New 56-min Rough Cut in Progress

I've been editing for the past week with Linda Hattendorf, the producer/director/editor of The Cats of Mirikitani (thecatsofmirikitani.com). She has put together a nearly hour long rough cut for submission to our next grant submission for post production funding. She has been terrific, working long hours in order to meet our deadline of April 1. The Cats of Mirikitani won numerous awards in the festival circuit, The Audience Award at Tribeca. I was very touched by her film when I first saw it at the Cinema Village in NYC a few years ago. So naturally when a friend of a friend recommended her to me as an editor, I seized the opportunity. (Though initially I had searched for a Vietnamese/English bilingual editor, I was not able to find someone in NYC with experience I needed.) The film was one of the most heartwarming stories that I have seen in years and has the power to soften the most cynical of souls. It's like a non-pharmaceutical anti-depressant, sure to lift one's spirit. The story of how they bond and how Jimmy reconciles parts of his traumatic past are poignant.

After much discussion, research, restructuring and contemplation, we are putting together a rough cut at least 56 mins long. She seems to think that the film may work as a feature film and has said that the film is very important in showing how Asian American families deal with mental illness. It is so good to have her as an ally and advocate. Now a few director of an Asian American Institute has expressed an interest in sponsoring a talk or screening because Linda has told them about the film. I am so fortunate to have her working by my side this week and so happy to have met her. Because my film also touches upon the Consumer Movement which, to my knowledge, has not been shown previously in documentary films, it may be a first for PBS. And now I am in the process of scheduling a rough cut screening through New York Women in Film and Television, a professional association of women. The viewers will all be professional film people whose judgment will tell me whether it should be a short or feature.

Like so many other indy filmmakers, I also have mounting debts and no income-generating work. Luckily for me, I have had many successful and profitable years working as an artist and have marketable skills that will enable me to sustain myself once this project is over. The only thing I want more than money is sleep right now, but I am too wired after spending a day looking at footage and combing through nearly 600 pages of transcripts for clips to put into my cut. It's been a difficult day. I learned that Can is finally returning home to Dayton, OH for a week after a year away from his family. Can has been living in Stockbridge, MA serving as a personal care assistant for his friend, John Aldam, who is disabled from his spinal tumor. So now on top of writing the grant due April 1, I also have to do pre production for the shoot in April 6, for which I have no money. Oh there is so much to do without the funding to do it all. To be continued... in my next post.

History of the Consumer Movement

Can, the subject of my documentary, has been active in the consumer movement, which is something I was not familiar with until I started shooting this film. He is among the very few Asian Americans are involved in this flourishing social and political effort started by former psychiatric patients whose experiences with the mental health system were less than favorable. There is a growing National Network of Consumer/Survivor groups. Some of them are the National Empowerment Center (http://www.power2u.org). Though there is stigma in the Euro-American community, there tens of thousands of Caucasian American consumers who are open about their psychiatric histories and experiences as mental patients. In contrast, there are probably about less than 10 Asian Americans out of about 7 million Asian Americans who are active in the consumer movement, a disproportionately low number. Because the lifetime prevalence rate of mental illness which is 47% in the general population is the same among Asian Americans, approximately half of the 14 million Asian Americans has, had or will have a mental illness in their lifetime. This is one area that Asian Americans are grossly underrepresented and underserved. The low numbers of Asian Americans utilizing mental health services and appearing in patient populations reinforce the model minority myth that Asian Americans are usually socio-economically mobile and do not have mental illnesses, which we know to be false.

Because of the lack of Asian American mental health advocates who are engaged in policy-making efforts, there are a lack of state and federal resources going to services for Asian Americans. In many states and in our Federal government, mental health policies are shaped and formed with input from consumers as well as professionals.

From the website of the National Coalition of Mental Health Consumer Survivor Organizations (nsmhcso.org): "NCMHCSO was built on the foundation laid by the courageous work of those who started the mental health consumer/survivor movement in the early 1970’s. Those early
leaders were people with diagnoses of mental illness, who were inspired by people who
were finding strength, courage and power by joining together to work for human and civil
rights."

Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia about the consumer movement:

There is a growing movement throughout the United States (and the world) of people calling themselves consumers, survivors, or ex-patients--who have been diagnosed with mental disorders and are working together to make change in the mental health system and in society. The consumer movement grew out of the idea that individuals who have experienced similar problems, life situations, or crises can effectively provide support to one another. According Sally Clay, one of the leaders of this movement, The Consumer/Survivor Communities began 25 years ago with the anti-psychiatry movement. In the 1980's, ex-mental patients began to organize drop-in centers, artistic endeavors, and businesses. Now hundreds of such groups are flourishing throughout the country. Our conferences (many sponsored by NIMH) have been attended by thousands of people. More and more, consumers participate in the rest of the mental health system as members of policy-making boards and agencies. When it began, there was an initial hostility toward the mental health system, but the consumer movement has evolved into a recovery model that encompasses everyone involved in caring for people with mental disorders.
From around the country, people who had been in treatment for schizophrenia and other forms of serious mental illness began coming out of the shadows and identifying ourselves. We were no longer willing to remain hiding, quietly suffering the ridicule and hostility that too often characterize people's reactions to serious mental illness. Slowly, we began to organize, forming local, state, and then national organizations for recovering persons and our allies. We advocated, trying to regain our rights as human beings. For the most part, the more articulate consumer-advocates felt that professionals, who so readily dismissed our point-of-view when we had been patients, were not to be trusted. Many of us felt we could make it "on our own." And why not? All of us had been diagnosed with having serious mental illnesses...About twelve years ago, however, some consumer-advocates began to suggest that many of us, particularly those who were most disabled, could not so easily make it "on our own."We suggested that most of us did indeed need other people: family members, friends, and often the help of experienced mental health professionals.Frederick J. Frese The importance of the consumer movement has been recognized and documented by mainstream mental health, such as in the Surgeon General's Report.

Vietnamese Man Uses Hands to Administer Energy Healing

Many traditional healing arts are remarkably effective. Though the US often boosts of its technological advances in medicine, our country lacks research into healing folk arts which have been around for millenia. As a Korean American, I know that the folk healers have a special touch of groundedness that professional doctors of Western medicine do not. I know that faith in one's healer has much to do with the health outcomes. Trust and love can be healing in of themselves. Anyways, Can who has been doing some energy healing with his hands passed on this article to me.



Vietnamese Man Uses Hands to Administer Energy Healing.

URL: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-8408987_ITM

COPYRIGHT 2001 San Jose Mercury News

Byline: Elsa C. Arnett

HANOI _ He isn't listed in any doctors' directory.

But hundreds of people will attest to his remarkable healing powers.

Dung Tran uses only one medical tool: his hands. The fingers are bony, the skin at the knuckles have wizened, the fingertips are stained a faint copper from years of potent Singapore cigarettes. Overall, they seem pretty ordinary for a 75-year-old.

Until you touch them. Tran's hands are toasty, almost bordering on hot, as if he just lifted them from the sides of a steaming bowl of noodle soup.

Tran uses his hands, and their heat, to administer an ancient form of Asian medicine known in Vietnam as nhan dien, or ''energy healing.''

For centuries, folk remedies such as energy healing, crushed tiger bone and extracted bear bile were all that Vietnamese people had to treat ailments from a sore back to a stroke. Not any longer. These days, Western medicine abounds in Vietnam. Hospitals have high-tech diagnostic devices; pharmacy shelves are stocked with drugs from the United States, France and Germany.

Yet many Vietnamese still cling to the familiar. They continue to rub a pungent homespun alcohol on an arthritic back. They continue to stroke a coin vigorously into their skin to ease a bad cold. They continue to make a bitter, black brew from dried plants to settle an upset stomach.

They continue to line up at Tran's doorstep so his fingertips can try to soothe their ulcers, slow their cancers and quell their seizures.

