As I’ve written before, anti-consumer legislators and judges have so thoroughly eviscerated claims against pharmaceutical companies that in most states there’s only a single claim left: the claim that brand-name drug manufacturers failed to warn about the risks of the drug. For example, the IUD Mirena causes pseudotumor cerebri, but the label says nothing about that.

As long as the company warned about the risks of the drugs, they’re essentially immune from liability, even if the drugs weren’t properly tested, even if they were deceptively marketed, and even if the drug didn’t perform as promised. (Sometimes state and federal attorneys general can sue over drugs that were falsely marketed, like how Johnson & Johnson was just walloped for $1.2 billion in Arkansas for improper marketing of Risperdal, but consumers can’t, because those same legislators and judges have delivered mortal wounds to most consumer class actions.)

A slim 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court disappointingly killed the vast majority of generic drug liability last year with PLIVA, Inc. v. Mensing (#1 on my list of most unfair drug and medical device court opinions). Manufacturers of the brand-name drugs that are still under their patents could kill almost all of the rest the litigation if they just bothered to warn consumers about the real side effects of their drugs. But they won’t. As I wrote in November about Propecia, the pharmaceutical industry is simply too dependent on blockbusters and marketing, and so try to squeeze every penny out of each drug, patient safety and lawsuits be damned.

That is, of course, until the FDA awakens from its slumber every now and then and makes the companies fix their labels. Just last week, the FDA released two prescription drug label changes, one for Propecia, another for Beyaz, Safyral, Yasmin and Yaz.

Propecia (new label here, FDA release here) will warn about “libido disorders, ejaculation disorders, and orgasm disorders that continued after discontinuation of the drug” with the patient insert noting “reports” of “difficulty in achieving an erection that continued after stopping the medication,” the same sexual side effects in the consolidated lawsuits in New Jersey.

Yasmin / Yaz (new label here, FDA release here) will warn about blood clots or, in the uniquely hand-wringing way drug labels describe deadly risks, it will warn that:

[S]ome epidemiologic studies reported as high as a three-fold increase in the risk of blood clots for drospirenone-containing products when compared to products containing levonorgestrel or some other progestins, whereas other epidemiological studies found no additional risk of blood clots with drospirenone-containing products.

Yasmin’s patient insert is more informative than the warning label itself, noting, “Like pregnancy, birth control pills increase the risk of serious blood clots … Women who use birth control pills with drospirenone (like Yasmin) may have a higher risk of getting a blood clot.”

What Bayer, Merck, and the FDA expect consumers to do with that sort of equivocation is anybody’s guess. (At least it’s better than NuvaRing, which has those same blood clotting risks only they’re twice as likely, not that the prescribing information mentions that.) Given the financial incentive drug companies have to conceal risks, and how slow the wheels turn at the FDA’s bureaucracy, it usually takes a long time for labels to be updated to show their true risks. Hundreds of Actos lawsuits have been filed, but the Actos warning label still only admits “There may be an increased chance of having bladder cancer when you take Actos,” and hundreds of Pradaxa deaths have been reported, but the Pradaxa patient medication guide says only “Pradaxa can cause bleeding which can be serious, and sometimes lead to death,” without a word discussing the lack of a reversal agent or the comparative risk to warfarin.

I raise the actual text of the labels not to address their adequacy per se, but to address another issue near and dear to my heart as a plaintiff’s lawyer: whether or not a FDA labeling change is a “subsequent remedial measure.”Continue Reading Yaz and Propecia Labels Updated; Are They Subsequent Remedial Measures?

[Update: Drug & Device Law has also released their list of “best” cases, and so I have responded.]

First, a bow to my opponent. I reference the pharmaceutical company defense lawyers from Dechert at Drug & Device Law a lot here on this blog even though, as a plaintiff’s lawyer, I’m always on the other side from them (one might even say they’re on the wrong side of the law) because they write a great blog. They write detailed, passionate arguments about substantive issues of law, and they link liberally, involving others in the conversation. It’s not that I haven’t noticed you folks over at Weil Gotshal with your competing Product Liability Monitor (link nofollowed), but you need to add some hot sauce and link out if you want to roll with the big boys. Maybe it’s because Dechert’s in Philadelphia and Weil Gotshal’s in New York, or maybe it’s because we Philadelphia lawyers punch a little bit harder.

