Eli Lilly’s Picking On Schizophrenics (LLY)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 17, 7:49AM EST

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Picking on people with schizophrenia would seem to be very unfair. If it is a large corporation, the odds against prople with serious mental illness would really seem to be stacked against them.

Lawyers for patients who suffer from the awful disease have uncovered documents that show the Lilly played down the health risks of Zyprexa, the companies best selling drug for treating schizophrenia.The drug can cause weight gain and increase in blood sugar, both of which can cause diabetes.

The drug brings in $4.2 billion a year, so it is not hard to see why Lilly would try to dupe the mentally ill and their doctors.

According to the NY Times internal Lilly documents are "replete with references to Zyprexa’s importance to Lilly’s future and the need to keep concerns about diabetes and obesity from hurting sales"

At least the attorneys for these seriously ill people have a smoking gun.

And, at least Lilly is probably facing a major legal and PR disaster. Not good for the stock.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.