For many Vietnamese, a cure lies not in a pre-processed tablet, but from the harmony between their bodies, their minds and the natural world. For them, the latest advances in modern medicine cannot compete with the time-tested remedies passed down over several thousand years.

''Nature influences many things that go on in us,'' said Tran, who spent most of his life as a philosophy and foreign language professor in Hanoi. ''People get migraines during thunderstorms, people feel energetic in sunlight. It only makes sense that if nature can harm us, it can also help us.''

Energy healing hails from China and India as far back as 4,000 years and is practiced by millions of people throughout Asia. The theory requires one person _ Tran, for example _ to become a giant heat magnet and absorb energy from nature and transfer it to another person.

In Asian medicine, the human body is all about balance and the smooth flow of energy through the veins and organs. The infusion of added energy from healer to patient is supposed to open whatever clog has developed to block that smooth flow, restoring equilibrium.

In the United States, energy healing is one of the many alternative therapies that are only grudgingly gaining the respect of mainstream medicine. American researchers are working on experiments to figure out why energy healing, herbs, deep breathing and even laughter seem to boost people's health.

Until they find a scientific explanation, many of these therapies remain on the fringes. Health insurance companies won't cover them. People who seek them do so at their own risk, and expense.

''The medical community is still keeping alternative medicine at arms length,'' said Dr. John Wahdud Laird, director of the Jaffe Institute of Spiritual and Medical Healing, an energy healing school in California's Napa Valley. ''But there is a much more open attitude towards these things than there was five or 10 years ago.''

Immigrants have helped to popularize energy healing in the Bay Area, where it has become a fixture in the world of alternative medicine.

It's hard to know how many in Vietnam rely on energy healing. The Vietnamese government does not keep track of healers like Tran; it wouldn't be easy even if they tried. Most of these healers take classes from various healing masters, but they aren't certified. Most work out of their living rooms. Most are as mysterious as the healing they practice.

Tran doesn't advertise. He doesn't charge, either. His skills, he says, were given to him by God. Comfortably retired, he would not sully them by taking money.

Many who arrive at Tran's doorstep come after everything else has failed. They hear about him by word-of-mouth: so-and-so's mother who knows so-and-so's brother went to Tran and was cured, they say. Next thing, Tran has a new patient.

That's how Phuong Nguyen found himself cross-legged on Tran's lacquered wood coffee table that fills one-third of Tran's living room.

Nguyen, 29, was studying design in Montreal. At the start of his second year of classes, he began to feel anxious, restless, sweaty. He stared at the ceiling of his dorm room and couldn't fall asleep.

First, Nguyen went to the clinics at his university, then to specialists. They came up with nothing. They did blood test after blood test. Nothing. They gave him tranquilizers. Still, nothing.

Nguyen became so exhausted, he had to withdraw from school and return to Hanoi. There, he went to an acupuncturist, then to an herbalist. Nothing helped. Desperate, Nguyen took his father's advice and visited Tran.

That first day, he was led through a small, leafy, courtyard and into Tran's living room. Tran told him to slip off his shoes and sit on the table. Nguyen was told to close his eyes, relax his body, and try to clear his mind of thoughts and worries.

Then, Tran stepped up on the table, rubbed his hands together, and maneuvered around Nguyen, pressing his index fingers into various pulse points of Nguyen's temples, cheeks, neck, spine and chest. Then he moved on to his legs, ankles and toes.

Both Nguyen and Tran's minds were deep in concentration. Only the echo of schoolgirls chattering outside or the bang of a hammer from three houses down broke the silence.

About 45 minutes later, Tran was done. At first, Nguyen didn't notice anything. But after visiting Tran for three days, Nguyen fell asleep that night for the first time in months for a solid three hours. By the end of two weeks, he could sleep for six to eight hours. The sweating stopped. So did the jitters. Now, several months later, Nguyen is practicing on his own and is awaiting a visa to return to his studies in Montreal.

How did energy healing help him when nothing else could? Nguyen doesn't know. And he said, ''I don't need to know. I just know I feel so much better. I have my life back again.''

