HELENA -- The states are starting to pile up against Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly over the marketing of its blockbuster mental-health drug Zyprexa.

Less than a month after Pennsylvania joined a multi-state lawsuit seeking reimbursement from Lilly to its medicaid program over the alleged mismarketing, Montana today filed a similar complaint.

Attorney General Mike McGrath alleges Lilly gave kickbacks to doctors and promoted the drug, approved for use as an antipsychotic, as a sedative for the elderly. Marketing drugs for uses other than those approved by the FDA, known as off-label, is a federal crime.

McGrath's complaint alleges that Lilly "instructed its representatives to minimize and misrepresent the dangers of Zyprexa." Such a strategy "was designed and intended to maximize company profits," McGrath's filing added.

Montana is now the seventh state to sue Eli Lilly over allegedly promoting off-label uses of Zyprexa and the second in 2007 after Pennsylvania. Lilly also faces a federal probe into off-label marketing.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan and her Vermont counterpart William H. Sorrell both recently stepped up their investigations of Lilly's promotions of Zyprexa, as reported by LegalNewsLine in late January.

Madigan and Sorrell both demanded that Lilly hand over marketing documents for Zyprexa as part of their own investigations. Neither has yet signed onto the seven-state suit, which also includes Louisiana, West Virginia, Alaska, New Mexico and Mississippi.

Zyprexa sold $4.36 billion worldwide in 2006, as much as half of it estimated to be through off-label sales. That's because, unlike off-label marketing, off-label prescribing is not illegal.

McGrath's suit claim Eli Lilly created a 280-person sales force charged with selling Zyprexa to nursing homes and long-term care facilities while downplaying its associated risks. Zyprexa use has been linked to weight gain and higher rates of diabetes.

Critics of the states' actions against Eli Lilly claim
the attorneys general are piling on the company in hopes of forcing a big-dollar settlement.

Eli Lilly said in a regulatory filing last month that it had settled about 28,500 individual claims by Zyprexa users for about $1.2 billion, Bloomberg News reported.