Nexium class action lawsuits filed

Massachusetts consumers of the heartburn medication Nexium have filed a statewide class action lawsuit in Massachusetts Superior Court against the drug's distributor, AstraZeneca. The suit alleges that the pharmaceutical company sought to preserve their market share and profits as the patent on their blockbuster drug, Prilosec, was set to expire, by initiating a massive and misleading advertising and promotional campaign to deceive consumers into purchasing Nexium, a nearly identical new drug.

This issue has gained prominence since the recall of Vioxx by Merck. Experts have argued that Merck aggressively advertised Vioxx to consumers who were unlikely to benefit from it. Merck is facing hundreds of class action lawsuits related to Vioxx. Pfizer, the maker of Celebrex and Bextra, two other drugs like Vioxx, has also been warned by FDA about misleading ads and consumers have filed dozens of class action lawsuits against Pfizer.

“The Nexium campaign is a perfect example of a ‘me-too' drug being falsely marketed as a medical improvement. Adding yellow stripes to the Purple Pill only improves AstraZeneca's bottom line, not consumers' health,” said Alex Sugerman-Brozan , Director of Community Catalyst's Prescription Access Litigation Project (PAL)

“AstraZeneca's Nexium promotional campaign has resulted in billions of dollars of unnecessary drug expenditures at a time when rising drug prices have created a health care crisis in this country. As a result, hundreds of thousands of patients take Nexium when they don't need to or when more affordable substitutes are readily available,” said John McDonough , Director of Health Care For All, which is a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

“As part of its strategy to switch patients from Prilosec to nearly identical Nexium, most of AZ's clinical studies compared 40mg of Nexium to 20 mg of Prilosec. In addition, according to a 2002 article in the Wall Street Journal , AZ ‘won't release detailed descriptions' of two studies that showed even the higher dose of Nexium to be no more effective than Prilosec,” explained John Abramson, M.D., author of Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine. “Evidence-based medical care is not necessarily the best care when the scientific evidence is designed to optimize commercial benefit instead of health. In the case of Nexium, doctors and patients have been misled into believing that Nexium, which costs up to 7 times as much, is superior to over-the-counter Prilosec.”

Prilosec (also known as Losec) is a proton-pump inhibitor (PPI) primarily used to treat Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD) and was AstraZeneca's most profitable drug. By 2000, Prilosec was the most prescribed drug in the world, with annual global sales reaching $6 billion. But with Prilosec's patent set to expire in 2001, its loss of brand name protection and assured competition from generic drug manufacturers posed a financial vulnerability to the pharmaceutical company.

The lawsuit alleges that AstraZeneca responded to this financial threat by launching a massive advertising campaign to overshadow the perceived effectiveness of Prilosec, and persuade consumers that Nexium was a new and improved PPI.

“As a consumer, I'm outraged that a company supposedly in the business of helping people would put its profits ahead of my health and well-being,” said Glenn Crenshaw, who took Nexium and who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit. “Tricking consumers into switching to a drug that's much more expensive has caused millions of people fiscal heartburn and shows that the system is in real need of change.”

“We feel that AstraZeneca is misleading the public through expensive marketing campaigns that don't tell the whole story about Nexium and Prilosec, in order to increase its sales,” said Bob Master, Director of Commonwealth Care Alliance. “Schemes like this add to the runaway cost of health care and every dollar spent unnecessarily on expensive new drugs of dubious added value is a dollar less available for real patient care.”

The suit is brought by Health Care For All, Commonwealth Care Alliance, and individual consumers, on behalf of Massachusetts residents who purchased Nexium. Both organizations are members of the Prescription Access Litigation Project (PAL), a national coalition of over 100 consumer organizations dedicated to fighting illegal pharmaceutical price inflation through class-action lawsuits.

The lawsuit claims that AstraZeneca is violating the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Act, Chapter 93A. That law prohibits “unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices” by businesses. The lawsuit alleges that by deceiving the public about the value and effectiveness of Nexium through a multi-million advertising campaign, AstraZeneca has illegally deceived Massachusetts consumers and caused them to pay a premium price for Nexium as a result of that advertising.

Another suit has been brought by the American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the Congress of California Seniors, andthe California Alliance for Retired Americans, on behalf of consumers nationwide who purchased Nexium.

Other drug recall links:

Bextra recall

Celebrex recall

Prozac recall