Alabama Court Rules Man Taking Generic Drug Can Sue Name Brand Manufacturer

By Candelaria US Recall News / January 17, 2013

Since the US Supreme Court decision in Pliva v. Mensing barred most lawsuits against generic drug manufacturers, it seemed that people injured by generic drugs that lacked adequate labeling may have no right to compensation. On Friday January 11, though, the Alabama Supreme Court proposed a logical solution to the problem: people injured by generic drugs can sue the name brand manufacturer who is responsible for the inadequate label.

Who Can You Sue for Drug Injuries?

Two recent US Supreme Court decisions have clarified the rules for bringing defective product lawsuits against drug manufacturers. The 2008 decision in Wyeth v. Levine stated that name brand drug manufacturers alone bore responsibility for the adequacy of their labeling. Although Wyeth had claimed that it could not change its labeling without the approval of the FDA, the Court noted that the Changes Being Effected (CBE) rule allowed manufacturers to change their labels first and ask for approval afterward. This made it the manufacturers’ responsibility to ensure that the public was informed of potential risks as soon as they became known.

Then in 2011, the Court revisited the issue with its decision in Pliva v. Mensing. In this decision, the Court decided that generic drug manufacturers could not be sued for failure to warn or similar inadequate labeling claims because the law required that generic drug labels must exactly match the label for the name-brand drug. Therefore generic drug manufacturers did not have the power to warn the public about new risks. This apparently made generic drug manufacturers nearly immune to failure to warn lawsuits and left people injured by generic drugs without a legal option for compensation.

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