Evelyn Pringle April 5, 2007
For the last two decades, illegal drug marketing schemes have paid off well for Big Pharma. However, as the old saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and every major drug company is currently involved in massive litigation.
Some companies are facing thousands of lawsuits with a common complaint that the drug maker deliberately concealed the side effects of their products while illegally promoting the drugs for off-label use.
Off-label refers to prescribing drugs to treat conditions other than those approved by the FDA and listed on the label. It can include prescribing drugs to unapproved populations, such as children or the elderly, or in higher doses than specified on the label.
It is illegal for drug companies to promote a drug for off-label uses, but doctors are allowed to prescribe a drug for any use they choose. Almost without exception, the lawsuits currently pending accuse the pharmaceutical companies of influencing doctors to prescribe the product for unapproved uses.
On August 18, 2006, Bloomberg News reported that Wyeth has accumulated more than 175,000 lawsuits since the Fen-Phen diet combination was removed from the market after studies revealed that the drugs caused heart valve damage, and primary pulmonary hypertension, or PPH, a life-threatening lung disorder. All total, Wyeth has set aside more than $21 billion to cover legal costs and settlements since the drugs were withdrawn, according to Reuters on May 24, 2006.
There was a national class-action settlement involving claims for heart valve damage, but it did not include claims for PPH which are proving to be costly. In one 2004 case alone, a Texas jury awarded over $1 billion to the family of a woman who died of PPH after taking Fen-Phen for about two years, including $113.4 million in compensatory damages and $900 million in punitive damages, according to Wyeth's 2005 Annual Report. The case was later settled for an undisclosed amount.
PPH is a life-threatening condition that can require a heart-lung transplant. According to the FDA, PPH "results in death in about 40% of affected individuals within 4 years."
The Fen-Phen combination was never FDA approved for any use, which means every prescription was off-label. Patients were able to get Fen-Phen on the internet, and Jenny Craig and Nutri-System set up weight-loss programs where doctors would prescribe the drugs to customers.
And there appears to be no end in sight for Fen-Phen lawsuits. On December 5, 2006, five more women who took the drugs in 1996 and 1997, filed lawsuits against Wyeth after being diagnosed with PPH. When it comes to liability, a plaintiff's attorney, Paul Rheingold, in "Fen-Phen and Redux: A Tale of Two Drugs," says, "there is blame enough to go around."
The doctors who set up store-front Fen-Phen clinics and prescribed the drugs are obvious culprits, he says, and so are drug companies that profited financially from the fad and may have neglected to pass on information about deadly side effects.
On August 18, 2006, Bloomberg reported that Wyeth was facing 5,000 lawsuits over the menopause drug, Prempro, alleging that Wyeth misled the plaintiffs through deceptive marketing about the cancer risks associated with estrogen and progestin. As many as 6 million women took Prempro before it was linked to cancer in a 2002 study.
Financial analysts are predicting that, Merck in the end, will pay out as much as $50 billion for Vioxx litigation. On March 12, 2007, Reuters reported that a New Jersey jury found the drug was responsible for a plaintiff's heart attack and awarded $20 million in damages.
According to Reuters, the jury also found that Merck committed consumer fraud by making misrepresentations concerning the heart risks, and intentionally concealing safety information from doctors prior to the plaintiff's heart attack.
A large number of lawsuits have also been filed against Merck, over the osteoporosis drug Fosamax, and against Johnson and Johnson, over the Ortho-Evra birth control patch. The plaintiff's allege that Fosamax causes jaw-bone death (OJN) and that the patch causes blood clots, which in turn lead to strokes.
Legal experts predict causation in cases involving Fosamax and the Ortho patch will be easy to prove because the plaintiffs have what is referred to as a "signature disease," meaning a condition easily tied to the drug because it is rare.
The jaw-bone death occurring in people taking Fosamax is extremely uncommon. Kenneth Hargreaves of the University of Texas, noted the increasing cases in the April 3, 2006 LA Times. "We've uncovered about 1,000 patients in the past six to nine months alone," he said, "so the magnitude of the problem is just starting to be recognized."
FDA approved in 1995, Fosamax is a relatively new drug, and unreported cases may be higher than expected because doctors may attribute the pain caused by ONJ to osteoporosis, according to Diane Wysowski of the FDA's Office of Drug Safety.
Dr Salvatore Ruggiero, an oral surgeon and one of the first doctors to notice the rise in ONJ in 2001, told the Times, "Even though the chances of getting this are small, considering there are 23 million women taking this drug, we could be talking about a significant number of people."