Now, on to the fight. Drug & Device Law has compiled their “Ten Worst Drug/Medical Device Decisions of 2011.” It must have been a Herculean task: from my perspective, you have to look really hard to find court decisions against the pharmaceutical and medical device industry. As I’ve written before, the deck is stacked against innocent people injured by these drugs and medical devices: it’s almost impossible to sue pharmaceutical companies for anything other than inadequate warnings on their labels (a claim that is itself in peril, even as drugs like ActosPradaxa, and Propecia warn of their minor risks but not their major risks), and it’s virtually impossible to sue implant and medical device manufacturers for anything other than violating FDA regulations.

Of course, none of the court opinions on the D&D Law list were really against the drug and medical device companies; no court ever rules that a drug company was negligent or that medical device company has to pay compensation. When a plaintiff “wins” a court decision, that really means the plaintiff gets a chance to prove their case in front of a jury. Instead, when drug and device companies complain about courts, it’s because they think the court should have dismissed the cases entirely, without a trial, without a word of testimony or a shred of evidence shown to a jury. The bulk of the cases cited by Drug & Device Law follow that pattern, with the defense lawyers complaining either that a court didn’t buy some preposterous defense theory or that a court didn’t let a company walk away scot-free after violating FDA regulations and hurting people.

Indeed, the D&D Law list of cases is revealing because of just how reasonable these “worst” court opinions are.  There’s been a lot of press lately about how more Americans are killed annually by prescription medication overdoses than car accidents; coincidentally, D&D Law’s “worst” decision of the entire year, DiCosolo, involved a consumer indisputably killed by a defectively manufactured prescription painkiller patch, and they argue we’re supposed to let the maker of that deadly product walk away from any accountability because the DiCosolo’s weren’t compulsive hoarders that held on to every used disposable product in their house? Because Janssen Pharmaceuticals failed to convince a jury of its ridiculous fentanyl fairy theory? What’s so wrong with letting a jury hear those factual arguments and deciding what’s true and what’s not, the way we’ve settled disputes since ancient times?

Let’s unpack a couple of these “worst” opinions and see just how bad they really are. 
Continue Reading The Unintentional Message Of The “Worst” Drug And Device Court Opinions

[Update: the American Medical Association recently posted an article about how “off-label” marketing is so pervasive that many doctors don’t even know what the approved purposes of the prescription drugs and medical devices are, exposing them to malpractice liability.]

The pharmaceutical defense lawyers at Drug & Device Law, one of my favorite blogs to throw rocks at (we went Jersey Shore over the Wellbutrin litigation a year ago), are at it again, this time attacking a legal theory they refer to as ‘FDA regulatory informed consent.’ Although drug companies aren’t allowed to market drugs for any purpose other than those purposes approved by the Food and Drug Administration (it’s called “off-label marketing” and it’s blatantly illegal), the FDA permits individual doctors to prescribe FDA-approved drugs for any purpose, creating a disconnect between FDA approval and actual medical practice. The FDA doesn’t do anything to regulate what doctors prescribe; the closest it comes to informed consent are its regulations for clinical trials.

Under the theory of FDA regulatory informed consent, physicians should be required to tell patients if the physician is prescribing a medication for a use not approved by the FDA. Jim Beck at Drug & Device Law thinks it’s a bad idea, and wrote his post in response to a new law review article, “The Case For Legal Regulation Of Physicians’ Off-Label Prescribing,” 86 Notre Dame L. Rev. 649 (2011)(online copy here), by Philip M. Rosoff, a professor at Duke Medical School, and Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a professor at Duke Law School. As Beck notes, most courts don’t accept the explicit version of this — i.e., the requirement that a doctor specifically say the drug or medical device isn’t FDA-approved — but, as Beck doesn’t note, some courts get awfully close. See, e.g., DeNeui v. Wellman, No. 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 114853, at *11–14 (D.S.D. Dec. 9, 2009)(“a jury must determine whether a reasonable person would attach significance to the off-label use of [the medical device] before deciding whether to undergo the surgery in this case”); In re Diet Drug Litigation, 384 N.J. Super. 525, 895 A.2d 480 (Law Div. 2005)(distinguishing Blazoski v. Cook, holding “While obesity is a serious condition, phen-fen is hardly its only cure. While phen-fen may have provided real benefits for those who took it, these patients were entitled to know of its risks. And it is certainly foreseeable that, if advised of the risks, they might well have chosen alternatives.”).

I’m unsurprisingly more on Rosoff and Coleman’s side. I’ll explain.

