Arkansas Declines To Reveal Risperdal Suit Details

Ever since Arkansas AG Dustin McDaniel filed suit against J&J/Janssen in November I've been trying to get someone at his office to discuss the lawsuit with me. The lawsuit alleges, among other things, that J&J/Janssen cooked its clinical trials of the atypical anti-psychotic Risperdal back in the early-1990s (basically not giving patients who'd been on Haldol enough time to let that drug clear their systems before putting them on Risperdal or a placebo). As a result, the AG alleges that the company knowingly put a defective drug on the market once it received FDA approval.

As I noted then, this is a gigantic accusation, an attack on the central premise that Risperdal and other atypicals have fewer side effects than older anti-psychotics. What's more, if the accusation is true, then the State of Arkansas has identified a huge public health problem given that millions of Americans (and millions more worldwide) take or have taken the drug, causing the deaths of over 1,000 people.

So I asked the AG's office to detail its evidence for those accusations. Did it have documents upon which to base its claims? Was an expert on the drug offering testimony to the effect that the drug was defective?

Basically the AG's office blew me off and, on Friday, finally told me it wouldn't discuss the case. The evidence, a spokesman told me, was covered under a court protective order. He didn't seem very impressed with the argument that the state has a responsibility to alert the public to a public health problem. Nor did he seem particularly interested in my request that the state make the documents publicly available in whatever settlement agreement eventually gets hashed out.

We'll see what happens at some point. My own hunch is that the AG's office has gotten its hands on documentary evidence or it would have never made the accusations in the lawsuit.

No word on when McDaniel's office will file suit against Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca. It will be interesting to see if they make similar accusations about Zyprexa and Seroquel.