US Court Ruling May Curb Drug Suit “Tourism”
Last week’s 8-1 ruling by the US Supreme Court in a long-running case brought against Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) and California-based drug distributor McKesson Corp – which could bar patients from suing drugmakers in states other than their own – has given healthcare group Johnson & Johnson (J&J) hope of reversing recent judgments and deflecting pending lawsuits against it.
In the litigation against BMS and McKesson decided in the final instance on Jun. 19, the US Supreme Court reversed a California Supreme Court decision that out-of-state patients could sue for harm allegedly caused by the blood thinner Plavix just because patients in the state had also taken the medication.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion: “For a court to exercise specific jurisdiction over a claim there must be an affiliation between the forum and the underlying controversy, principally, an activity or an occurrence that takes place in the forum state.”
Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, Circuit Judge Rex Burlison, hearing a case against J&J in St. Louis, Missouri, in which two of the three patients were from another state, granted the company’s motion to declare a mistrial. HHHowever, he left the door open for the plaintiffs to argue they still have jurisdiction.
In favor of St. Louis, one lawyer for the plaintiffs said he would argue that Missouri courts still have jurisdiction as J&J used a bottler based in the state to package its talc products.
The healthcare giant last year lost at least three lawsuits brought by patients in the state, claiming that its talc-based baby powder caused their cancer, while winning another earlier this year. According to reports, its efforts to move talc cases out of St. Louis, which it has called “overly plaintiff-friendly,” were rejected by the Missouri Supreme Court earlier this year.
Along with the J&J talc cases, large-scale litigation alleging injuries from Bayer’s Essure birth control device in Missouri and California and GlaxoSmithKline's antidepressant Paxil in California and Illinois have been cited by US media as examples of other cases where defendants could leverage the Supreme Court decision to fend off litigation.