First, a little bit of background on the subject. As I’ve discussed before, intense lobbying by drug companies — including infiltration of the supposedly neutral legal research groups like the American Law Institute, which publishes the various Restatements — has whittled away at most of the potential claims against defective drug manufacturers. The law’s so hostile to patients that even doctors think it’s too protective of drug companies. (At the same time, those same companies have lobbied for absurd laws like the Prescription Drug User Fee Act that penalize the FDA if it doesn’t approve drugs quickly enough; unsurprising, that has made drugs less safe and more likely to be withdrawn.)

If you try to sue a drug company for inadequately testing or improperly designing a drug, the drug company will cite FDA approval and shout “pre-emption,” arguing that the FDA already signed off on the drug’s safety and efficacy and that the courts aren’t allowed to second-guess that — even if neither the FDA nor Congress said they meant to foreclose tort lawsuits. Defense lawyers call that dubious argument “implied pre-emption.”

Courts will too often buy those arguments; consider the lengths to which Judge Posner jumped to deny a toxic epidermal necrolysis / Stevens-Johnson syndrome victim a $3.5 million jury award. I’m not sure why he bothered with that long and winding factual argument, leaping from assumption to assumption and begging his own questions; he could have just said, “I’d prefer they lose” and be done with it.

In short: under a variety of names (“implied preemption,” “learned intermediary,” “unavoidably unsafe product,” etc) the drug manufacturers routinely claim that FDA approval is the be-all, end-all of drug safety, and so no injured patient should ever be allowed to sue the manufacturer of an FDA-approved drug. It’s thus more than a little hypocritical for them or their lawyers to now claim that FDA approval is irrelevant to patients. It’s the sole reason they believe they’re entitled to special legal immunities not granted to other manufacturers.

Although every defective drug lawsuit these days alleges a variety of claims like strict liability, negligence, breach of warranty, and violations of consumer protection laws, in the end most of the prescription drug lawsuits tend to boil down to one type of claim: the “failure to warn” of a certain side-effect or problem with the drug. The Supreme Court held in Wyeth v. Levine that failure to warn cases could go forward, so patients’ lawyers have held on to that will all their might. All the big prescription drug cases these days — Accutane, Actos, Chantix, Darvon-Darvocet, Depakote, Fosamax, Plavix, Topamax, Yaz — are primarily failure to warn cases. The Accutane plaintiffs allege that Roche failed to warn about side effects like inflammatory bowel disease and birth defects. The Actos plaintiffs allege that Takeda failed to warn about an increased risk of bladder cancer. The Chantix plaintiffs allege that Pfizer failed to warn about the risk of depression and suicidal thoughts. Et cetera.

Lurking under the surface of many of these cases is the scourge of off-label marketing. You wouldn’t know it from Beck’s critique, but doctors and medical researchers have long fretted about off-label prescription. One study in 2006 found over 150 million off-label mentions by physicians each year — totalling over one-fifth of overall prescriptions — and found that three-quarters of those off label prescriptions had “little or no scientific support.”

Worse, many patients don’t know that doctors are allowed to prescribe drugs for unapproved and unsupported uses: “A 2006 poll suggests that much of the U.S. public is confused and ambivalent about off-label prescribing, with about half the respondents believing that physicians are permitted to prescribe drugs only for on-label indications and about half believing that physicians should be prohibited from prescribing drugs for off-label indications.” (Source).
Continue Reading Off Label Drug Use Should Be Regulated For Patient Safety

It’s no secret that pharmaceutical companies are among the more litigious businesses in America. Up until 2003, when Congress stepped in, the big drug makers had a good thing going: whenever the patent was about to expire on one of their blockbuster drugs, they would file a new patent for trivial modifications to the medicine, and thereafter would sue generic drug manufacturers claiming that the generic version of the old drug somehow infringed on the new patent.

Here’s the kicker: the big drug makers knew these patent infringement claims were frivolous, so they would enter into a “settlement” in which the big drug company — which nominally brought the case to recover monetary damages — would pay the generic company not to manufacture the generic drug anymore. Crazy, huh?

So crazy and so hopelessly anticompetitive that in 2003 Congress amended the Hatch-Waxman Act to force the major drug companies to report all of these “exclusive-payment” patent settlements to the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC still keeps an eye on them and keeps filing amicus briefs to make sure courts realize how damaging that practice is. As I’ve discussed before, some unions and health plans, stymied by the Illinois Brick decision precluding antitrust claims by indirect purchasers, have tried recovering the inflated health care expenses by filing unfair trade practices lawsuits.

