Furious Seasons

December 14, 2009

Report: Glaxo Paid Out $1 Billion To Settle Paxil Lawsuits

Doing some good old-fashioned reporting and document sleuthing, reporters at Bloomberg have totaled up all the payouts and settlements made by GlaxoSmithKline over the years involving Paxil and they find the total to be $1 billion. That's a stunning amount--Lilly's total legal payouts for Prozac are rumored to be about $50 million--and one GSK has kept quiet for a long time. It should be a huge red flag to doctors who continue to prescribe this drug as if there are no risks attached to its use and to patients who willingly take the drug. It would also make Paxil the anti-depressant whose maker has been forced to make the largest legal payouts to settle claims, as far as I know.

The Paxil lawsuits have fallen into three areas: suicide, birth defects and withdrawal. Yes, there's something especially special about Paxil. You can read the article for details of the payouts and the cases involved. The numbers are staggering: 3,200 withdrawal/addiction settlements; 150 cases of suicide and 300 of suicide attempts settled; 12 birth defects cases settled or with a jury verdict against GSK; 600 birth defects cases to go; and, a slew of British users still suing GSK over withdrawal and other problems.

Noted one attorney:

"'Paxil’s been different from most drugs,' said Pogust, a lawyer from Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, who is handling suicide and withdrawal cases. 'You’ve had three major personal injury litigations over one drug -- the suicide, the birth defect and the withdrawal cases. To have three significant problems with one drug is really unusual.'"

I don't think a single anti-depressant has been implicated quite as strongly as Paxil has been. Implications for doctors?

"'It’s important to disclose such settlements because it raises the red flag for both doctors and patients that there might be a problem,' said Dan Carlat, a psychiatrist at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston who writes and edits a blog and a monthly Psychiatry Report. 'It would motivate doctors to dig into the literature even more before prescribing these drugs.'"

I'm sure a psychiatrist such as Carlat would do some digging, but sadly I fear too many of his psych colleagues and even many more PCPs and internists are either too lazy, too incurious or too overwhelmed with work to do the same kind of digging. Maybe I'm being too cynical, but that's what I've seen in mainstream medicine when it comes to anti-depressants and their problems.

As for Paxil, I've had psychiatrists I know tell me they'd like to see the drug remove from market or banned. I tend to lean in their direction. One wonders where the FDA has been the whole time while GSK was settling lawsuits.

Posted by Philip Dawdy at December 14, 2009 12:03 AM

del.icio.us Digg it reddit

Comments

Paxil... nasty stuff!

Posted by: Gledwood at December 14, 2009 03:57 AM

Too bad everyone who has been damaged by an SSRI can't get a lawyer. And once you've been poly-drugged, you can forget it.

Posted by: Damaged at December 14, 2009 04:36 AM

The sleuths at Bloomberg forgot to mention that, in a civil trial, Paxil was found to be the cause of a murder-suicide. Over 6 million dollars was awarded.

http://www.ssristories.com/show.php?item=240

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4236200,00.html

'Four people dead is four too many'

Don Schell was taking a Prozac-type antidepressant when he killed his wife,
daughter and granddaughter, then turned the gun on himself. His son-in-law
sued the drugs company - and won £5m. Sarah Boseley meets him

Sarah Boseley
Guardian Unlimited

Thursday August 9, 2001

Tim Tobin was an ordinary guy with a wife and a baby daughter living in small town America and that was just fine. He and his family were simple, normal people, he says. They didn't want to be anything different. He and Deb, his wife and their nine-month-old baby, Alyssa, lived in Montana, but they spent a lot of time over the Wyoming border with Deb's parents, Don and Rita Schell, in the small oil town of Gillette. Alyssa was the first grandchild and everybody adored her.

Posted by: Rosie at December 14, 2009 06:20 AM

I think a lot of doctors (and shareholders) would be shocked by these numbers and that would be enough to get the docs thinking twice about pulling out the script pad for Paxil. There is no doubt that these numbers should be disclosed each and every year and not require some investigative reporting and speculation to get them in the public domain. They speak for themselves and don't require a lot of further digging into literature frankly, especially since so much of the "literature" out there is corrupt and flawed.

Posted by: Sara at December 14, 2009 08:04 AM

sadly I fear too many of his psych colleagues and even many more PCPs and internists are either too lazy, too incurious or too overwhelmed with work to do the same kind of digging.

Or maybe his psych colleagues have seen it work for patients in their clinical practice...

Posted by: Blackeneth at December 14, 2009 09:38 PM

If you heard that a restaurant had settled many claims out of court for food poisoning, would you eat there?

A restaurant owner would not be allowed to get away with it... neither should Glaxo.

Keep up the great work Phil

Fid
Seroxat Sufferers Author

http://fiddaman.blogspot.com

Posted by: Bob Fiddaman at December 15, 2009 12:54 AM

Glaxo is settling cases like mad now to avoid the jury trials in open court after they dragged the injured victims through the court system for years trying to get the cases dumped with the bogus preemption scam.

I predicted a couple years back that the birth defect litigation would be the battle of the decade and that if the trials ever started, Glaxo would settle because it would never risk parading those kids that were born injured in front of jury.

Glaxo has been quietly settling the birth defect cases since they lost the first trial, but with little to no fanfare.

In fact, the Bloomberg report was the first time I'd seen it mentioned in the MSM>

Posted by: Evelyn Pringle at December 15, 2009 04:18 PM