Shark feeding frenzy - 2000 UK law firms dined out on legal aid budget, before the plug pulled on benzodiazepine litigation. Clients got fuck all !!

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/sociology/documents/soc02.pdf


extract -


From the late 1980s and early 1990s, consumers no longer accepted
drug injuries as inevitable risks of medical treatment. Following the Opren
litigation, during which the regulators had formed an ‘alliance’ with the manufacturer,
consumers increasingly looked to the courts, rather than the regulatory
state, to settle their grievances with pharmaceutical companies, while lawyers
responded by moving into medical negligence (Dingwell et al., 1991). In 1988
another major legal action in the UK began on behalf of several hundred
patients claiming compensation for dependence on the benzodiazepine, Ativan
(Medawar, 1992: 183). By 1994, 17,000 claimants and 2000 law firms in the
UK, assisted by the Tranquillizer Action Group, were involved in litigation
against manufacturers of several benzodiazepines due to alleged drug injury
(Dyer, 1994).
These legal cases probed deeply into the quality of the medical science
underpinning the drugs’ development by the pharmaceutical companies and
their regulation by expert government scientists. Consumer organizations
fundamentally challenged the conflicts of interest of expert scientists advising
the regulatory authorities. For example, the Chairman of the CSM at the time
of the Opren controversy had previously advised Eli Lilly on clinical trials with
the drug and within one week the Head of the British drug regulatory authority
became the Director of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical
Industry (ABPI) (Anon, 1984; Grasham, 1985; House of Commons, 1985:
1142). In this respect, Gabe and Bury (1996) and Giddens (1990) are right to
argue that this is a reflection of social challenges to medical dominance and the
growing contestability of expert knowledge. This is, however, related to a
deeper cause, that is, the mismatch that developed between the citizenship conceptualized
when these regulatory states were established and that which has
come to be envisaged by consumers since the mid-1980s. Indeed, such challenges
can be regarded as the consumerist expression of citizenship rights to
security in health, which the state was supposed to provide after Thalidomide.