Don’t put that pill in your mouth
The headache wouldn’t go away. Nauseated, my temples throbbing under the wet washcloth draped over my eyes, I asked my husband for aspirin.
Swallowing two pills, I absently thought, “Gee, these feel too big.”
An hour later, my headache was gone but my heart was pounding, my legs trembled, and my eyes wouldn’t focus. With a poke in the ribs, I woke Dean up.
“What did you give me?”
The pill bottle’s unfamiliar label revealed I’d consumed a double dose of a high-powered amphetamine-caffeine-aspirin drug we were later told was sold only by prescription in Hawaii. Accidentally, my husband had given me a kind of “speed” he’d legally bought at an airport kiosk in Alaska. I’d compounded the problem by consuming it without question because I’d trusted him.
We were both dumb.
We should have carefully read the label. Then we should have cross-checked ingredients to make sure that nothing conflicted with my prescription medications. If there were no red flags, I should have taken a single “experimental” dose to test my reaction.
Yet how often do any of us read the labels of the drugs we’re ingesting? Like most people, if I glance at the warning label and am not about to operate heavy machinery (When am I?), I don’t expect any side effects. My sensors don’t focus until there’s a recall and perhaps a death.
I was among 20 million people around the world who relied on Vioxx before Merck pulled it off the market last year after clinical trials revealed it posed heart risks compared with a placebo.
My experience with these two different drugs, ingested under different circumstances, convinces me I can’t trust anyone to keep me safe from bad medicine, not even myself.
But each of us must still be 100 percent proactive about our own health and safety and demand constant accountability from government regulatory agencies, drug companies, retail outlets, pharmacists and caregivers legally charged with keeping us that way. As I know first-hand, even well-meaning loved ones make mistakes.
The recent $253.4 million verdict against Merck for allegedly hiding Vioxx’s cardiac risks goes a long way toward putting drug manufacturers on notice that they cannot lie, cover up or even hedge about the dangers of their products. If they suspect trouble with a drug, they must halt sales immediately, or find themselves — as Merck does — facing thousands of lawsuits like that won by Robert Ernst’s widow.
The Texas jury which found Merck liable for Ernst’s May 2001 death after he took Vioxx said the company’s internal documents convinced them the pharmaceutical giant knew about Vioxx’s cardiac risks but hid that information from patients.
Merck maintains it acted responsibly and plans to appeal the Ernst verdict.
The five women and seven men who voted 10 to 2 against Merck in the Angleton, Texas, trial entered the jury box as ordinary citizens charged with a mind-boggling task. For six weeks they listened to experts, waded through thousands of pages of evidence — some of it highly technical — and debated vigorously among themselves as they struggled to do the right thing.
In the end, they decided Merck — which sold $22 billion worth of products and earned $6 billion of profit last year — negligently cost Robert Ernst his life.
In a post-verdict interview with The New York Times, Derrick Chizer said he and his fellow jurors awarded a large punitive damage to warn drug companies they must be honest about their medicines’ risks.
“Respect us, that’s the message,” Chizer said. “Respect us.”
Merck’s lawyers certainly should.
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