Prozac: A Second Opinion
Prozac is one of the most heavily prescribed psychiatric drugs in use today, but there are good reasons to challenge its popularity. While this medication is primarily prescribed as an antidepressant, it is itself associated with depression, and other severe side effects, such as nervous system damage. What's more, its use has been implicated in suicides and homicides. To understand why this drug was approved in the first place and how the public became brainwashed into embracing it, we must first investigate cover-ups during the testing phase and then look at the powerful interest groups behind its promotion.
Worthless Clinical Trials
Dr. Peter Breggin, author of Talking Back to Prozac: What Doctors Aren't Telling You About Today's Most Controversial Drug <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312956061/foundatfortruthi>, believes strongly that Prozac should never have been approved. He backs up his assertion with a multiplicity of reasons.
First, studies were performed by the manufacturer's own handpicked doctors who chose to ignore evidence of Prozac's stimulant properties. Patients becoming agitated were administered sedatives, such as Klonopin, Ativan, Xanax, and Valium. This fact in itself, Breggin says, invalidates the studies, because whatever effect the patients were experiencing was not provided by Prozac alone. "Basically," Breggin argues, "the FDA should have said, 'We're approving Prozac in combination with addictive sedatives.''14
Second, researchers lied about the number of people tested. Eli Lilly, the manufacturer, claims that thousands of people received Prozac in controlled clinical trials during its testing phase. In actuality, the numbers were far lower, since those who failed to complete the studies due to negative side effects were never accounted for. FDA material, derived via the Freedom of Information Act, shows that up to 50% of the test patients dropped out of the studies because of serious side effects. In his book,28 Dr. Breggin reports that, in the final analysis, only 286 people were used as a basis for Prozac's approval. Significantly, Lilly has never challenged this information. "They've had me under oath in court," Breggin says, "and they haven't contested a single word that I've written in the book."14
Third, tests purposefully excluded the kinds of patients who would later receive Prozac - those who are suicidal, psychotic, and afflicted with other emotional/mental disorders. Even now, Breggin reminds us, Lilly could easily study how many people have attempted or committed suicide since the drug's release:
"One of the easiest things to study is whether your patients are alive or not. It's much easier to study that than whether they've gotten over their depression. That's a hard thing to judge. How do you know somebody's feeling better or not feeling better? It's very complicated. But it's very easy to see if a person made a suicide attempt or if a person committed suicide...Lilly excluded all suicidal patients from its outpatient studies that were used for the approval of the drug. They also excluded patients who were psychotic, who had all kinds of problems for which the drug nonetheless is now given."14
We are now reaping the consequences of irresponsible approval. Dr. Breggin has testified as a medical expert in an ongoing lawsuit, the case of Joseph Wesbecker, who, while taking Prozac, shot 20 people, killing eight of them and then himself. The data in that trial indicate that Lilly knew beforehand that patients taking Prozac were having much higher suicide attempt rates than patients taking placebos or other drugs.
The Medical Industrial Complex
Why did Eli Lilly and the FDA use trickery to approve a drug it knew to be ineffective and unsafe? Breggin says this happened because psychiatry is part of the medical industrial complex, which, like any industry, is looking to sell products:
"One way to look at this is to consider the industrialization of suffering. Getting Prozac from a doctor is very similar to getting a Ford or a Toyota from a car dealer. We are at the end point of an industrialized process with a product. Now, psychiatrists are like salesmen in the car showroom. We go to a psychiatrist and he's going to try and sell us a car, only the car in this case is a psychiatric drug, and very frequently it's going to be Prozac.... The FDA is influenced by what the manufacturers do and what the manufacturer tells them."14
Prozac is not the first pharmaceutical to be questioned after FDA authorization. Hundreds of drugs that initially pass their tests end up having major label changes - i.e., a major new warning has to be made - or wind up being withdrawn. In the field of psychiatry, the rate is especially high. During the time Prozac was approved, about 16 other psychiatric drugs passed inspection, and nine of these have since had major label changes. Breggin says that the FDA reveals the truth of the matter to physicians, but not to the public: "A few months ago," he reports, "I attended a full day's seminar put on by the FDA where they were openly admitting this.... They had a black poster there that said, 'Once a drug is approved, is it safe? No, it's not!' They were making the point that many drugs turn out to be very dangerous after approval."14
There are a number of reasons why dangerous effects of medications are not known early on. One is that the individual studies performed by the FDA usually have a hundred patients or less. Four thousand patients may be tested as 40 groups of 100. According to Breggin, this means that scientists are less likely to notice a reaction in one patient:
"They may think, Jane got depressed when she took Prozac but she was probably going to get more depressed anyway. In 40 different studies, 40 or more people may be missed. Perhaps a fatal reaction shows up once in 5,000,000. That's a lot of fatalities but it may not show up at all in a group of 5000. Or it may be missed. Eli Lilly was developing a drug for the treatment of a liver disorder. A couple of people died from this drug but it was missed in the early stages of the study. So, it's very easy for things to get through."14
Cont ...