The pharmaceutical companies are also not strangers to deceiving the federal government; over the past decade they’ve paid several billion dollars in qui tam cases, the result of brave whistleblowers exposing the fraud at great personal cost.

So pardon me if I don’t think that pharmaceutical companies deserve a special exception from the basic legal responsibilities we all have to one another just because they claim litigation is expensive or because they claim that always tell the FDA the truth. That sort of special treatment is what they’re trying to get with “tort reform” in the Pennsylvania legislature, and what they’re claiming they’re owed in the courts:

In questioning during oral argument Tuesday in Philadelphia, a state Supreme Court justice characterized the drugmaker Wyeth as asserting that there is enough protection for persons harmed by prescription drugs in federal regulation of the release of drugs onto the market, and limiting plaintiffs to lawsuits for drugmakers’ alleged failures to adequately warn of risks.

Plaintiffs are arguing in a case that could change the landscape of pharmaceutical products liability law in Pennsylvania that drugmakers can be sued for the negligent design defect of their drugs.

Questioning the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Justice Max Baer also said that Wyeth asserts that Pennsylvania would chill the manufacturing of prescription drugs if pharmaceutical companies can be sued for the negligent design defect of their drugs. He asked the lawyer to address why that may not be so.

The case, Lance v. Wyeth, arises from a primary pulmonary hypertension death allegedly caused by Redux, a hopelessly dangerous diet drug that causes a host of medical conditions which was yanked from the market for causing valvular heart disease. No one credibly disputes that the drug should never have been marketed or sold in the first place: it combined two drugs known to cause cardiovascular problems. Had Wyeth (now owned by Pfizer) properly tested it, they probably would never have sold it. Had they properly warned doctors and patients of the real risks, no doctor would have prescribed it and no patient would have taken it.

If dangerous drugs were automobiles with defective air bags (like Gaudio v. Ford Motor Co.), or rollover-prone all-terrain vehicles (like Smith v. Yamaha Motor Corp.) there wouldn’t be a question of the applicable law. Everybody — you, me, lemonade stands, multinational corporations, and everyone in between — has the same general legal duty to exercise reasonable care not to cause injuries to others. If we don’t exercise that reasonable care, we’re negligent, and we’re responsible to pay for the damage we cause.

That’s how the tort of negligence works. It’s quite simple.

In addition to their responsibility to pay for all negligently caused damages, everyone who sells products — again, from the lemonade stand to the multinational corporation — has “strict liability” for all damages caused by defective products. Consider that defective air bags case above:

[W]e will briefly review the history of products liability law and the crashworthiness doctrine in this Commonwealth. Our Supreme Court first adopted section 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts in Webb v. Zern, 422 Pa. 424, 220 A.2d 853 (1966). To state a section 402A products liability claim in Pennsylvania, the plaintiff must prove that the defendant sold a product “in a defective condition,” that the defect existed when the product left the defendant’s hands, and that the defect caused the plaintiff’s injuries. See, e.g., Hadar v. AVCO Corp., 886 A.2d 225, 228 (Pa.Super.2005). A product is “in a defective condition” when it lacks “any element necessary to make it safe for its intended use or possessing any element that renders it unsafe for the intended use.” Azzarello v. Black Bros. Co., Inc., 480 Pa. 547, 559, 391 A.2d 1020, 1027 (1978). Because the key inquiry in all products liability cases is whether or not there is a defect, it is the product, and not the defendant’s conduct, that is on trial. See, e.g., Hutchinson v. Penske Truck Leasing Co., 876 A.2d 978, 983 (Pa.Super.2005), affirmed, 592 Pa. 38, 922 A.2d 890 (2007).

Gaudio v. Ford Motor Co., 976 A. 2d 524 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2009)(remanding for trial a crashworthiness claim).

But Section 402A of the Second Restatement of Torts has a pesky “comment k” for defective drug cases which says:

There are some products which, in the present state of human knowledge, are quite incapable of being made safe for their intended and ordinary use. These are especially common in the field of drugs. . . .  Such a product, properly prepared, and accompanied by proper directions and warning, is not defective, nor is it unreasonably dangerous.  The same is true of many other drugs, vaccines, and the like, many of which for this very reason cannot legally be sold except to physicians, or under the prescription of a physician. . . .  The seller of such products, again with the qualification that they are properly prepared and marketed, and proper warning is given, where the situation calls for it, is not to be held to strict liability for unfortunate consequences attending their use, merely because he has undertaken to supply the public with an apparently useful and desirable product, attended with a known but apparently reasonable risk.

