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Meth suits target cold medicine makers, sellers
Cold medicines are the subject of several new lawsuits that claim manufacturers and retailers have long ignored the fact that decongestants containing pseudoephedrine are being used to produce the highly addictive street drug crystal meth. The suits claim pharmaceutical companies knew, and chose to ignore, that their products were being used illegally. Plaintiffs argue that when sales skyrocketed during the last 10 years, the companies musthave known the number of people with colds did not increase that much. Yet the explosion of meth addition during that same period was well documented. ... "Products liability law does not attach liability to everything that is dangerous or has some hazard," agreed Carl Bogus, a products liability law professor at Roger Williams University Law School in Bristol, R.I. "The question is whether it's unreasonably dangerous or defective," he continued. "And deciding whether it's unreasonably dangerous requires a weighing of social benefits and risks. Certainly, any drug has certain risks. Sudafed has certain risks, and this may be one of the risks. But Sudafed has important benefits. So, to win, the plaintiff is going to have to establish not only that it has a risk but that the risks outweigh the benefits and, that if you took this off the market or made it by prescription, there would be more social good thatwould flow from that than the reverse. "That's going to be a tough sell," Bogus said.
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