In the early 1990s Dr. Breggin was selected to be the scientific and medical expert
for all of the more than 100 combined Prozac-related cases brought against the manufacturer,
Eli Lilly and Company (makers of Prozac
®). Dr. Breggin was asked to evaluate for the plaintiffs the
scientific basis for the claim that Prozac was causing violence and suicide, and
also to evaluate the drug company's potential negligence in the development and
marketing of Prozac, including any attempts to hide the risk of Prozac-induced
suicide and violence. He was also asked to evaluate individual cases for their
merit.
In 1994 Dr. Breggin testified in the first Prozac case to go to trial, the Wesbecker case.
Joseph Wesbecker was on Prozac in September 1989 when he walked into his
workplace, an Indianapolis printing plant, shot dead
eight colleagues, wounded 12 others, and killed himself. Survivors and
relatives of the dead took Lilly to court in 1994. They claimed that
Wesbecker's violence was due to Prozac.
In the
process of serving as the expert medical witness in this case, Dr. Breggin evaluated and testified about a number of key documents (all
of which are available below as PDFs). At first, the trial was
apparently won by Eli Lilly -- the jury found that Prozac was not at fault --but the judge
later determined that the trial had been rigged; Eli Lilly had paid the
plaintiffs
to throw the trial by withholding damaging evidence against the
company. Dr. Breggin describes his participation in this dramatic case in detail in his latest book,
Medication Madness (July 2008).
For many years after the fixed trial, plaintiffs, attorneys and even the FDA
remained unaware of many of the documents Breggin had discovered and/or evaluated. Then in
2004, an anonymous individual sent the documents to the
British Medical
Journal (BMJ), who published an article about them and also distributed them. When Eli Lilly
forced the BMJ to apologize for suggesting that the documents had
"disappeared" while in Eli Lilly's care, Breggin wrote an unpublished letter to BMJ
explaining how the documents had indeed disappeared (available below). Though criticizing BMJ for saying
that the company had in effect hidden the smoking guns, Eli Lilly never actually contested
the allegations surrounding the documents -- that the drug company had withheld
evidence that Prozac caused suicide.