Defense lawyers contend that comment k promises pharmaceutical companies total and complete immunity from all potential theories of liability except for a narrow class of “failure to warn” claims. Wyeth argued that the sole question is “whether the risk information conveyed to prescribing physicians was sufficient to permit them to conduct an individualized risk-benefit analysis.”

Nonsense.

The plaintiffs in Lance were smart to hire Howard Bashman, friend of the blog, for their appeal, and his excellent opening brief and reply are both online. So, too, is the joint American Association for Justice and Pennsylvania Association for Justice amicus brief.

The briefs quite adequately cover Pennsylvania law on the subject, all the Incollingo v. Ewing, 444 Pa. 263, 282 A.2d 206 (1971)(a Jim Beasley case), Baldino v. Castagna, 505 Pa. 239, 478 A.2d 807 (1984), and Hahn v. Richter, 543 Pa. 558, 673 A.2d 888 (1996) a drug liability law nerd could ask for.

Personally, I think two arguments should decide Lance v. Wyeth.
Continue Reading Pennsylvania’s Defective Drug Design Laws Hang In The Balance

If you were diagnosed with bladder cancer after using Actos and are reviewing your legal options, please see my Actos Bladder Cancer Lawyers page for patients. 

I wrote this post for my legal blog, which is ordinarily read by other lawyers. Patients looking for legal help should read the Actos page linked above. 

Personal injury law isn’t like running an ordinary business, not even an ordinary law practice, because of the risk involved in taking cases. Defective drug and consumer products lawsuits exemplify both extremes of our work: the cases are enormously expensive to pursue and require a tremendous amount of attorney time, but they also have the potential to be lucrative blockbusters.

Problem is, once a drug or product is shown to be unreasonably harmful by a study or a recall, there’s no way for us to know for certain what the courts will do with the lawsuits. We don’t roll the dice — it’s much more rational and systematic than that — but we have to play the odds. So it will be with Actos lawsuits: we believe the drug was inadequately tested and didn’t warn patients of the risks, and will vigorously pursue cases against their manufacturer, but the cases aren’t without considerable risk.

Consider the denture cream lawsuits. To paraphrase what I wrote last week while discussing asbestos lawyers, GlaxoSmithKline settled the vast majority of Super Poligrip claims, but Proctor and Gamble fought the Fixodent cases, resulting a judge dismissing one of the bellwhether cases on Daubert grounds.

One of the drug cases trial lawyers are pursuing these days involve Actos (pioglitazone), the best-selling Type 2 Diabetes drug in the world. The Associated Press recently wrote about the “wave of lawsuits” filed against Takeda Pharmaceuticals:

TRENTON, N.J. — The maker of the world’s best-selling diabetes drug is facing hundreds of lawsuits and likely a big sales drop as suspicion grows that taking the pill for more than a year raises the risk of bladder cancer. …

both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency have issued warnings about the cancer risk based on new research, but they have allowed sales to continue. Doctors are being told not to prescribe Actos for people who have or have had bladder cancer.

The warning will limit patient choices and could spell the end for a once-promising class of Type 2 diabetes drugs that debuted more than a decade ago amid heavy promotion.

An FDA warning that a popular drug increases the risk of any type of cancer or heart disease virtually guarantees the filing of thousands of lawsuits, and pioglitazone is no exception: it raises the risk of bladder cancer by more than 40%, or an “extra 28 cases a year for every 100,000 people taking it.” The irony is why Actos is so popular:

Actos, despite links to heart failure risk and other serious side effects, became the No. 1 diabetes pill after Avandia, the only other drug in that class, was found in 2007 to sharply increase risk of heart attacks. Avandia’s use was banned in the EU and sharply restricted here. Actos sales jumped from about $2.9 billion in 2006 to more than $4.3 billion last year.

Avandia’s restriction, of course, prompted its own wave of lawsuits, and GlaxoSmithKline has settled about 12,000 of them for around $700 million. Assuming the clients are on one-third contingent fee agreements, that’s over $200 million for the lawyers. I don’t say that to be critical; one of those firms, for example, recently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on an antitrust action just to lose and then also get hit with almost $600,000 in costs. It’s a big-risk, big-reward kind of business, and one of the few elements of society keeping medical products safe in light of the broken clearance processes we have for new drugs and devices.

Which brings me to one of the lessons this episode has for lawyers trying to build a personal injury or product liability law practice.
Continue Reading Lawyer Branding And The Race For Actos Bladder Cancer Clients