LANSING - On Thursday, Sept. 8, the House Legislature discharged a package of bills to end the drug industry's legal immunity from responsibility when its products cause harm.
"The unfair protection of pharmaceutical companies must end," said State Rep. Gary McDowell, D-Rudyard, who sponsored one of the bills. "Our citizens are being punished for trusting drug companies that are more concerned with the bottom line than they are with consumer safety, and that's wrong."
The Democratic sponsors of the bills requested a discharge of the proposed legislation because they had not received a hearing in the House Committee on Commerce. Discharging a bill allows the proposed legislation to be forwarded to the full House of Representatives without having to wait for a vote by the appropriate committee.
The proposed bills would repeal a 1996 law granting legal immunity to drug companies. That law gives companies complete immunity from legal action so long as the drug in question has been approved for safety and efficacy by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The bill was part of a package; a second bill would make the immunity repeal retroactive so that Michigan residents harmed by prescription drugs since 1996 can seek legal remedy; a third would include drug companies in the Consumer Protection Act, from which they are currently exempted.
"For too long, our residents have been put at risk by FDA-approved medications like Vioxx and fen-phen, only to be told by the courts they're on their own," McDowell said. "It's past time to end special protection for big drug companies that profit from drugs that harm and even kill people."
Michigan remains the only state in the country to give companies like Merck, the maker of Vioxx, impunity when its products cause harm.
Vioxx, an anti-inflammatory drug that Merck pulled off the market in 2004, may have caused heart attacks or cardiac deaths in up to 139,000 Americans, based on Merck's own studies. Because Merck knew the dangers Vioxx posed, a Texas jury recently found the company liable for the death of a man who died while taking the drug. The weight-loss drug combination fen-phen was banned in 1997 after causing hypertension and heart-valve abnormalities in tens of thousands of people nationwide. Bextra was taken off the market in April due to an increased risk of heart attack and serious skin reactions among the painkiller's users.
