Thursday 13 September 2007

Eli Lilly, Zyprexa and the Bush family

I came across the name of Wesbecker, just recently, and in an odd moment, I thought I'd read up on this interesting little snippet of pharmaceutical history. I found this piece, by Bruce Levine, which told me all that I needed to know (thanks Bruce, at least somebody did):

http://www.antidepressantsfacts.com/Bush-Lilly-CIA-serotonin.htm

And here's a little exerpt, which might just get you wondering what front page-holding events were kicking off at around that time to prevent the Fourth Estate from getting their thumbs out of their arses:

"In the Wesbecker trial, Lilly attorneys argued that the Oraflex information would be prejudicial and Judge John Potter initially agreed that the jury shouldn't hear it. However, when Lilly attorneys used witnesses to make a case for Eli Lilly's superb system of collecting and analyzing side effects, Judge Potter said that Lilly had opened the door to evidence to the contrary and ruled that the Oraflex information would now be permitted. To Judge Potter's amazement, victims' attorneys never presented the Oraflex evidence and Eli Lilly won the case. Later, it was discovered that-in a manipulation Cornwell described as "unprecedented in any Western court"-Eli Lilly cut a secret deal with victims' attorneys to pay them and their clients not to introduce the Oraflex evidence. However, Judge Potter smelled a rat and fought for an investigation. In 1997, Eli Lilly quietly agreed to the verdict being changed from a Lilly victory to "dismissed as settled.""

But Levine excels himself with this beauty, which, if I hadn't been caused to wish a large number of people ill, I would have laughed at:

"There is one Eli Lilly piece of history so bizarre that if told to many psychiatrists, one just might get diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and medicated with Zyprexa. Former State Department officer John Marks in The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control, The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences (1979)-along with the Washington Post (1985) and the New York Times (1988)-reported an amazing story about the CIA and psychiatry. A lead player was psychiatrist D. Ewen Cameron, president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1953. Cameron was curious to discover more powerful ways to break down patient resistance. Using electroshock, LSD, and sensory deprivation, he was able to produce severe delirium. Patients often lost their sense of identity, forgetting their own names and even how to eat. The CIA, eager to learn more about Cameron's brainwashing techniques, funded him under a project code-named MKULTRA. According to Marks, Cameron was part of a small army of the CIA's LSD-experimenting psychiatrists. Where did the CIA get its LSD? Marks reports that the CIA had been previously supplied by the Swiss pharmaceutical corporation Sandoz, but was uncomfortable relying on a foreign company and so, in 1953, the CIA asked Eli Lilly to make them up a batch of LSD, which Lilly subsequently donated to the CIA."

Eli and mind control. You shouldn't have done that, guys.

Matt

2 comments:

Radagast said...

Did I ever mention that I ran into a NHS psychiatric nurse who was quite well read in this area. He told me that more was known of the actions of SSRIs through studying the effects of psychedelic drugs than through studying the actions of the SSRIs.

In any event, research into medicinal uses appears to be ongoing. Along with ketamine (LMFAO - a horse tranquilizer!).

Matt

Anonymous said...

You can read more about Dr. Ewen Cameron's CIA-funded experiments and all the MKULTRA subprojects in the MKULTRA Briefing Book, which was prepared by the CIA in 1976. The CIA Inspector General wrote in 1958 of MKULTRA: "Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles."