Supreme Court’s Generic Drug Injustice

Supreme Court’s Generic Drug Injustice

ABC News with Diane Sawyer on Tuesday finally gave badly overdue mainstream media airtime to the tremendous injustice the Supreme Court has done to victims of generic drugs. More than 80 percent of prescription drugs consumed in the country are generic, so the overwhelming majority of drug-induced injuries result from generic drugs. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in 2011 (Pliva v. Mensing) that victims of generic drugs were not entitled to compensation from the company that made the drug which hurt them. The court essentially ruled that multiple-billion-dollar Generic companies were helpless but to reap enormous profits while simultaneously carrying no responsibility for their products.

No corporation in the world can be allowed to reap profits from the blood of the very people who trust and use their product without being simultaneously responsible for the content of the product they make. Adding insult to injury, many generic companies aren’t even American-based, and their profits leave our country. A government which fails to protect its own people from multi-national corporations is practicing taxation without representation. If the so-called Tea Party stood for what its namesake implies, and hadn’t been co-opted by the Koch brothers and other corporate giants, it might take note. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue, though the five Republican-appointed members of the highest court all voted to protect multiple-national drug makers at the expense of the people who fund the FDA and pay for the drugs which often cause more problems than they solve.

The system isn’t perfect and nobody can reasonably expect that it should be; but Tort law was in place to protect people from corporations for 100 years until the court turned common sense and natural law on its head with Mensing.

We pray the extreme five will reconsider Mensing as it debates Bartlett. We pray the court comes to its senses and realizes its Mensing decision was a catastrophic miscarriage of justice.