The same goes for the Ortho patch. Blood clots seldom develop in young women of childbearing age. And legal experts say, for that reason, many Ortho patch lawsuits have already ended in confidential settlements with hardly a peep in the mainstream press, and J&J has made it clear to other plaintiffs' attorneys that the company is willing to cut a deal.
Experts predict that many more lawsuits will be filed because there are thousands of young patch victims who are still unaware that the patch caused the health problems. In 2005 alone, more than 9.4 million prescriptions were written for the Ortho patch, according to IMS Health, an industry-tracking firm.
The FDA says it has received about 9,000 reports of adverse events related to the patch, but the agency also acknowledges that only between 1% and 10% of adverse events are ever get reported.
There are over a hundred more lawsuits filed against J&J involving the Duragesic pain patch. The device is supposed to deliver controlled doses of fentanyl, a drug so powerful that high doses can turn off the respiratory center in the brain.
On July 8, 2006, the Associated Press reported that a Houston jury had awarded $772,500 to the daughter of a woman who died after a leak on the patch increased the dose of the painkiller, and the jury found J&J negligent in the way the patch was made.
Another fentanyl product that legal experts say will bring a wave of lawsuits in the next couple of years, is Cephalon's painkilling lollipop, Actiq. The product was only approved to treat cancer patients in chronic pain who are already on an opioid drug, because life-threatening conditions can occur at any dose in patients without a built-up tolerance for opioids. But a recent study by Prime Therapeutics found Actiq is being prescribed off-label nearly 90% of the time.
Fentanyl is reportedly 80 times stronger than morphine, and is a Schedule II narcotic drug, in the same category as cocaine, opium, methamphetamine and methadone, a class known to have the highest potential for abuse and overdose.
In 2004, there were an estimated 8,000 emergency-room visits for fentanyl overdoses, according the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Overdose can result in sudden death through respiratory arrest, cardiac arrest, severe respiratory depression, cardiovascular collapse or severe anaphylactic reaction, according to the agency. As of November 16, 2006, there were 653 deaths confirmed in the US since 2005.
In November 2006, the Wall Street Journal, said evidence obtained in litigation showed Cephalon had set high sales quotas for its sales representatives that could not be reached without promoting Actiq off-label.
Internal company documents show sales reps were regularly sent to doctors who treated no cancer patients, with free coupons for doctors to pass out to patients. According to the Journal, Dr Stephen Leighton, a general practitioner with only 3 cancer patients at any given time, said a Cephalon saleswoman stop by once a month and gave him about 60 to 70 coupons to pass out to patients for 6 Actiq lollipops.
He told the Journal that the coupons led him to try the drug for migraines and back pain and said he prescribes Actiq 15 to 20 times a month to patients who do not have cancer.
According to the November 3, 2006, report in the Journal, Actiq sales increased from $15 million in 2000, to more than $400 million today.
The consequences of the off-label prescribing of this product are far reaching. On January 22, 2006, the Free Press reported that the wife of a minister, a former schoolteacher and mother of three, was charged with involuntary manslaughter because she gave Actiq to a friend for a migraine, and the friend died of a drug overdose.
More lawsuits are sure to be filed against Eli Lilly since secret internal documents obtained in litigation by attorney, Jim Gottstein, from Dr David Egilman, an expert in previous Zyprexa litigation, prove that the company concealed Zyprexa's link to severe weight gain, high blood sugar, and diabetes for a decade, while Lilly promoted the drug for so many off-label uses that more than 20 million people have taken Zyprexa.
To date, Eli Lilly has spent well over $1 billion to settle about 26,000 Zyprexa lawsuits, with still more litigants waiting in line. Zyprexa has been linked to serious side effects, including diabetes, hyperglycemia and pancreatitis.
On January 14, 2005, a class-action lawsuit was filed in Canada with claims that Lilly also withheld information on the safety of Prozac. The plaintiffs allege that the reason Lilly failed to disclose the documents was because they showed a drastic increase in suicide attempts and other violent acts in patients taking Prozac, when compared to patients taking 4 other drugs.
All through the 1990s, Lilly swore that Prozac did not increase the risk of suicide or violence, while the company was quietly settling lawsuits out of court which made it possible to keep the incriminating evidence hidden with court orders, just as it has been doing with Zyprexa until the secret documents showed up in the press in December 2006.
Similar lawsuits are being filed against AstraZeneca over its antipsychotic drug, Seroquel, which reportedly has been used by more than 16 million people since it came on the market in 1997. The plaintiffs in those cases also claim that Astra downplayed the diabetes risks and concealed safety information.
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