Tran, who has practiced energy healing for about a decade, realizes all this might sound suspicious. He doesn't take it personally. He was dubious, too, once.

He had heard bits and pieces about energy healing for years. But he didn't think much of it until he went to say goodbye to an old school friend who was diagnosed with a late-stage of cancer.

When Tran saw his friend, he saw that he looked remarkably fit, was still able to go out and eat and talk with friends, and ended up living for three years longer than doctors had predicted. The secret, the friend said, was energy healing.

Curious, Tran decided to study with the same teacher who had instructed his friend. Tran hoped it might ease the two ulcers, the erratic heart-beat, the dizzy spells, and the general fatigue that had troubled him all his life.

Three months into his lessons, his stomach felt better, and to his delight, he was well enough to drink beer again. A year later, his heartbeat returned to normal. He felt stronger than he did when he served in the military years ago.

Grateful for this gift, Tran decided to try to help others. Since then, his fingers have worked on hundreds of people. There's the 8-year-old boy with epilepsy, the 42-year-old woman with a bleeding ulcer, the 60-year-old woman with deteriorating eye sight, the 65-year-old woman with breast cancer, and his own wife who had almost lost all use of her left arm.

Tran said that all have improved. Did he, or more precisely, did energy healing make them better? He doesn't profess to be a miracle worker. Tran said he is simply helping people heal naturally, though he admits that there are always a few he cannot help.

Tran could talk a lot more about energy healing, but not today. There is a woman at his gate with her 10-year-old daughter. The little girl has had a sinus infection for two years. Medications haven't helped. Sometimes the pain is so bad she buries her tiny face in her hands. They stand waiting for Tran, their faces anxious and expectant.

Tran jumps up from his chair, rubs his hands together and prepares for the next challenge.


(c) 2001, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).

Visit Mercury Center, the World Wide Web site of the Mercury News, at http://www.sjmercury.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

The Expose on Big Pharma

In the past few months, much corruption in the world of psychiatry has been exposed by a New York Times reporter named Gardiner Harris. Several prominent psychiatrists, Charles Nemeroff and Joseph Biederman, and Fred Goodwin never disclosed publicly or to their employers and funders that they were receiving large sums in excess of a million dollars by pharmaceutical companies while they were serving in positions that required them to disclose any conflicts of interests. Sadly, this revelation undermines the integrity of psychiatric research going on in this country. They say that Dr. Biederman was responsible for clinical research that was basically resulted in the 40 fold increase of the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children. Frightening. It made me glad that I didn't have children. 40 fold increase!!!???!!! Is that not insane? Not that the integrity of psychiatric research wasn't damaged in the first place. Certainly, many in the consumer movement knew well that the pharmaceutical companies exerted undue influence in nearly every arena of mental health services. They are indeed motivated by profit, not public health.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/health/policy/04drug.html
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/joseph_biederman/index.html
http://www.policymed.com/2009/01/letters-from-grassley-harvard-and-biederman-get-the-facts.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/health/22radio.html

This is an article that was forwarded to me from Can Truong.

Eli Lilly and the Case for a Corporate Death Penalty
By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
Posted on March 3, 2009, Printed on March 5, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/129709/

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."

Rudolph is not exaggerating. Zyprexa, marketed as an "atypical" antipsychotic drug, has been promoted as having less dangerous adverse effects than "typical" antipsychotic drugs such as Thorazine and Haldol. However, on February 25, 2009, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the rate of sudden cardiac death in patients taking either typical or atypical antipsychotic drugs is double the death rate of a control group of patients not taking these drugs.

Zyprexa -- though not nearly as well known as Lilly's previous blockbuster Prozac -- is today one of the biggest-selling drugs in the world. Zyprexa has grossed more than $39 billion since its approval in 1996, with $4.8 billion of that in 2007 (and it was projected to equal or surpass that gross in 2008 when earnings are reported).

