AS sufferer may join oxycodone class action

For most of us, the medications we take to treat the pain and inflammation of ankylosing spondylitis are not addictive: the street value of naproxen, for example, is pretty low. But some of us have been prescribed opioids like oxycodone -- e.g., OxyContin and Percocet -- which are addictive. More addictive, in fact, than was previously let on: oxycodone's manufacturer, Purdue Frederick, and its executives were fined more than $634 million last month for understating the addictiveness of their drug. Now a class-action lawsuit may be in the offing in Canada, and a Cape Breton man with ankylosing spondylitis, who was prescribed Percocet, then OxyContin on top of that, and then turned to crime to feed his oxycodone habit, is interested in joining it, the Cape Breton Post reports (also reprinted in the Halifax Chronicle Herald).

Jury awards $47.5 million in Vioxx lawsuit

In November 2005 I referred to a Vioxx lawsuit that Merck won in New Jersey. A superior court judge granted the plaintiffs -- Frederick "Mike" Humeston and his wife Mary, of Idaho -- a new trial based on new evidence about the risks of short-term Vioxx use, and today the jury in the second trial returned a very different outcome from the first trial: they awarded the Humestons a total of $47.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages. AP story: Business Week; Houston Chronicle; Wired. Merck is facing 28,000 lawsuits over Vioxx (half of them in New Jersey), and they're fighting them one by one; they say they'll appeal.