Over The Counter Drugs

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During a recent Surfin’ Safari we must have told the DDL Son at least five times to slather on more sunscreen.  Naturally, he engaged in the usual noncompliance-defiance and, naturally, now has a face adorned with a scarlet nose.   Years ago there was a famous commencement address built on the advice that everyone should wear sunscreen.  Sunscreen sometimes makes a cameo appearance in the news of the weird.  We learned that American Army World War II tins of sunscreen and bacon recently turned up on the Salisbury Plain (not so far from Stonehenge).  And we were brought up short when we read that some sunscreen products were recalled because they might ignite.

In this season of Summer Fun and marathon photosynthesis sessions, God Only Knows how ignorant and indifferent so many of us are about the need for sunscreen.  Do you use sunscreen?  (You should – and not just when you are reading the latest Lisa Scottoline thriller at the Jersey Shore.)  Do you know what the SPF (sun protection factor) numbers mean?  (SPF 15 means that only 1/15th of the burning radiation will reach the skin, SPF 30 means only 1/30th will, SPF 50 means only 1/50th will, etc.)  How often should you reapply sunscreen?  (At least every two hours.  Then Do it Again.)  How  much should you use? (Way more than you think.)

Who regulates sunscreen?  (The FDA.  Sunscreen is considered an over-the-counter drug.)

And therein hangs the tale of today’s case, Eckler and Engel v. Neutrogena Corp., — Cal. Rptr. 3d –, 2015 Cal. App. LEXIS 584 (Cal. App. 2d Dist. June 9, 2015).  Two plaintiffs brought slightly different claims that sunscreen labeling was misleading, and those claims were Shut Down by the California appellate court (one that really knows about sunscreen) on grounds of preemption.  Up front in the opinion, the court sums up the issue nicely:  “This case concerns congressional intent with respect to label information on sunscreen products: is it to be determined solely by the federal agency it charged with ensuring uniform labeling for those products, or, in addition, by each state through private civil suits.”  That formulation captures the need for preemption to ensure uniformity and to apply agency expertise.

Continue Reading Fun Fun Fun: Cal Court Dismisses Sunscreen Cases on Preemption

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This past weekend, we attended a fundraising 5K race organized by a friend who lives with a form of muscular dystrophy.   We volunteered to photograph the event, because the usual photographer was not able to attend.   And so, we didn’t run – something we used to do, if the definition is expanded to include a shuffle befitting Tim Conway’s character on The Carol Burnett Show.  Instead, we stood at the start line, snapping pictures and gazing longingly at the runners disappearing down the path. Observing our misty countenance, a friend asked us why we didn’t start running again if we missed it so much. In wordless response, we produced our yellowed and crumbling birth certificate.  To which our friend replied, “’Too old’ is a meaningless phrase – you will have to do better than that.”

That is exactly what the Court of Appeal of Louisiana said to the plaintiff in Jean Cooper vs. CVS Caremark Corporation, et al., 2015 La. App. LEXIS 1201 (La. App. 1 Cir. June 17, 2015).  Plaintiff purchased an over-the-counter allergy remedy at a CVS store. Before she used any of the medication, she noticed that the expiration date on the package had passed.  She “did not request a refund, could not remember if she complained to the store, did not take any of the medicine, and, by her own admission, did not suffer any damages as a result of the purchase.”  Cooper, 2015 La. App. LEXIS 1201 at *1-2.

We know what you’re thinking:  “This is the heady stuff of a class action lawsuit.”  Plaintiff had the same thought.  She sued several CVS entities, alleging that they “had a long history of selling out of date medications” and that the expired allergy remedy “had exposed her to health risks.”  Id. at *2 (internal punctuation omitted). Plaintiff requested an award of damages, as well as “injunctive relief to remedy violations of law,” and an order requiring CVS, inter alia, to stop selling expired products and to notify purchasers of “the true characteristics of the products sold.”  Id.   Plaintiff sought certification of the suit as a class action and requested that she be confirmed as class representative.
Continue Reading A “Too Old” OTC Product Does Not A Class Action Make

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This post is from the non-RS side of the blog only.

I didn’t know that the SPF value for sunscreens can reach higher than 100.  But they can.  As someone of Irish descent, someone who can burst into flames at the hint of sunlight like a John Carpenter vampire, I should have known that.  For instance, Coppertone markets a product called SPORT SPF 100+. I’m going to buy a case.

Now, some plaintiffs’ attorneys will tell me that I’m wasting my money.  Or, they might tell me that I have a lawsuit.

