Lawsuits help guarantee drug safety, doctors say
August 16, 2008 By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR , Associated Press Writer(AP) -- Top doctors at the helm of one of the nation's most influential medical journals are giving the Supreme Court some unsolicited legal advice about a major case.
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The argument going on here is about whether a company can claim immunity from prosecution if a State body has pronounced their product safe. That is almost trivially true. If the State creates the hurdles over which producers must jump in order to have their products licensed and the producers duly jump the hurdles, then what more can we reasonably ask? OF THE PRODUCER.
Clearly the fault here lies not with the Producer, who has apparently met all legal requirements, but with the legal requirements themselves. If, as in this case, the producer was not obliged by law to issue the kind of warnings the plaintiff is complaining about then the obvious question for the Jury is "should those warnings have been mandatory" and if the answer to that is "yes", then the guilty party here is not the producer but the FDA.
This, of course, means that the FDA should be in the dock, not the company. And that requires the State to give up the last vestiges of the "Divine Right of Kings" by which it decrees that it is itself beyond the rule of Law and cannot be prosecuted...