Not seen to be done
Brian Masters
THE POWER TO HARM: MIND, MEDICINE AND MURDER ON TRIAL by John Cornwell Viking, £18, pp. 336 While the rest of the world's press sat hypnotised by the 0. J. Simpson trial, at which Californian lawyers demonstrated their readiness to tell any number of lies in order to get their client off, John Cornwell was attending another trial in Louisville, Kentucky, which only one local reporter bothered to cover. Yet this was just as venal, just as riveting, and in the long term vastly more important than the sad farce in Los Angeles.
The bulk of John Cornwell's book is a sober, well-paced and absorbing account of the trial itself, but his real subject lies beyond it. There are two heads to this. One is Americans' subservience to pills, and the other their obsession with litigation. Corn- well shows that the first threatens to remove all understanding of what is human nature, and the second to make cases of civil liability an amusing kind of gamble in which justice plays no part. Both tamper with responsibility and the decency of Western communal society. They fuse here because it was a pill (Prozac) that was on trial, and, according to the judge, money which found it not guilty.
Here's what happened. On 14 Septem- ber, 1989, Joe Wesbecker, 47, went to Standard Gravure where he had worked many years as a pressman and shot 20 of his colleagues, killing eight and injuring 12. Throughout, he acted as though in a trance, 'like he didn't have no blood in his body at all', according to one witness. Then he blew his own head off.
Wesbecker had been an unremarkable man, twice married and with two sons from the first marriage, a hard worker and prop- er provider. But he had a history of acute depression. A victim of perfectionist mania, he spent his life in 'hyperfutility', repeating every little task until exhausted, washing his hands compulsively, sometimes pacing up and down for hours on end. He was mocked by his workmates and felt resent- ment of the exploitative conditions imposed upon him by the new owners of Standard Gravure, who exalted profit above every benevolent consideration. At the age of six he had watched his grandmother carted off to a lunatic asylum, and his younger son was an incorrigible flasher, whose delinquency he nevertheless sought to remedy with tolerance rather than scorn.
Over the years Wesbecker had swallowed a dozen different mind-altering drugs, including muscle-relaxants and tranquillis- ers, in an attempt to deal with his prob- lems. In the summer of 1989 his new psychiatrist, Dr Lee Coleman, prescribed a course of Prozac, but grew alarmed by the deterioration in his condition which result- ed. Three days before the disaster Coleman noted that the patient was in a state of severe mental disturbance, and blamed Prozac. (Wesbecker was also buying guns and ammunition, but his distorted belief in their power to assuage is yet another American subject which would need an entire book to explore).
The bereaved and injured victims of this man's catastrophic moment of collapse or vindictiveness (depending upon which way you are inclined to view it) brought a suit against the manufacturers of Prozac, alleg- ing liability. Their ostensible aim was not only to seek damages but to ensure publici- ty for the drug's harmful effects.
Prozac is one of the 20th century's most successful pharmaceutical inventions, sold in two-thirds of the world. The defenders `That's the thing about America, the choice is amazing.' of the lawsuit were its manufacturers, Eli Lilly & Co, who stood to lose fortune and reputation if the case went against them.
According to the plaintiffs' lawyers, Lilly had already been negligent in testing the drug, by prescribing other palliatives to camouflage effects which they did not want recorded, and by ignoring or burying warn- ings from Britain and Germany.
They planted prejudicial material in the media, hostile to the plaintiffs' witness, Dr Peter Breggin, a known doubter about Prozac. They paid another witness for the plaintiffs, Dr Coleman himself, handsomely to review their documentation; they did not call this a bribe, but it had the desired effect of reversing his testimony in their favour. According to the plaintiffs' evidence, they altered the documentation of a psychiatric test to which Wesbecker had submitted. They even blatantly winked at the jury to deride evidence they found unpalatable. As for their own 'expert', Dr Granacher, he earned his income by appearing in court every working day of the year to spout whatever opinion he was hired to promote. He is not a unique speci- men; forensic/legal psychiatrists in the United States are wonderfully adept at playing with the labels and categories in their manuals, and woefully hopeless in understanding the springs of human behaviour.
It looked as if Lilly & Co would win the case, because it could not be proven that their drug was directly responsible for Wesbecker's murderous rampage, but that was not good enough for them. When the judge ruled that evidence of their guilt in marketing a previous defective drug be allowed in, they moved to have this squashed by a secret deal which gave each of the plaintiffs a huge pay-off, in which their lawyers would share, effectively pay- ing to have evidence withheld. Not even the judge was informed, which was unprecedented. When he discovered he had been duped, he sought to have the record amended, and the lawyers had to hire other lawyers to prevent him.
Not even the injured parties come out of this sorry tale untainted, for they, too, were prepared to be bought, despite their anguish and disfigurement. So much for the community's desire to right a wrong through the courts. I hope this excellent and worrying book is published in America, so that the purveyors of Prozac are made at least to wince a little as they count their loot.
The case is crammed with ironies, amongst which the most far-reaching is that a drug may be claimed to have an effect upon mood and personality by altering the chemical reactions within the brain, but that if it does, it's not the drug's fault.
To order a copy of this book at the special discount price of f14 ring The Spectator Bookshop on 0181 324 5500.
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