The Drug Companies Get Tobacco Stained

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is in a world of hurt. The Cleveland Clinic’s Steven Nissen suggests that Avandia, known generically as rosiglitazone, raises the risk of heart attack, in an analysis of clinical data. The drug is important enough to GSK that its stock dropped 6% on the news.

According to the Health Blog at The Wall Street Journal, Nissen has been turning up problems with drugs for some time. He has been involved in studies that found health risks in Merck's (MRK) Vioxx, Johnson & Johnson’s (JNJ) Natrecor, a heart-failure treatment, and Bristol-Myers Squibb drug Pargluva.

Nissen is just one guy. But, in the case of Vioxx, Merck has faced hundreds of millions of dollars in suits from patients who claim that the company was aware of the drug's dangers. While it is too early to tell whether Glaxo or any of these other drug companies could eventually have liability problems, that risk exists.

It also begs the question of how these drug firms, with their huge R&D arms, can claim that they have been completely unaware of the risks of their own products. This would appear to be more than a conspiracy theory, and may be a bit more like the product liability problems that Big Tobacco faced two decades ago. A company creates a problem, and then claims to have no knowledge of its risks. It is left to outsiders to surface the dangers.

It took tabacco a long time and huge legal fees to get past the perception that it knew its products were dangerous. It may now be the drug companies' turns

Douglas A. McIntyre.