Or maybe I don’t.  Plaintiff Danika Gisvold brought a class action claiming that she paid an extra dollar for Coppertone SPORT SPF 100+ at Walmart, but it didn’t provide any more protection than Coppertone products with only an SPF value of 50 .  Gisvold v. Merck & Co., Inc., 2014 WL 6765718 (S.D.Cal.) (S.D. Cal. Nov. 25, 2014).  She thought she was getting double the protection, but she wasn’t.  She sued to get her dollar back and an order that Merck should issue a corrected label and corrective advertising.  Id. at *1.

Continue Reading When More Is Neither Better Nor a Lawsuit

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Bexis is pretty pleased this morning.  Almost eighteen years ago, to the day, he filed his first brief with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court challenging the negligence/strict liability dichotomy adopted in Azzarello v. Black Brothers Co., 391 A.2d 1020 (Pa. 1978) (in a case called Spino).  Over twelve years ago, he filed his first outright “overrule Azzarello” brief (in a case called Phillips).  Well, yesterday the Pennsylvania Supreme Court did precisely that – it overruled Azzarello – unanimously in an opinion written by Chief Justice Castille.  In the end, even the most pro-plaintiff members of the Court (those remaining, anyway) could not stomach the travesty that Azzarello had become.  End of self-congratulatory gloat.

We learned of this development late yesterday afternoon and published a very brief “breaking news” post alerting our readership.  At that point we had not yet read the Court’s entire 137-page opinion, Tincher v. Omega Flex, Inc., No. 17 MAP, slip op. (Pa. Nov. 19, 2014).  Now we have.  While it’s clear that the most obnoxious aspects of the Azzarello regime − the bizarre pre-trial procedure for determining “unreasonably dangerous” as a matter of law, the absolutist negligence/strict liability dichotomy, and the “plaintiff wins” guarantor/any element jury instruction (for those of you not familiar with Pennsylvania law, this is what jurors are instructed: “The supplier of a product is the guarantor of its safety.  The product must, therefore, be provided with every element necessary to make it safe for its intended use, and without any condition that makes it unsafe for its intended use,” Azzarello, 391 A.2d at 559 n.12) – have been disapproved, what’s taken their place is less clear.

On the theory that you can’t beat something with nothing, ever since Phillips Bexis had been advocating the Third Restatement of Torts as an alternative, even though there were significant aspects of the Third Restatement that could hardly be called defense friendly.  Yes, Azzarello was that bad.  The Court, however, did not adopt the Third Restatement in Tincher.  Instead, it has adopted a more mainstream (compared to Azzarello) approach to Restatement Second §402A, that in places is also informed by Third Restatement principles.  We’ll be discussing that in more detail.

Continue Reading Pennsylvania Product Liability – Azzarello Is Dead, Long Live…?

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There is no express federal preemption for drugs, right?

Wrong!  Today we expound on a flavor of preemption that we don’t often get around to—express preemption for claims related to non-prescription, over-the-counter drugs.  Under section 379r of the FDCA, no state may establish any requirement that relates to a non-prescription drug and “that is different from or in addition to, or that is otherwise not identical with” a federal requirement.  28 U.S.C. § 379r(a).  The “different from or in addition to” language rings familiar from medical device express preemption that we write on multiple times each month (such as here), and as if that were not clear enough, Congress drove the point home with the “otherwise not identical with” language.

So there you have it.  Express preemption in connection with drugs, albeit not the prescription drugs that usually occupy us, and not without significant exceptions.  The FDA can grant exemptions to the preemption rule under certain circumstances, and the provision does not preempt (1) state regulation of pharmacies or (2) any state requirement that a drug be dispensed only upon by an authorized prescription.  Id. § 379r(b), (c).  The really big exception is that the provision does not preempt product liability claims, Id. § 379r(e), so if we’re faced with claims alleging personal injury attributed to use of an allegedly defective non-prescription drug, express preemption will probably not come into play.

But that does not mean that OTC express preemption does not have teeth.  In Bowling v. Johnson & Johnson, No. 14-cv-3727, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 155899 (S.D.N.Y. Nov. 4, 2014), the plaintiffs alleged that the label on a popular brand of mouthwash falsely claimed that use would “Restore Enamel.”  Id. at *2.  According to the plaintiffs, loss of tooth enamel is permanent, making it “physically impossible” to restore enamel.  Id.  Based on this allegation, the plaintiffs alleged violations of multiple state statutes (the order does not say which statutes, but we presume they were statutes of the consumer fraud type) and the federal Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, which governs warranties on consumer products.  Id. at *1.

