The documentary is the story of big money–drugs that fuel a $330 billion psychiatric industry, without a single cure. The cost in human terms is even greater. These drugs now kill an estimated 42,000 people every year. And the death count keeps rising. Containing more than 175 interviews with lawyers, mental health experts, the families of victims and the survivors themselves, this riveting documentary rips the mask off psychotropic drugging and exposes a brutal but well-entrenched money-making machine.”
Produced by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International ,”Making a Killing: The Untold Story of Psycho tropic Drugging” depicts the field of psychiatry as a money-grubbing industry dedicated to making a profit at the expense of the mental health of their own patients.
In watching the video one will see how normal active children are forced into taking mind altering and addictive drugs with damaging and sometimes fatal consequences with their parents powerless against the coercive onslaught of falsehoods opinions and the "chemical imbalance" hoax which is foisted on them as ”fact".
Brian Beaumont, the president of the Vancouver chapter of CCHR said, “They invent the problem. They develop the product. And sell it for billions. The perfect formula for making a killing ... literally. Brutally factual, this 90-minute documentary exposes the greatest financial con this planet has ever seen. The facts are hard to believe, but fatal to ignore. “We are very proud of our new documentaries and plan many more in the future.”
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights was established by the Church of Scientology to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights. To View the new Video go to: http://www.cchrbc.ca/The documentary is the story of big money–drugs that fuel a $330 billion psychiatric... more
Jason League, chief of the child abuse-sex offense division of the Baltimore County state's attorney's office, said he didn't know why criminal charges weren't filed based on the March 2009 police report.
Referring to sexual abuse or molestation allegations, League said that "there are a whole lot of variables that go into these determinations" and prosecutors have to prove "intent of obtaining some kind of sexual gratification" by the perpetrator.
"...Everywhere we looked it was, ‘Take meds, take meds, take meds.'"
Friday, 06 November 2009 01:23
pharmacyOn November 3rd, 2009 Frontline aired a program on the subject of a dramatic increase in the number of children being diagnosed with serious psychiatric disorders.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/medicatedchild/view/
These overly prescribed and strong behavior modifying medications are now just beginning to be tested in children. In recent years, the number of children being diagnosed with bipolar, which is considered a mental illness, and ADHD is not only shocking, but very disturbing.
The program opens with a video clip of an activist protesting on behalf of children's rights and bringing light to this epidemic sweeping across the nation.
A lot of the credit for lighting a fire under the FDA goes to the much-maligned anti psychiatry movement and its most prominent spokesperson, Peter R. Breggin, MD. Dr. Breggin the author of many scientific articles and books which includes Toxic Psychiatry, and Medication Madness: A psychiatrist exposes the dangers of mood- altering medications (2008), for years along with a few others have been the lone voices in pointing out how drug companies have essentially bought and paid for the psychiatric establishment. This includes lead academic researchers who have been paid to lend credibility to questionable industry research. According to Dr Breggin, this research, most of which is done on adults, has been used to "justify coercing unsuspecting kids into submission".
"The rates of bipolar diagnoses in children have increased markedly in many communities over the last five to seven years," says Dr. Steven Hyman, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. "I think the real question is, are those diagnoses right? And in truth, I don't think we yet know the answer."
The drugs can cause serious side effects, and virtually nothing is known about their long-term impact. "It's really to some extent an experiment, trying medications in these children of this age," child psychiatrist Dr. Patrick Bacon tells Frontline. "It's a gamble. And I tell parents there's no way to know what's going to work."
I was riveted to my seat watching in horror as a father made a desperate call to 911 stating "my daughter passed away in the night." A picture of a beautiful 4 year old girl staring back at me made me wonder, how could something like this even happen?
