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Legal News

: Lawbeat

Epic tale of Eli Lilly's Zyprexa battles

By Mark Obbie

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Ben Wallace-Wells' masterful feature in the current Rolling Stone -- "Bitter Pill," a lengthy narrative on the history of the controversial antipsychotic drug Zyprexa -- puts into perspective the spot-news stories I've read over the years about litigation over the drug. Billions in fines and settlements by the drug's maker Eli Lilly, and fights with The New York Times over leaked discovery documents, now come into clear focus because of Wallace-Wells' ability to tell the story from beginning to end, though the eyes of on-the-ground participants. The story illustrates the ineffectiveness of the government's regulation of drugs that may have horrific side effects. And, in an author-Q&A sidebar, Wallace-Wells points toward a particularly intriguing angle at the intersection of law, journalism, and PR:

There's a 10-year patent protection companies get when they introduce a drug. Usually, around year two or three, there'll be a lot of reports of problems with a particular drug. Obviously, this doesn't happen with every drug, but it's a consistent pattern with those drugs where something's gone wrong. For four or five years the company will fight tooth-and-nail with any scientists who say that they've cooked the books. They'll be very antagonistic to reporters who ask questions and then, around year 10 you start seeing a lot more accommodations. They start going to researchers and saying, "Well, maybe you guys were right all along." They'll start settling suits, and they'll start saying to reporters, "Yeah, maybe we did something wrong." So, right now, Eli Lilly is right on the cusp of that and they're beginning to settle suits. The difference in part is that if you're on year three of a patent, you're still hoping to goose most of your profits out of it. By year eight, there's not that much left, so you're much more open to acknowledging difficulties with the drug. There's this arc that repeats itself again and again.

Rolling Stone and the writer deserve high praise for this piece of legal-medical journalism.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on January 30, 2009 (boomark / email).