Paxil-CR Lawsuit and Litigation
Paxil-CR Information
Paxil-CR Lawsuit and Litigation
Paxil Follows Prozac Into Courtroom
The maker of Paxil will be in a Wyoming courtroom next week to defend its antidepressant against charges that the drug caused a user to shoot three family members and himself to death.
GlaxoSmithKline faces the same charges that Eli Lilly and Co. has beaten twice in court over the alleged ability of its drug Prozac to induce suicide and violence.
Set to start Monday in U.S. District Court in Wyoming, the jury trial will focus on whether Paxil triggered Donald J. Schell to kill his wife, Rita, daughter Deborah M. Schell Tobin, granddaughter Alyssa Ann Tobin, and himself in February 1998.
Schell had been prescribed Paxil for depression two days before the shootings, according to the lawsuit brought by two surviving family members.
The wrongful-death lawsuit says British-owned GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world's largest drug companies, was negligent and reckless for not warning doctors and patients that Paxil can induce violence.
Houston trial lawyer Andy Vickery, who tried and lost a similar lawsuit against Lilly over Prozac, represents the plaintiffs in the Wyoming case.
He won a key pretrial battle earlier this month when U.S. Magistrate Judge William C. Beaman rejected GlaxoSmithKline's motion to exclude or limit testimony from the plaintiffs' expert witnesses.
The plaintiffs have lined up Wales psychiatrist Dr. David Healy and Dr. John T. Maltsburger, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, to testify that Paxil may have triggered Schell's deadly rampage.
GlaxoSmithKline's experts include Dr. J. John Mann, a leading suicidologist who is a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University.
The makers of the Prozac-class of antidepressants, which includes Pfizer Inc.'s Zoloft, have never lost a civil wrongful-death court case against their popular drugs, though hundreds of lawsuits have been filed.
A victory by plaintiffs in the case could prompt more such lawsuits against the major antidepressant makers or force them to pay more to settle pending cases.
The Food and Drug Administration also could face pressure to require the antidepressant manufacturers to put warnings about suicide and violence on their drugs' labels.
