Prozac Joseph Wesbecker - only settled to protect Lilly over Oraflex - source Pete Breggin

Joseph Wesbecker had been taking Prozac when he walked into his workplace, an Indianapolis printing plant, in September 1989, shot dead eight colleagues, wounded 12 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. The jury found that Prozac was not at fault.






Two years later, media pressure forced Lilly to admit that it had reached an out of court settlement with the plaintiffs. In return for an undisclosed - and reputedly large - sum the plaintiff's and their lawyer agreed not to bring potentially damaging evidence about another Lilly drug, Oraflex, into the trial. The story is related in The Power to Harm: Mind, Medicine and Murder on Trial (Viking, 1996), by British journalist and writer John Cornwell.



In 1985, writes Cornwell, Lilly pleaded guilty to charges brought by the US Justice Department for failing to report fatal reactions in Britain to Oraflex, an anti-inflammatory drug for arthritis relief. The company, whose global sales total $7.3 billion (around 255 billion BF) - $2.4 billion from Prozac alone - was fined $25,000 (around 875,000 BF). Lilly had been forced to settle hundreds of civil compensation claims and, says Cornwell, urgently needed a best-selling drug.



The Wesbecker verdict boosted Prozac sales in the US even though, as Cornwell points out, "Prozac had failed to help the sort of patient it was designed for."


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