyperactive," "clown-like." All this devolved into sudden
violent actions which were "totally unlike him."
September, 1991. The Journal of the American Academy of Child and
Adolescent Psychiatry. Author Laurence Jerome reports the case of a
ten-year old who moves with his family to a new location. Becoming
depressed, the boy is put on Prozac by a doctor. The boy
is then "hyperactive, agitated ... irritable." He makes a "somewhat
grandiose assessment of his own abilities." Then he calls a stranger on
the phone and says he is going to kill him. The Prozac is stopped, and
the symptoms disappear.
(What is true about Prozac is true about Paxil or Zoloft or any of the
other SSRI antidepressants. And be warned: suddenly withdrawing from
any psychiatric drug can be extremely dangerous to the patient. Gradual
withdrawal must be done under the supervision
of a professional who understands exactly what he/she is doing.)
So---A drug company, Eli Lilly; a drug, Prozac; mass murder; trust; betrayal.
A final piece of the truth now comes to light in the Wesbecker case.
In this sordid drama, there are many other actors. I've covered them in
other articles. But I can't let this article end without mentioning the
FDA, the sole federal agency responsible for certifying all medical
drugs as safe and effective for public use.
That agency went rogue a long, long time ago. It takes no
responsibility for launching killer chemicals on the population. It
operates as a colluding partner with the pharmaceutical industry.
Trusting the FDA to protect people from drugs such as Prozac
is like trusting a PR company, hired to promote war, to maintain the
peace.
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