Jacob Solomon, a young boy of five, was initially believed to suffer from an attention deficit disorder. With over one million children diagnosed with either ADHD or bi-polar, his parents followed doctor's orders and reluctantly started him on Ritalin. Over the next five years, he would be prescribed one drug after another. "It all started to feel out of control," Jacob's father, Ron, told Frontline. "Nobody ever said we can work with this through therapy and things like that. Everywhere we looked it was, ‘Take meds, take meds, take meds.'"
Despite clear link between anti-depressants and mass shootings, media fails to ask if Hasan was on SSRI’s
Friday, November 6, 2009
Despite the fact that Fort Hood gunman Nidal Malik Hasan was a psychiatrist, the media has failed to even raise the question of whether he was taking psychotropic drugs before he gunned down over a dozen of his colleagues during yesterday’s tragic rampage, a hefty indictment of how the establishment rushes to blame politics, religion, gun rights, or any other factor for mass shootings in order to hide the direct link between such massacres and the use of anti-depressant drugs.
It has been confirmed that Hasan was an Army psychiatrist at Fort Hood. Psychiatrists have a history of “self-medication” because of the easy access they have to psychotropic drugs.
In almost every major mass shooting over the past two decades, since anti-depressant drugs became popular, the killer has been on SSRI’s – serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
The establishment media, allied closely as it is with the pharmaceutical industry, uniformly fails to stress this common factor, preferring instead to blame shootings on gun rights or, as in the case of Hasan, political motives.
However, any fair study of mass shootings cannot justifiably come to any other conclusion but the fact that SSRI’s play a central role in causing assassin’s to go berserk and engage in the kind of carnage that the average person struggles to comprehend.
Immediately after we learned of the Virginia Tech massacre, the largest mass shooting in U.S. history by a single gunman, we predicted that the assassin would be on psychotropic drugs, which is exactly what turned out to be the case.
Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, as well as 15-year-old Kip Kinkel, the Oregon killer who gunned down his parents and classmates, were all on psychotropic drugs.
Robert Hawkins, the 19 year old who killed himself and eight other people with an assault rifle in Omaha, Nebraska in December 2007 had a history of treatment with psychiatric drugs for depression and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and was on prozac.
Jeff Weise, the Red Lake High School killer was on prozac, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczinski, Michael McDermott, John Hinckley, Jr., Byran Uyesugi, Mark David Chapman and Charles Carl Roberts IV, the Amish school killer, were all on SSRI psychotropic drugs.
Northern Illinois University killer Steven Kazmierczak had taken Prozac.
One Found Guilty and One a Suspect for Murder and Both Under Psychiatric Care and on Psychotropic Medication
The Orlando Shooter Jason Rodriguez was on psychotropic medication, and Michele Kehoe found guilty of first degree murder for killing her son and has been on Paxil and other medications since 1996.
This is another example of psychiatrists for the defense with one analysis and others for the prosecution having an opposite analysis on the same case. It is evidence that Psychiatry is not a science but opinion, and lack of consensus on how the mind works. The only idea they appear to agree on is to push psychotropic drugs and take no responsibility for the disastrous results. Every time you hear of news reports of mass killings or suicide you will find psychotropic drugs involved. The psychotropic drug aspects of these murders will not be broadcast by the media, and the government and FDA will take no action. The media needs the pharmaceutical advertising, so they will find other reasons for these murders and suicides except the obvious. The FDA is run by psychiatry and the pharmaceutical companies, and they are not even embarrassed by the results. The public needs to wake up and said enough is enough. There is an enormous amount of evidence which indicates that psychotropic drugs are directly related to aggressive behavior, and cause more depression then they will ever relieve.
When 13 teens were caught popping pills in a Hillsboro park last month, Peter Brigham expected his office to get busier.
Brigham directs the town's youth services department and typically deals with juvenile diversion cases, providing drug and alcohol intervention classes to kids once they've been arrested. In this case, he offered the class - free of charge - to the teens who were at the field but weren't charged with a crime.
"I did it in hopes that the parents would voluntarily sign them up," Brigham said last week. "And who's taken me up on it? Nobody."
