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.
Related posts:
Posted in Furious Seasons