This is a consipiracy by trial lawyers assoc. plain & simple. This proves that these people are interested only lining their own pockets. What's the legal word for extortion?

"Enriched and emboldened after successful fights against asbestos and tobacco companies, some of the nation's top plaintiffs' lawyers have trained their sights on drug makers,"
Those SOBs forgot the word "guns" in the line "against asbestos and tobacco companies"

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Trial Lawyers Now Take Aim at Drug Makers

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/business/18XDRU.html

May 18, 2003
Trial Lawyers Now Take Aim at Drug Makers
By ALEX BERENSON

Enriched and emboldened after successful fights against asbestos and
tobacco companies, some of the nation's top plaintiffs' lawyers have
trained their sights on drug makers, claiming that many giant
pharmaceutical companies have hidden the dangers of medicines the lawyers
say have harmed thousands of people.
In some cases the drugs at issue have already been pulled off the market,
like Rezulin, a diabetes treatment from Pfizer that the Food and Drug
Administration has linked to liver damage and is the target of almost
9,000 suits. Other suits name some of the industry's current best sellers,
including Paxil, an antidepressant that plaintiffs contend is addictive —
a claim denied by the drug's maker, GlaxoSmithKline.
In some instances, teams of plaintiffs' lawyers are spending several
million dollars preparing cases for trial, in the hopes of winning
billions of dollars in settlements and jury verdicts from the drug
companies, which have some of the deepest pockets among American
corporations.
The lawyers pursuing the suits say that the Food and Drug Administration
has systemically failed to protect patients from dangerous drugs, and that
the companies have tried to hide side effects. But the agency says
medicines are safer now than they have ever been.
Within the industry, meanwhile, some experts on drug development say that
juries may be ill-equipped to make the complicated cost-benefit analysis
that the F.D.A. performs when it decides to approve new drugs. And
companies have begun to consider the threat of lawsuits when deciding
which new medicines to pursue, said Kenneth I. Kaitin, the director of
Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, a nonprofit group that is
supported by the industry. Companies, for example, have mostly stopped
developing contraceptives, which are very vulnerable to lawsuits, Mr.
Kaitin said.
Drug companies have always faced isolated claims about side effects from
their medicines. But the new lawsuits are much larger, covering more drugs
and many more plaintiffs. In addition to the 8,700 people who have sued
Pfizer, the world's largest drug company, over Rezulin, an additional
32,000 people have said that they may sue, giving notice to avoid missing
the opportunity to eventually file such claims.
Wyeth, another big drug company, has already set aside $14 billion since
1997 for claims by people who say they were injured by its diet drugs, and
the company has been informed by an additional 90,000 people that they may
sue. Johnson & Johnson and Bayer have also been been named in thousands of
suits. Drugs from Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly and Merck have also been
named in lawsuits. A spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers of America, the industry's trade group, declined to comment
on the wave of lawsuits.
With hundreds of thousands of people claiming that they have been injured
by dangerous medicines and deserve compensation, the drug makers say that
they are now spending several billion dollars each year to defend
themselves from lawsuits and settle claims.
The new wave of lawsuits has come at a difficult time for the companies,
which face heavy pressure over drug prices and accusations that they abuse
patents to keep less-expensive generic competitors off the market.
Plaintiffs' lawyers say that the suits have increased because drug makers
have introduced dangerous drugs and hidden their risks. In some cases,
documents obtained from the companies themselves during pretrial
investigations appear to back that claim. A note from an official at
Bayer, introduced this spring in a Texas lawsuit over the company's
cholesterol treatment, Baycol, was offered as evidence that Bayer
deliberately avoided studying potential links between Baycol and a rare
muscle disorder. "If the F.D.A. asks for bad news, we have to give, but if
we don't have it, then we can't give it to them," the note said.
Bayer stopped selling Baycol in 2001 after more than 30 deaths from the
disorder were linked to the drug. The company has said the drug was
marketed properly and is safe when properly used.
The industry's focus on producing drugs for chronic conditions like
depression and diabetes has vastly increased the pool of potential
plaintiffs, because medicines for those diseases are taken by millions of
people for years on end. And because clinical trials for new drugs are
conducted on only a few thousand subjects, the tests do not always
discover rare but dangerous side effects that surface after a drug is
approved, according to experts on drug development — even at the F.D.A.
"All drugs have side effects, and even the safest approved drugs have side
effects," said Dr. Janet Woodcock, the director of the agency's Center for
Drug Evaluation and Research. "It is very likely that the newer classes of
drugs in general are safer than older drugs, but you have to recognize
that many more people are taking medicines now than used to."
Medical trends aside, plaintiffs' lawyers acknowledge that much of the
momentum behind the suits comes from the increasing aggressiveness and
wealth of the trial bar. These days, the battle between drug companies and
plaintiffs' lawyers is no longer one between corporate goliaths and
individual advocates on a shoestring budget.
"We've got plenty of a war chest," said J. Michael Papantonio, a lawyer in
Pensacola, Fla., who is a leader in drug litigation. "It's a different day
out there. It's not like they're going to look across at a table from us
and say, `We're going to dry you up.' "
Plaintiffs' lawyers can now finance enormously complicated suits that
require years of pretrial work and substantial scientific expertise, in
the hope of a multibillion-dollar payoff. Scores of firms collaborate on a
case, with some responsible for finding claimants, others for managing the
millions of documents that companies turn over, others for the written
legal arguments, and still others for presenting the case to a jury. Some
60 firms have banded together, for example, in the Baycol litigation.
And even when they do not form explicit partnerships, plaintiffs' lawyers
are working much more closely together than they once did. At conferences
around the nation with names like "Mass Torts Made Perfect" — that one was
organized by Mr. Papantonio and the lawyer-celebrity Johnnie L. Cochran
Jr. — and "The Knowledge to Conquer," lawyers trade information and legal
strategies.
"The plaintiffs have learned how to communicate and share information,"
said Robert J. Gordon, of Weitz & Luxenberg in Manhattan, which is among
the largest plaintiffs' law firms in the country, with about 400
employees, including 70 lawyers.
In addition, the plaintiffs' bar has refined a technique in drug lawsuits
that it has used effectively against many asbestos companies. Lawyers file
a few cases with very sick plaintiffs in states and counties considered
favorable to plaintiffs, while building big "inventories" of less
seriously ill patients, or so-called pill-taker cases, even people who
have used the drug but are not sick.