What happened at Grimes Field on Oct. 12 was troubling, said police Chief Dave Roarick, who responded about 2 p.m. to a report of suspicious behavior. There, he found a group of teenagers, ages 13 to 19, hanging out with backpacks. Roarick thought that was odd because it was Columbus Day and school wasn't in session. The 19-year-old - Stephen Martel of Hillsboro - was drinking alcohol and arrested. The rest, whom the police have not identified because they are minors, were taken into protective custody, he said.
As the teens were brought back to the station, Roarick said the police learned that the majority of them had taken multiple doses of Benadryl, an antihistamine, and that four had mixed it with Prozac, an antidepressant.
"We probably found four or five boxes of Benadryl on them . . . and a baggie containing a lot of Prozac. Some of them had (consumed) alcohol, too," Roarick said. "As we're finding this, one of the girls appeared to be really out of it, acting very, very strange."
Roarick said the girl, who looked "extremely tired and intoxicated," began having seizures on the floor of the police station. She and others who had also taken a combination of the pills were taken to the hospital after showing signs of elevated heart rates, he said. Two of the hospitalized teens had left the group shortly before the police arrived and were tracked down in Deering.
In the weeks before the incident, Roarick said at least one local store owner called the police to report that the store had been selling a lot of Benadryl. Roarick said he's advised store owners not to sell to kids if they think something "isn't right."
The Prozac was provided by a teenager who had a prescription and was present among the group, he said.
Too common
For kids, experimenting with drugs is "pretty serious, but not uncommon," Roarick said.
The police met with high school officials and the youth services department to decide how to move forward. Roarick said he expects to arrest up to four others who were involved. Three of them face charges of possession of a controlled drug. The teenager who provided the Prozac could be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
The rest of the teens were offered the educational program via letters to their parents, he said.
"This is not uncommon, but to have this sized group of kids doing it so nonchalantly at the field is troubling," Roarick said. "I don't know that there was anything to that combination (of drugs), other than that's what was available on that day."
Nicole Soroko, who manages the Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment program for Child and Family Services, a private nonprofit organization, said her office has seen an increase in kids being treated for abuse of prescription drugs.
Charles Nemeroff, an Atlanta psychiatrist who was the subject of a Senate investigation concerning huge sums he received from drug companies, is being named chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Miami medical school.
Last year Nemeroff, as chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Emory University, was the intense focus of an investigation by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who said he was concerned about the money the psychiatrist received from drug companies while conducting supposedly unbiased research for the National Institutes of Health on drugs made by the companies he was receiving money from.
On Thursday, Pascal Goldschmidt, dean of UM medical school, called Nemeroff ``an extraordinary psychiatrist and scientist. . . . He got into serious trouble on disclosure on conflict of interest.''
Goldschmidt said he had read investigative reports from Emory about Nemeroff's activities and found nothing to indicate that payments the psychiatrist received had in any way influenced his research results.
In a telephone interview at mid-day Thursday, Nemeroff, 60, told The Miami Herald he was excited to be coming to Miami. ``I think it's going to be a top-10 school.''
A front-page report by The New York Times in October 2008 said that congressional investigators found Nemeroff -- ``one of the nation's most influential psychiatrists'' -- had received $2.8 million in consulting deals with drug makers over seven years and failed to report at least $1.2 million of that to Emery University.
Based on Grassley's complaints, Emory suspended Nemeroff's work on an NIH grant and asked him to step down as chair of psychiatry while it studied his conduct. Earlier this year, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services had launched an investigation into Nemeroff's activities.
The OIG said it never confirms nor denies any inquiries about investigations. Nemeroff said he knew nothing about an OIB investigation. NIH did not immediately respond on Thursday morning to Herald requests for comment. Nemeroff said he had been told by NIH that he could apply for grants as soon as he arrives in Miami.