Continue Reading Express Preemption OTC

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As large swaths of the country continue to get pounded by a variety of winter precipitation, we know that there are many over-the-counter cold and flu preparations being consumed by our readers. We assume many of our readers have minor children who are taking the pediatric versions of these preparations after suitable review of the

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Do you remember way back yesterday when we posted on Daubert rulings from an OTC pediatric ibuprofen SJS case?  The rulings were in March but just popped up on Lexis last week.  We led in with a discussion of video games as a clever segue to the games some experts play. Really, no glimmer of recognition?  Well, the same case had summary judgment rulings that have now been “published,” so we are giving you a double dose.  See Newman v. McNeil Consumer Healthcare, No. 10 C 1541, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 113440 (N.D. Ill. Mar. 29, 2013).  As with the expert rulings, there is a mix of good and bad, but the bad gets stuck in our throat.  Dispensing with the lame medication jokes, on to the rulings, the good ones first.

Plaintiffs asserted a claim under the Illinois Consumer Fraud Act premised on “standby statements” from 2003 and 2005 concerning separate reports of SJS/TEN in children using defendants’ ibuprofen products.  This claim failed both because the statements were not deceptive—an obvious element of the claim—and because the defendants established the applicability of the Act’s regulatory compliance defense.  (The Act did not require that the plaintiff rely on the deceptive statement, only that the defendants intended that there be reliance, or there would have been another obvious basis where plaintiffs and their parents surely never saw the statements before using the product.)  As anyone who has ever participated in drafting any statements on adverse events knows, the line between saying something that will later be called an admission of causation and saying something that will later be called minimizing is a fine one.  The statements at issue described the particular cases as “allegedly associated” with the defendants’ product and noted that SJS and/or TEN, in general, “are associated” or “reported to be associated” with ibuprofen and other medications.  The FDA-approved label from 2009, when the plaintiffs used the product, included the warning that “[i]buprofen may cause a severe allergic reaction . . . .”  Under these circumstances, the statements were held consistent with the label and not “so misleading or deceptive in the context that federal law itself might not regard [it] as adequate.”  Id. at *19 (quoting Bober v. Glaxo Wellcome PLC, 246 F.ed 934, 941 (7th Cir. 2001)).  It was very sensible to not read “associated with” as deceptive simply because the label later said “may cause.”

The sensible approach continued in the evaluation of the evidence offered on the regulatory compliance defense—an unnecessary analysis given the lack of an otherwise actionable deceptive statement.  Without rehashing the discussion, which overlaps with the Daubert analysis at issue in yesterday’s post, the part that interested us was the use of statements from FDA in light of the inevitable allegations that defendants had underreported adverse events and generally kept FDA in the dark about the SJS risk of ibuprofen.  Defendants here were able to rely both on a 2006 denial of a citizen’s petition call for withdrawal of all OTC ibuprofen products—for once, not made by Public Citizen, at least openly—and deposition testimony of an FDA official.  The denial included the statement that “we have no evidence that there is additional undisclosed safety information that was withheld by ibuprofen manufacturers” and the FDA official did not suggest that defendants failed to perform any required analysis of adverse events.  Id. at **23-26.  With this back drop, the plaintiffs’ “slight, at best,” evidence of noncompliance could not be assumed to have “affected . . . FDA’s decision making.”  Id. at **26-27.  Placing the burden on plaintiffs to come forward with evidence that alleged noncompliance with regulatory requirements somehow invalidated FDA’s authorization of defendants’ statements was predictably fatal to plaintiff’s claim.

Continue Reading Recurring Intermittent Headache

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            We don’t spend much time on this blog on over-the-counter (“OTC”) drugs, but when OTC crosses paths with preemption in our own backyard, we can’t help but be interested.  And as this case also had a few other interesting bits, we thought we’d share it. 
The case is Crozier v. Johnson & Johnson Consumer

Photo of Michelle Yeary
            Since the first sneeze, people have been trying to cure the common cold.  While the cure remains elusive, everyone has a remedy for its symptoms – chicken soup, salt water gargle, fresh chopped garlic on crackers and, our personal favorite, the hot toddy.  But, do any of them really work?  And, if they don’t,

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No this post isn’t about Canadian pharmacies, Chinese counterfeits, or anything dodgy like that. Instead, we’re referring to a preemption topic we’ve never discussed before.

We can almost hear you scoffing. Surely, in over two years of “all preemption, all the time” blogging, that’s the one topic we haven’t missed. Wouldn’t that be like Court