In the course of research for articles in Adbusters and Focus magazines, I found these documents. They are internal memos, emails and studies from Eli Lilly and Company, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.

There are a lot of relatively uninteresting pages mixed into this large file (269 MB), but overall some of the documents do seem to indicate, exactly as the New York Times and others have written, that Lilly apparently was involved in illegal, possibly criminal activities by misleading doctors about side effects and appropriate uses for their sedating-antipsychotic Zyprexa (Olanzapine), currently one of the world’s top-selling drugs.

Previously, distribution and even to some extent discussion of these documents was suppressed by an injunction from Eli Lilly in the United States. At that time, I found them using the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s TOR anti-censorship stealth network. As of mid-Feb, the injunction against U.S.-based websites was lifted, and the documents are re-appearing widely online.

The single document was very large and used up expensive bandwidth. Since there are now other and better ways to access these documents, I have removed my own copies from my website as of July 2007. I suggest going to the Furious Seasons blog to get them piece by piece or to this German site. Some Bittorrent files are also available.

For those just generally interested in the story, lawyer Jim Gottstein of PsychRights has posted an excellent overview of links.

As they obviously did for Gottstein, for me, the documents raise particular concern and sympathy for those people around the world who are being forced to take Lilly’s Zyprexa and other very dangerous drugs against their wills, victims of forced psychiatric interventions or inappropriate treatment in homes for the elderly. These documents help show how misguided forced psychiatric intervention really is, and how its methods tend to be more similar to chemical restraint and torture than to science or medicine.