About $800,000 to $1.2 million, according to published reports, came from GlaxoSmithKline, while Nemeroff was leading a major study into mood disorder drugs, including ones made by GSK.
Nemeroff said Thursday that the news reports had not made clear that the talks were on GSK drugs now on the market, while his research funded by NIH involved animal and lab studies of GSK chemical compounds that were years away from market.
The psychiatrist said in retrospect he should have declared the drug maker payments but that, at the time, he viewed the university standards as not requiring such revelations since the talks were of an educational nature. Emory has since changed its rules to make them more clear.
In a letter to Grassley last December, Emory officials wrote: ``We do not believe that Dr. Nemeroff's participation in the compensated speaking arrangements with GSK in any way biased the research conducted under the grant, although we will continue to ensure that no such bias existed.''
The Emory letter said Nemeroff's talks on behalf of GSK were ``focused on medical education and were not product specific or promotional. . . . As you alleged, Dr. Nemeroff did not disclose substantial speaking fees from pharmaceutical companies to Emory. Under federal regulations and Emory's policies, we believe he should have done so, although both the regulations and our policies could have been clearer.
``In Dr. Nemeroff's view, substantive, nonproduct specific talks focused on general medical education did not present a significant financial interest and were therefore not subject to disclosure under the United States Public Health Service.''
Grassley responded in a letter that his staff's research found that Nemeroff's talks were not educational and should haveCharles Nemeroff, an Atlanta psychiatrist who was the subject of a Senate... more
Omnicare has had success selling drugs to nursing homes and other facilities, but that success may have come with a dose of dishonesty.
(CBS) As members of Congress debate healthcare reform - most would agree to a crackdown on those who cheat the system. At least $68 billion is lost to health care fraud every year - and that's considered a conservative estimate.
CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian has more on a staggering fraud case involving health care giant Omnicare.
When it comes to selling drugs to nursing homes and other long-term care facilities across the country, Omnicare has a prescription for success - a market share in excess of 70 percent and more than $6 billion in sales last year alone.
its settlement of kickback allegations with Omnicare, the Justice Dept. continues to probe Johnson & Johnson
A $112 million settlement involving alleged drug kickbacks that the Justice Dept. announced with the nation's largest nursing home pharmacy and a generic drug manufacturer on Nov. 3 is part of a wide-ranging investigation of suspected Medicaid fraud by the pharmaceutical industry. Critics say the continuing probe, which involves Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and other major drugmakers, highlights what they describe as an industry practice of paying money to outfits that provide drugs to consumers, in return for preferential treatment.
Because those alleged payoffs have the effect of compromising patient care and driving up costs for government and private health insurers, cases like the settlement unsealed with Omnicare (OCR) in Covington, Ky., and IVAX Pharmaceuticals in Weston, Fla., could bolster opposition to the controversial deal the Obama Administration reached with the pharmaceutical industry to win its support for health-reform legislation. Many Democrats say the Administration should have asked for much bigger cost savings from drugmakers.
Under Tuesday's settlement, Omnicare will pay $98 million plus interest to the federal government and a number of state Medicaid programs to settle allegations that it participated in kickback schemes with IVAX, J&J, and two nursing home chains. IVAX, a subsidiary of Israel's Teva Pharmaceutical Industries (TEVA), agreed to pay $14 million plus interest.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Babies whose mothers used antidepressants during pregnancy visit the doctor more often and have higher risks of certain health problems than other children their age, a new study suggests.
The study looked at the medical records of nearly 39,000 Norwegian children through the first year of life. It found that rates of congenital heart defects and physical therapy -- a potential sign of movement-related problems -- were elevated among babies whose mothers used antidepressants throughout pregnancy.
These children also tended to have more doctor visits and higher rates of certain other health problems, like respiratory and digestive symptoms. However, those rates were also elevated among children whose mothers had stopped using antidepressants before pregnancy.
This raises the possibility that the risks were related to the mother's depression itself, rather than antidepressant use, according to the researchers, led by Dr. Tessa Ververs of the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands.
The bottom line for women on the medications is that the decision to continue or stop during pregnancy is an individual one. Women should talk with their doctor about what is best for them, Ververs told Reuters Health in an email.
The question of whether to continue on antidepressants during pregnancy is not simple.
Initial studies on the drugs' safety were "reassuring," Ververs and her colleagues note, but some recent reports have linked the medications to problems in newborns -- including cases of congenital heart defects.
Antidepressant use in the third trimester has also been connected to higher risks of respiratory distress, feeding problems and irritability in newborns, the researchers note in their report published in the British obstetrics journal BJOG.NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Babies whose mothers used antidepressants during pregnancy... more
Washington: Children and teenagers that took what specialists call "second generation" anti-psychotic medicine were at risk for obesity, according to a study in a US journal out Wednesday.
Children and teens in the United States diagnosed with psychotic and bipolar disorders, as well as mood disorders, are often prescribed second-generation antipsychotic medications such as aripiprazole, olanzapine, quetiapine, and risperidone.
The study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) looked at 272 patients between the ages of four and 19 who had not earlier taken such medicine.
The effects "are particularly problematic during development because they predict adult obesity, the metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular morbidity, and malignancy," wrote the study authors, which included Christoph Correll, from the Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, New York.
Of the patients in the study group, 49 percent had mood issues, 30 percent were diagnosed with schizophrenia, and 22 percent diagnosed with disruptive or aggressive behavior.
Fifteen patients who refused to participate or did not take their medicine served as a comparison group.
Patients were treated with one of the aforementioned medicine for 12 weeks.
At the midpoint of the 11-week treatment, all children taking the medicine reported an average weight gain of nearly 19 pounds (8.5 kilos), compared to minimal weight change in the control group.
"Each antipsychotic medication was associated with significantly increased fat mass and waist circumference," the authors wrote.
"Altogether, 10 percent to 36 percent of patients transitioned to overweight or obese status within 11 weeks."
Minors taking those medications also risked adverse side effects including raised cholesterol and triglyceride levels, and changes that could lead to diabetes and hypertension.
Increasingly, "the cardiometabolic effects" of those medications "have raised concern," the authors of the study wrote.
WASHINGTON — A majority of the donations made to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, one of the nation’s most influential disease advocacy groups, have come from drug makers in recent years, according to Congressional investigators.
The alliance, known as NAMI, has long been criticized for coordinating some of its lobbying efforts with drug makers and for pushing legislation that also benefits industry.
Last spring, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, sent letters to the alliance and about a dozen other influential disease and patient advocacy organizations asking about their ties to drug and device makers. The request was part of his investigation into the drug industry’s influence on the practice of medicine.
The mental health alliance, which is hugely influential in many state capitols, has refused for years to disclose specifics of its fund-raising, saying the details were private.
But according to investigators in Mr. Grassley’s office and documents obtained by The New York Times, drug makers from 2006 to 2008 contributed nearly $23 million to the alliance, about three-quarters of its donations.
Even the group’s executive director, Michael Fitzpatrick, said in an interview that the drug companies’ donations were excessive and that things would change.
“For at least the years of ’07, ’08 and ’09, the percentage of money from pharma has been higher than we have wanted it to be,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said.
He promised that the industry’s share of the organization’s fund-raising would drop “significantly” next year.
“I understand that NAMI gets painted as being in the pockets of pharmaceutical companies, and somehow that all we care about is pharmaceuticals,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said. “It’s simply not true.”WASHINGTON — A majority of the donations made to the National Alliance on Mental... more
Idaho is getting $13 million as part of a settlement reached with Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co. over its marketing of an anti-psychotic drug.
Attorney General Lawrence Wasden announced the deal Tuesday, calling it the largest financial settlement in a legal case since Idaho and other states ended a lawsuit with tobacco companies in 1998.