Lilly has had other Zyprexa scandals, but in this current one, Lilly executives matched Charles Dickens scoundrels. Zyprexa is approved by the Food and Drug and Administration (FDA) for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but Lilly illegally marketed it for sleep difficulties, aggression, and other unapproved uses. Lilly sales reps aggressively pushed Zyprexa as a wonderful drug to chill out disruptive children and the elderly who were not schizophrenic or bipolar. The lawsuit against Lilly stated, "In truth, this was Lilly's thinly veiled marketing of Zyprexa as an effective chemical restraint for demanding, vulnerable and needy patients."

Doctors can prescribe drugs for unapproved uses (called "off-label prescribing"), but drug companies are not allowed to market drugs for unapproved uses. Many drug companies break this rule, but Lilly broke it with gusto. “The company made hundreds of millions of dollars by trying to convince health care providers that Zyprexa was safe for unapproved uses," said Laurie Magid, acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania where the case was prosecuted. Magid said that Lilly was responsible for "putting thousands and thousands of patients at risk."

One marketing effort consisted of the Lilly sales force urging geriatricians to use Zyprexa to sedate unruly nursing home and assisted-living facilities patients. Lilly sales reps distributed a study claiming that elderly patients taking Zyprexa required fewer skilled nursing staff hours than were necessary for patients taking competing medications. Magid stated that Lilly sales reps were "trained to use the slogan five at five, meaning five milligrams at 5 o'clock at night will keep these elderly patients quiet." Illegally marketing Zyprexa for elderly patients was especially troubling for prosecutors because Zyprexa increases the risks of heart failure and life-threatening infections such as pneumonia in older patients.

In addition to targeting the misbehaving elderly, Lilly also targeted annoying kids. New York Times reporters Gardiner Harris and Alex Berenson, who have been covering Eli Lilly and Zyprexa for several years, reported on January 14, 2009, "The company also pressed doctors to treat disruptive children with Zyprexa, court documents show, even though the medicine's tendency to cause severe weight gain and metabolic disorders is particularly pronounced in children ... The children receiving Zyprexa gained so much weight during the study that a safety monitoring panel ordered that they be taken off the drug."

Mainstream reporters were so appalled by Lilly's recent actions that some voiced caustic commentaries about the relatively small price Lilly paid for its transgressions. CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson (January 15, 2009) noted, "Eli Lilly has pled guilty to marketing the sometimes dangerous drug Zyprexa in ways never proven safe or effective ... Lilly has agreed to pay $1.4 billion, including the largest criminal fine ever imposed on a corporation. Ironically, that's about as much as the company's Zyprexa sales in the first quarter last year." However, the mainstream media failed to provide the context of Lilly's horrendous history which goes back decades.

The New York Times 2009 article did at least go back as far as 2006, reminding readers of the Times exclusive on another Zyprexa scandal. In December 2006, a whistle blower handed over to the Times hundreds of internal Lilly documents and e-mail messages among top company managers that showed how Lilly had downplayed Zyprexa's association with weight gain and metabolic disorders such as diabetes.

A Rolling Stone piece earlier this year ("Marketing Lilly's Zyprexa, a Phony ‘Miracle' Drug") details how Lilly minimized Zyprexa's relationship with dramatic weight gain. In 1995, prior to FDA approval of Zypexa , Lilly's own panel of experts concluded that Zyprexa produced an average weight gain of 24 pounds in a single year (one in six patients gained more than 66 pounds); that kind of weight gain can elevate blood-sugar levels and cause diabetes. This data, however, was not submitted by Lilly to the FDA.

Lilly-Zyprexa scandals didn't just start in 2006. A 2003 Lilly-Zyprexa scandal involved Medicaid and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), ostensibly a consumer organization. That year, Zyprexa grossed $2.63 billion in the United States, 70 percent of that attributable to government agencies, mostly Medicaid. Zyprexa cost approximately twice as much as similar drugs, and state Medicaid programs, going in the red in part because of Zyprexa, were attempting to exclude it in favor of similar, less expensive drugs. When Kentucky's Medicaid program attempted to exclude Zyprexa -- its single largest drug expense -- from its list of preferred medications, NAMI bused protesters to hearings, placed full-page ads in newspapers, and sent faxes to state officials. What NAMI did not say at the time was that the buses, ads, and faxes were paid for by Lilly.

