AS OF 1994, HAVE THERE BEEN ANY COURT DECISIONS GRANTING ANY NEGATIVE CLAIMS OF PROZAC’S EFFECTS ON PATIENTS?

admin on March 23rd, 2009

As of January 1994, 78 suits against Eli Lilly have been dismissed and 160 others have been filed with accusations ranging from charges that Prozac causes rashes to allegations that the drug led to violent, bizarre death.

So far, not a single court has said that Prozac caused suicide or violent behavior in any of the cases brought to trial. Indeed, although, approximately a hundred cases are soil pending, fifty-one s have already been dismissed. One such case is that of Bonnie Leitsch, a Louisville woman who was the national director of the Prozac Survivors Support Group, another organization opposed to Prozac. In November 1990, she brought a $150 million lawsuit against Eli Lilly and Company, claiming that after she started taking Prozac as a “pick-me-up” prescribed by her doctor, she became hostile, argumentative, and impulsive, developed violent thoughts, and for the first time in her life tried to commit suicide. “I wanted to die,” she said. ‘That seemed to be the only answer. Death was the only escape from Prozac.” She repeated this dramatic “story not only in court but also on “Geraldo” and “Phil Donahue” and “60 Minutes.” The case was dismissed when it turned out that Leitsch had taken an overdose of sleeping pills in 1960, had a history of depression in her medical records dating from 1976, when her stepdaughter was shot to death in a gas station robbery, and had recently endured the suicide of her 21-year-old daughter.

So what caused her to try to take her own life? Eli Lilly representatives maintained that it was her disease: depression.

The FDA continues to proclaim Prozac’s safety as an antidepressant and has consistently refused to list any warning in the insert package regarding possible suicidal or violent impulses resulting from taking the drug.

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