DON'T believe all the hype, the drug company executives insisted --

our best-selling product isn't everything it's cracked up to be.

A consultant psychiatrist, Dr Ian Pullen from Edinburgh, sat alongside

them as they spent an hour-and-a-half yesterday trying to convince me.

He wasn't there to check on their sanity; the drug in question was

Prozac and the people from Dista pharmaceuticals had decided that its

reputation as the feelgood pill of the nineties required a

damage-limitation exercise.

Prozac's see-saw reputation is on an upswing in the US because of a

book written by psychiatrist Peter Kramer, enthusiastically describing

the experiences of his patients after he started prescribing the

anti-depressant.

Three years ago Prozac was under attack over claims that it provoked

suicidal preoccupations and aggression. Dista, a subsidiary of the

American company Eli Lilly, now says this has been laid to rest after

scrutiny of the data by the US Food and Drugs Administration and

Britain's Medicines Control Agency.

No damages claims have succeeded, nor have attempts by 42 people

accused of murder or assault to cite their use of Prozac as a defence.

The anti-Prozac bandwagon has been helped along by the Church of

Scientology, which opposes all conventional psychiatric treatment; one

reason, says Dista marketing chief Gordon Taylor, is that it offers its

own, costly, form of help for troubled minds.

Now the bandwagon is hurtling in the opposite direction, and Mr

Kramer's use of Prozac in the cause of what he has termed ''cosmetic

psychopharmacology'' has raised fears that more-or-less healthy people

will use the drug to boost their egos and assertiveness.

Prozac is a relatively new type of anti-depressant which works by

sustaining the level of the chemical messenger serotonin in the brain.

There are four available, but it is Prozac that hits headlines and

appears on T-shirts in New York.

So is Mr Kramer's support in his best-seller Listening to Prozac

embarrassing Dista all the way to the bank?

''Not at all,'' said Dr Gordon Coutts, the company's medical director.

''I am sure most doctors prescribe the drug responsibly. We dissociate

ourselves from Kramer's book. His evidence is anecdotal. There is no

credible evidence that Prozac is a personality-altering drug.''