-- continued --

If the lawyers can win large verdicts in the early cases, they then refuse
to settle the claims of their other very sick clients unless the
defendants also agree to pay the claims of people who are less sick. Under
those circumstances, the companies face a difficult choice. If they go to
trial in a case that includes a few seriously injured plaintiffs and
hundreds more who are less affected, they risk losing hundreds of millions
of dollars in a single case, frightening Wall Street and spurring more
suits. But if they settle cases without a trial, they risk being perceived
as an easy mark for lawyers.
Finally, the Internet and television advertising have made finding
potential plaintiffs much easier, plaintiffs' lawyers say. If a drug is
withdrawn from the market or given a "black box" warning by the F.D.A.,
indicating that it has significant dangers, "the plaintiffs' lawyers make
sure that word gets out," said Charles S. Zimmerman, a Minneapolis lawyer
involved in the Baycol litigation and other drug lawsuits. "We're looking
to make sure that people know they have a claim, and they know they're
represented if they choose to be."
Plaintiffs' lawyers say that their new aggressiveness has not led them to
attack good drugs. Instead, their new resources and methods have simply
made them better able to press claims in what they say are the many cases
when companies introduce dangerous drugs and hide their risks — which they
say the F.D.A. does not adequately monitor once drugs are approved.
The public risks have increased over the last decade, the lawyers said, as
the industry tries to meet Wall Street's demands for steady growth in
profits. Some doctors agree.
"Are there systemic problems with the drug companies?" said Dr. David
Egilman, a clinical associate professor in public health at Brown
University who often consults for plaintiffs' lawyers. "The answer to that
in some cases is yes," he said. Companies often hide information about the
dangers of their drugs, he said, or market them in ways that increase the
odds they will be prescribed inappropriately.
But medical experts who act as industry consultants say such accusations
are unfair. "I've never seen a situation where a drug company encouraged
the manufacturing of a drug that was potentially unsafe," said Mr. Kaitin
of Tufts. And yet, drug companies are pressing the F.D.A. to approve drugs
more quickly, he said, and those fast approvals can increase the risk that
a medicine's side effects are not fully known when it is approved.
Mr. Kaitin, and some other public health specialists, say that juries are
willing to make large awards in drug cases in part because the public
misunderstands the risks and benefits that prescription medicines are
supposed to provide.
No medicine is completely safe for everyone, said Dr. Kin-Wei Chan, a
Harvard epidemiologist who also practices at a clinic in Boston and has
consulted for both plaintiffs and defendants.
Because tests are conducted on a few thousand patients, drug companies
cannot immediately know every side effect of their medicines, Dr. Chan
said, but the family of a person who has been injured or died after taking
a new medicine may have a difficult time accepting that fact. "For a
family it's not one in a thousand or one in a million, it's one in one,"
he said. "But from a public health perspective, and I'm coming from a
public health perspective, this is something we have to live with. We all
have to recognize that we have to live with some nonzero risk."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company