The Lilly-NAMI financial connection had already been exposed by Ken Silverstein in Mother Jones in 1999. Silverstein reported that NAMI took $11.7 million from drug companies over a three-and-a-half-year period from 1996 through 1999, with the largest donor being Lilly, which provided $2.87 million. Lilly's funding also included loaning NAMI a Lilly executive, who worked at NAMI headquarters but whose salary was paid for by Lilly.

Beyond Zyprexa, in 2002 fingers were pointed at Lilly for tampering with the Homeland Security Act. On November 25, 2002, soon after George W. Bush signed the Act, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert discovered what had been slipped into it at the last minute, "Buried in this massive bill, snuck into it in the dark of night by persons unknown . . . was a provision that – incredibly – will protect Eli Lilly and a few other big pharmaceutical outfits from lawsuits by parents who believe their children were harmed by thimerosal."

While it was recently revealed that research published in 1998 that linked vaccine use to autism was fraudulent, in 2002 the harmfulness of thimerosal (a preservative that contains mercury and used by Lilly and other drug companies in vaccines) was not clear. Specifically, in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Public Health Service had urged vaccine makers to stop using thimerosal, and in 2001 the Institute of Medicine concluded that the link between autism and thimerosal was "biologically plausible." So in 2002, drug companies such as Lilly which had used thimerosal in vaccines were nervous about what scientists and the courts would ultimately determine.

How then did a drug-company protection provision get inserted in the Homeland Security Act? Here's my bet for one of Herbert's "persons unknown." In June 2002, then President George W. Bush had appointed Lilly's CEO, Sidney Taurel, to a seat on his Homeland Security Advisory Council. Ultimately even some Republican senators became embarrassed by the drug-company protection provision, and by early 2003, moderate Republicans and Democrats agreed to repeal that particular provision from the Act.

The year 2002 was a banner one for "Lillygates," with "60 Minutes II" ultimately airing another juicy Lilly scandal. Lilly's patent for Prozac had run out, and the drug company began marketing a new drug, Prozac Weekly. Lilly sales representatives in Florida gained access to patient information records, and, unsolicited, mailed out free samples of Prozac Weekly. Though they primarily targeted patients diagnosed with depression who were receiving competitor antidepressants, at least one such Prozac Weekly sample was mailed to a sixteen-year-old boy with no history of depression or antidepressant use. Law suits followed.

The most cinematic of all Lilly scandals began in 1989 and culminated in1997. One month after Joseph Wesbecker began taking Lilly's antidepressant Prozac, he opened fire with his AK-47 at his former place of employment in Louisville, Kentucky, killing eight people and wounding twelve before taking his own life. British journalist John Cornwell covered the trial for the London Sunday Times Magazine and ultimately wrote a book about it. Cornwell's The Power to Harm is not simply about a disgruntled employee becoming violent after taking Prozac; the book is about Lilly's power to corrupt a judicial system.

Victims of Joseph Wesbecker sued Lilly, claiming that Prozac had pushed Wesbecker over the edge. The trial took place in 1994 but received little attention as America was obsessed at the time by the O.J. Simpson spectacle. While Lilly had been quietly settling many Prozac violence suits, the drug company was looking for a showcase trial that it could actually win. Although a 1991 FDA "Blue Ribbon Panel" investigating the association between Prozac and violence had voted not to require Prozac to have a violence warning label, by 1994 word was getting around that five of the nine FDA panel doctors had ties to drug companies -- two of them serving as lead investigators for Lilly-funded Prozac studies. Thus with the FDA panel now known to be tainted, Lilly wanted a Prozac trial it could win, and it believed that Wesbecker's history was such that Prozac would not be seen as the cause of his mayhem.

