In a saga which began almost two years ago, the New York Times reports a U.S. judge has finally ordered the public release of a slew of Eli Lilly’s internal documents about its big-selling “antipsychotic” sedating drug Zyprexa. The confidential documents became infamous when maverick Alaska civil rights lawyer Jim Gottstein of the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights, with debated legality, released them onto the internet, prompting first a series of NY Times articles and then injunctions against websites from Eli Lilly. (See previous articles on the topic here and also here.) This latest decision, wrote the Times, “came as part of a ruling that gave class-action status to a case brought by insurance companies, pension funds and unions that want Lilly to repay them billions of dollars they spent on the drug. They contend that Lilly hid the side effects of the drug and marketed it for unapproved uses.” Basically, it’s a huge, momentary victory for the public, but the damning documents themselves remain a terrible example of how far pharmaceutical companies can and will go in deceit and manipulation.