AlterNet: At this point, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is basically a public menace.

[marmar]

The Case for Giving Eli Lilly the Corporate Death Penalty

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet. Posted March 3, 2009.

At this point, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is basically a public menace.



Eli Lilly & Company's rap sheet as a public menace is so long that for Lilly watchers to overcome the "banality-of-Lilly-sleaziness" phenomenon, the drug company must break some type of record measuring egregiousness. Lilly obliged earlier this year, receiving the largest criminal fine ever imposed on a corporation.

If Americans are ever going to revoke the publicly granted charters of reckless, giant corporations -- well within our rights -- we might want to get the ball rolling with Lilly, whose recent actions appalled even the mainstream media. And with Lilly's chums, the Bush family, out of power, now might be the right time.

On January 15, 2009, Lilly pled guilty to charges that it had illegally marketed its blockbuster drug Zyprexa for unapproved uses to children and the elderly, two populations especially vulnerable to its dangerous side effect. Lilly plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge and agreed to pay $1.42 billion, which included $615 million to end the criminal investigation and approximately $800 million to settle the civil case.

One of the eight whistle-blowers in this case, former Lilly sales representative Robert Rudolph, says the settlement will not completely change Lilly's business practices, and he wants jail time for executives. "You have to remember, with Zyprexa," said Rudolph, "people lost their lives." ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/129709/the_case_for_giving_eli_lilly_the_corporate_death_penalty/

[tavalon]

1. Ely Lilly has been a devil for a longtime

One of the worst but not in very nice company.

[readmoreoften]

3. I'm pretty sure they got started with eugenics and then moved on to

buying LSD from Sandoz (now Novartis), but I could be wrong. Big corporate freaks.

[tavalon]

2. I actually went to read this article and I have a bone to pick.

If internet sites want to be considered legitimate, they need to be very careful about misspellings. When I got to the second misspelled word, I quit reading because it's hard to place credibility in something not spell checked. And I'm inclined to believe anything bad about Eli Lilly, so the misspellings really annoy me.