Daily Zyprexa Post

Noting that earlier Zyprexa lawsuits have included gag orders (i.e., we pay you off and you shut up!), a quote in an excellent post I ran across went like this:

So there you have it. My point, if any? Gag orders protecting the guilty should not be permitted as part of any civil settlement. Prohibit it by law, and we won't have to put up with this nonsense. If civil litigation is supposed to be a mechanism for protecting the public, it will work best if it includes public airing of the relevant facts and evidence. An outcome in which a few of the people who were injured get compensated, at the cost of keeping the truth from everybody else, is not in the public interest, and it should never be allowed to happen.

Good point. Every time we have a lawsuit, there is the potential for docs to become public. That’s how David Healy got access to files indicating that SSRI manufacturers were cooking the books on the suicide numbers to make placebo look more dangerous than it actually was. Yet in many cases, the documents vanish and hidden information about the safety and/or efficacy (or lack thereof) is again relegated to the company archives.