Showing posts with label Off-Label Drug Use. zyprexa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Off-Label Drug Use. zyprexa. Show all posts

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Lilly Reaches Zyprexa Agreement With Seven States (Update2)

Eli Lilly & Co. agreed to settle, on confidential terms, lawsuits filed by seven states alleging the company improperly marketed its antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, a court-appointed official said.

“All of the states have essentially settled for the same” non-monetary arrangements, said Michael Rozen, special master appointed by the court to help settlement negotiations. The money terms, which weren’t disclosed, “have fallen roughly in line,” he said at a hearing today in federal court in Brooklyn, New York.

Lawyers told U.S. District Judge Jack B. Weinstein, who is overseeing the cases, that finishing the settlements may be delayed while the parties determine how much money the U.S. government plans to claim in compensation for federal dollars spent on Zyprexa through state Medicaid programs.

If completed and approved in court, the settlements would leave four suits filed by states pending against Lilly.

READ MORE @ BLOOMBERG

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Bitter Pill

Created to treat schizophrenia, Zyprexa wound up being used on misbehaving kids. How the pharmaceutical industry turned a flawed and dangerous drug into a $16 billion bonanza

In June 1992, not long after the place closed down, a Harvard-trained psychologist named Sergio Pirrotta walked out of Danvers State Hospital for the last time. The psychiatric facility, at this late date, was a baggy old thing, rectangled into a field just north of Boston; whole wings were barely occupied, and vandals had already begun to rip out the mantelpieces and furniture. The hospital had been slowly, incrementally shutting down for a decade, and the patients that remained were the hardest cases, mostly schizophrenics and those with disorders too dense and weird to classify. But now, as Pirrotta took a walk around the campus, even those patients were gone: released into the larger world to fend for themselves or bused to hospitals where the staffs had little psychiatric training.

Pirrotta had come to Danvers in the mid-1970s to rehabilitate children whom the courts had declared insane. Back then the place was overpopulated, the halls packed with madmen who would wander around smoking cigarettes, leering and lunging at the kids. In those days, the drugs used to treat mental illness were crude and ugly things. Thorazine was the best, and it made you into a ghouled and lifeless ogre — your face seized up involuntarily, you kept shuffling around, you were an emotional drone. But gradually the medications got a little bit better, the pharmacology more precise. First there was haloperidol, similar to Thorazine but with less-vivid side effects. Then clozapine, which had at first seemed a wonder drug, before it turned out to trigger a potentially fatal immune deficiency in two cases out of a hundred.

READ MORE @ ROLLING STONE

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Statement from Eli Lilly and Company: Response to Today's New York Times Article, 'Lilly E-Mail Discussed Off-Label Drug Use'

See Friday, March 14, 2008 post.
Eli Lilly and Company today called the assertions in a New York Times online article 'flat out wrong.' The Times report in question focused on the State of Alaska v. Eli Lilly and Company trial that is underway and attempted to interpret a 2003 email from John C. Lechleiter, Ph.D., currently Lilly's president and chief operating officer. About this email and the Times report, the company makes the following statement:

READ MORE @ EARTHTIMES