Idaho sued Eli Lilly over allegations the company used deceptive marketing strategies for the drug Zyprexa. The state accused the company of failing to warn doctors of the drug's serious side effects, a move that caused significant costs to the state's Medicaid program.
Idaho also claimed Zyprexa, approved for severe psychological disorders, caused consumers to gain weight, leading to other problems like diabetes.
Wasden said the $13 million will offset losses incurred by Idaho's Medicaid program.
Zyprexa, which boasts $4.7 billion in annual sales, has cost Lilly lots of legal trouble, sparking thousands of patient lawsuits as well as investigations by federal and state governments.
In January, Lilly agreed to pay $1.42 billion to federal and state governments to resolve a lawsuit over Zyprexa marketing brought by the U.S. Justice Department. Some states, including Idaho, did not join that settlement.
More than 30 states sued Lilly over Zyprexa. The only case that went to trial was in Alaska, which ended with a settlement that calls for Lilly to pay the state $15 million.Idaho is getting $13 million as part of a settlement reached with Indianapolis-based... more
featuring G. Edward Griffin, author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, a critically acclaimed book about the U.S. Federal Reserve — on Congressman Ron Paul’s “Reading List for a Free and Prosperous America”.
PBS News just reported on how Chinese dissidents, whistleblowers and government petitioners are being labeled “mentally ill,” incarcerated in psychiatric wards and subjected to electroshock — a tactic reminiscent of Soviet Russia and the alliance between psychiatry and the police state.
The marriage of psychiatry with communist/socialist and police state regimes has spanned countries across the globe as an effective means to deal with political dissension. These practices are not limited to Russia, China, Cuba or Uzbekistan, all of which have recently employed similar psychiatric incarceration of citizens for political protest.
In the UK, a specialized unit called the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre has been granted the authority to incarcerate anyone who has given “inappropriate or threatening communications” to a member of government into a psychiatric ward. The assessment teams are made up of police, psychiatrists and psychologists who have been given the authority to evaluate, accuse and detain anyone against threat into a mental facility — indefinitely.
If you think this couldn’t happen in the U.S., think again.
MANHATTAN (CN) - A boy died from taking two ADHD drugs, Ritalin and Concerta, his parents claim in Federal Court. The Kansas couple says the drug makers never warned them that the drug combination could kill their son with methylphenidate toxicity. The active ingredient in both drugs is methylphenidate - a compound that Concerta releases slowly and Ritalin releases immediately upon digestion.
Edward and Susan Hill of Overland Park say their son Nicholas had taken Ritalin since 1998 and Concerta since 2000 to treat his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and that Ortho-McNeil-Janssen, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis and their subsidiaries never warned that the combination could be fatal.
Nicholas took the recommended dosage of each drug, the Hills say, and suddenly suffered nausea and vomiting one day in 2007; they found him unresponsive in his bed that evening.
Nicholas' levels of methylphenidate were so high on the night he died that it would have required him to ingest more than 100 pills, according to the complaint.
The Hills say the drug makers concealed the findings of a 2006 FDA Advisory Committee discussion about the failure to process slow metabolizers associated with methylphenidate drugs. They also say the companies did not warn patients to check for potentially fatal side effects.
The complaint does not state how old Nicholas was when he died. Contemporary news reports said he began taking ADHD drugs when he was 4.
The Hills seek punitive damages for product liability, negligence, breach of warranty and wrongful death. They are represented by Mark Sadaka with Potts Sadaka.MANHATTAN (CN) - A boy died from taking two ADHD drugs, Ritalin and Concerta, his... more
OLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina's attorney general said Friday the state has reached a $45 million settlement with drug maker Eli Lilly & Co. over the company's marketing of an anti-psychotic drug, an agreement the drug maker said was its largest with a single state over Zyprexa.
"This is a victory for South Carolina's taxpayers who were forced to bear the financial costs of Eli Lilly's unlawful conduct," Henry McMaster said. "Our case was sound. The evidence we presented was overwhelming. And I am pleased to say justice has been served."
