Prozac Generation (Part I)

A new happiness pill arrived and this time it was simple, legal and safe. After the Valium generation, here comes the Prozac generation.

Prozac is the registered trademarked name for fluoxetine hydrochloride, which was first documented in 1974 by scientists from Eli Lilly Company.

 

According to an article from the New-York Times, in 1988, a year after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Prozac, 2 469 000 prescriptions for it were dispensed in America and by 2002, that number had risen to 33 320 000.

However 40 years ago, depression was hardly anywhere, and studies suggest that in America, depression more than double from 1991 to 2001. Is it a coincidence if Eli Lilly supported a huge National campaign that alerted GPs and the public to the danger of depression?

Eventually in 2007, 20 years after the Prozac’s launch the World Health Organization considers that depression is set to become second only to heart disease as the world’s leading disability in 2020.

Prozac is now entered in the collective consciousness as a concept not just as a drug. Books were written about it as “Prozac nation”, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s bestselling memoire in 1994, that became a movie in 2001, or songs (Vanilla Ice’s “Prozac”).

 

Maybe it was too good to be true but since it was launched in the USA, the Guardian in 1999 considers that 200 cases have come to court in the US. As Prozac was prescribed by GP on the whole population rather than selected patient, some disturbing violent behaviors appeared.

The fist case to come to litigation concerned Joseph Wesbecker (see picture at the left), a Louisville printer who has been prescribed Prozac because of his depression. Few month after, in September 1989, Joseph Wesbecker went to his work with automatic weapons, killed eight and injured 16 of his colleagues before committing suicide. Eli Lilly won the case by 9-3. The defense was: “blame the disease not the drug”.

Lot of other cases came to court but there were all dropped or Lilly settled out of court, sometimes for millions of dollars. Indeed in 1999, Prozac was providing to the company with more than 25 per cent of its revenue, so it was primordial to hide this kind of adverse events.

Until 1993, when the Forsyths,, decided to get a hearing after their parents’ death and internal document belonging to Lilly were produced to court…