As you well know, this blog doesn’t pretend to be a newspaper.

If you want news, read the Times.

If you want — well, defense-side rants interspersed with legal citations and weak attempts at humor– visit Beck and Herrmann.

But there’s one pharmaceutical news story — the proposed suicidality warnings on anti-seizure medications — that we’ve mentioned in the past (here and here), so we feel compelled to give a short update today.

The FDA Advisory Committee met yesterday and voted 14 to 4 not to mandate new black box warnings about suicidality on epilepsy drugs. The Committee was apparently concerned that a black box warning would discourage use of the drugs by patients who need them. Here’s a link to the story in today’s Wall Street Journal (which requires a subscription), but you can presumably find details all over the web.

The FDA is not required to follow the advice of its Advisory Committees, but it often does.