In 2007, McMaster filed a lawsuit against Lilly, arguing that the Indiana-based drug maker had improperly marketed Zyprexa for off-label uses. The Food and Drug Administration has approved it to treat schizophrenia and certain types of bipolar disorder.
McMaster claimed the company also pushed doctors to prescribe the drug for other ailments including dementia and attention-deficit disorder without warning of possible side effects like heart problems, weight gain and diabetes.
In his lawsuit, McMaster argued that the drug maker should reimburse South Carolina's Medicaid and state health plan for the tens of millions of dollars it had spent to treat those side effects for nearly 64,000 patients from 1996 to 2007, as well as money the state spent to buy the prescriptions.
McMaster says the settlement is second in South Carolina history only to the 1998 agreement by tobacco companies to pay 46 states, including South Carolina, more than $200 billion over several decades. Instead of waiting years for payments expected to total $3.2 billion, state lawmakers in 2001 borrowed against the settlement to raise more than $900 million.
Attorneys general in 44 other states have sued Lilly over Zyprexa, but the $45 million agreement is the largest a single state has reached with the drug maker, company spokeswoman Marni Lemons said.
"We're glad to put the issue behind us and think it's in the best interests of not only Lilly but of patients, care givers, health care professionals and those who continue to rely on Zyprexa, which is a life-saving medication," she said.
The next-highest single-state Zyprexa settlement was with Connecticut, for $30 million, Lemons said. In its third-quarter earnings statement released Wednesday, the company said it was in "advanced discussions" with the six remaining states with which it has open Zyprexa cases.
In January, Lilly pleaded guilty to illegally marketing Zyprexa, agreeing to pay a combined $1.42 billion to settle civil suits with several states and end a criminal investigation. Lilly also pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act violation for promoting the drug as a dementia treatment.
Zyprexa, approved in 1996, is Lilly's top seller, bringing in $1.2 billion in the third quarter, 3 percent more than it did the same quarter last year. But a year ago, Lilly lost $465.6 million, or 43 cents per share, after setting aside almost $1.5 billion to settle the off-label marketing investigations.
As part of the settlement agreement, Eli Lilly is required to refrain from making misleading claims regarding Zyprexa and require medical — and not marketing — staff to approve references to the drug.OLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina's attorney general said Friday the state has reached... more
WASHINGTON — Children and teenagers that took what specialists call "second generation" anti-psychotic medicine were at risk for obesity, according to a study in a US journal out Wednesday.
Children and teens in the United States diagnosed with psychotic and bipolar disorders, as well as mood disorders, are often prescribed second-generation antipsychotic medications such as aripiprazole, olanzapine, quetiapine, and risperidone.
The study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) looked at 272 patients between the ages of four and 19 who had not earlier taken such medicine.
The effects "are particularly problematic during development because they predict adult obesity, the metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular morbidity, and malignancy," wrote the study authors, which included Christoph Correll, from the Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, New York.
Of the patients in the study group, 49 percent had mood issues, 30 percent were diagnosed with schizophrenia, and 22 percent diagnosed with disruptive or aggressive behavior.
Fifteen patients who refused to participate or did not take their medicine served as a comparison group.
Patients were treated with one of the aforementioned medicine for 12 weeks.
At the midpoint of the 11-week treatment, all children taking the medicine reported an average weight gain of nearly 19 pounds (8.5 kilos), compared to minimal weight change in the control group.
"Each antipsychotic medication was associated with significantly increased fat mass and waist circumference," the authors wrote.
"Altogether, 10 percent to 36 percent of patients transitioned to overweight or obese status within 11 weeks."
Minors taking those medications also risked adverse side effects including raised cholesterol and triglyceride levels, and changes that could lead to diabetes and hypertension.
Increasingly, "the cardiometabolic effects" of those medications "have raised concern," the authors of the study wrote.