A crucial component of the victims' attorneys' strategy was for the jury to hear about Lilly's history of reckless disregard. Victims' attorneys especially wanted the jury to hear about Lilly's anti-inflamatory drug Oraflex, introduced in 1982 but taken off the market three months later. A U.S. Justice Department investigation linked Oraflex to the deaths of more than one hundred patients, and concluded that Lilly had misled the FDA. Lilly was charged with 25 counts related to mislabeling side effects and plead guilty.

In the Wesbecker trial, Lilly attorneys argued that Oraflex information would be prejudicial, and Judge John Potter initially agreed that the jury shouldn't hear it. However, when Lilly attorneys used witnesses to make a case for Lilly's superb system of collecting and analyzing side effects, Judge Potter said that Lilly itself had opened the door to evidence to the contrary, and he ruled that Oraflex information would now be permitted. To Judge Potter's amazement, victims' attorneys never presented the Oraflex evidence, and Eli Lilly won the case.

Later it was discovered why victims' attorneys remained silent about Oraflex. In a manipulation Cornwell described as "unprecedented in any Western court," Lilly cut a secret deal with victims' attorneys to pay them and their clients not to introduce the Oraflex evidence. However, Judge Potter smelled a rat and fought for an investigation, and in 1997 Lilly quietly agreed to the verdict being changed from a Lilly victory to "dismissed as settled."

If Americans want to take on Lilly, they might want to do it during a time when the Bush family is out of power. Sidney Taurel, former Lilly CEO and George W. Bush appointee to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, is not the only Bush family-Lilly connection. George Herbert Walker Bush once sat on the Eli Lilly board of directors, as did Bush family crony Ken Lay, the Enron chief convicted of fraud before his death. Mitch Daniels, George W. Bush's first-term Director of Management and Budget, had actually been a Lilly vice president, and in 1991 he had co-chaired a Bush-Quayle fundraiser that collected $600,000. This is the same Mitch Daniels who is now governor of Indiana, Lilly's home state.

Currently, the public's right to revoke corporate charters is still recognized by the courts, but attorneys general today rarely exercise this option, and then only against small corporations. Loyola Law School Professor Robert Benson, who in 1998 petitioned California's attorney general to revoke the corporate charter of Union Oil of California (Unocal), notes that state attorneys general "don't hesitate to draw this particular arrow from their quivers when the target is some small, unpopular or socially marginal enterprise." But when it comes to egregious large multinationals, Benson concludes, "They don't even want you to know about it because they don't want to appear to be soft on corporate crime."

In his book When Corporations Rule the World, David Korten, former Harvard Business School Professor writes, "In the young American republic, there was little sense that corporations were either inevitable or always appropriate." Early in American history, Americans were very much concerned about any entity achieving too much power, and so in corporate charters there were clear limits placed on: years permitted to exist, borrowing, land ownership, extent of enterprise, and sometimes even on profits. Korten notes that in the first half of the nineteenth century, "Action by state legislators to amend, revoke, or simply fail to renew corporate charters was fairly common."

The Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy (POCLAD) was created in 1994, in part to inform Americans that they can in fact revoke corporate charters. In 1890, POCLAD explains, the highest court in New York State revoked the charter of the North River Sugar Refining Corporation in this unanimous decision: "The judgment sought against the defendant is one of corporate death ... the defendant corporation has violated its charter, and failed in the performance of its corporate duties, and that in respects so material and important as to justify a judgment of dissolution."

Giant drug corporations -- especially ones that make a killing selling dangerous drugs by hyper-pathologizing people who can't defend themselves -- get my adrenaline going; and so my candidate to get the ball rolling is Lilly, which has now made themselves vulnerable by getting in so much damn trouble. But with Lilly's man Mitch Daniels currently governor of Lilly's home state, Lilly still has pull; and so I won't be upset if some other giant sleazebag corporation receives the death penalty before Lilly.

Given the fact that Americans already have a history of revoking corporate charters, why shouldn't this practice be continued? Yes we did, yes we still can, and so yes let's do it.

Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and author of Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007).His Web site is www.brucelevine.net

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/129709/