And the FUCKING GREED behind it.
I'll never forget it, I subscribed and read it back at the time ... and wept. It's seemingly not on RS's site anymore I can find, but you can read it here ...
http://www.yoism.org/?q=node/398
Typical excellent RS expose ... and if they are REALLY giving children this w/o parental consent? It's way fucking criminal.
A tiny sample:
"Lilly has already agreed to pay $2.6 billion to settle charges that it built the market for Zyprexa first by concealing its side effects, and then by marketing it "off-label," for diseases for which it had not been approved.
<snip>
Eli Lilly insists that it has not marketed Zyprexa off-label and that it has accurately represented the drug's side effects. But some medical researchers who have studied the atypical antipsychotics say that, in the final tally, the drugs, which have already been linked to some deaths, may eventually be responsible for tens of thousands of cases of diabetes and other potentially fatal diseases. And despite their early promise for treating schizophrenia, the drugs have not even performed any better than the crude and imprecise earlier medications that preceded them. "We have been paying $16 billion a year instead of $2 billion a year for drugs that seem to be no better and might be worse," says Douglas Leslie, a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina who contributed to an extensive federal study of the drugs. The story of how Zyprexa and other atypicals became a multibillion-dollar market suggests that the medical community — doctors, researchers, the institutions that back them — may be themselves prone to a placebo effect: the willed conviction that a new drug, presented as a breakthrough, must in fact be one, that a product sold as healing must in fact do good.
<snip>
Wirshing saw very quickly, however, that Lilly had a problem: Many of his patients taking Zyprexa were gaining a startling amount of weight. The pattern was as sudden as it was consistent. For the first few days they were on the drug, you weren't aware of any palpable difference. But by the end of the week, you could see the weight gain, almost in real time. Bellies and thighs started spreading, faces started puffing out. By the end of a year, the results were stunning. Some of his patients had gained more than 125 pounds.
<snip>
Though Ahari had not known it when he applied, the company was on a kind of precipice. Its blockbuster drug, Prozac, the pill that provided nearly a third of Lilly's total revenues, was going to lose its patent protection in 2001, a date so significant that executives at Lilly referred to it, in memorandums and annual reports, as "Year X." As Lilly tried to figure out what to do, a consensus began to form around a new strategy. "The company is betting the farm on Zyprexa," one executive wrote in an internal memo in 2001. "The ability of Eli Lilly to remain independent and emerge as the fastest-growing pharma company of the decade depends solely on our ability to achieve world-class commercialization of Zyprexa. The problem, from a marketing standpoint, was that there simply weren't enough schizophrenics in the world to save Lilly's bottom line."
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