Zyprexa Ruling

Furious Seasons has a great post on the latest Zyprexa ruling. I won't even attempt to replicate his insightful analysis of the situation.

I will simply focus on one part of the ruling, in which the judge stated:

The harm faced by Lilly is amplified by the fact that the protected documents which respondents seek to disseminate are segments of a large body of information, whose selective and out-of-context disclosure may lead to confusion in the patient community and undeserved reputational harm –– 'what appears damning may, in context after difficult proof, be shown to be neutral or even favorable to the defendant.

Oh, SUCH a bad argument! So unless every single document is released (which Lilly will make sure never happens), then any document released is "out of context." Here's where this line of thinking may lead...

Maybe Lilly can use it to defend themselves regarding Zyprexa and diabetes. "Sure, studies A through Z showed a link between olanzapine and diabetes. But there are other studies which we conducted that put these findings into context. However, we cannot show you said studies because they contain trade secrets. In fact, we insist that all of the earlier published papers linking olanzapine to diabetes be retracted and burned publicly, as they are clearly lacking context."

This trade secrets and out of context thing is blowing my mind. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm glad about that, because I'm not sure I can come to grips with this type of thinking.

This is giving me flashbacks to the British Psychological Society's handling of the Blakemore Brown case and I think I'll need a "safe, gentle psychotropic" to help me handle the stress...