Diet-Drug Suits Set to Make for Fat Wallets

It’s enough to give a pharmaceutical company CEO heart trouble. A Texas woman who claimed she suffered heart-valve damage from using the diet-drug combination fen-phen was awarded $23 million by a jury Friday in the first verdict involving the controversial drug. It may not be the last. "This could definitely open the floodgates for suits related to this drug," says TIME legal correspondent Adam Cohen. And you don’t even need heart-valve damage to bring a suit -- in Trenton, N.J., this week, jury selection began in a class-action lawsuit involving healthy plaintiffs. They want money to cover years of medical checkups, just in case.

It doesn’t look good for the drug's makers. The lawyers for Debbie Lovett, 36, sounded like they’d watched a tobacco trial or two in their time. They claimed that Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories, a subsidiary of American Home Products, knew the dangers of fen-phen’s dangerous half, fenfluramine, long before the FDA yanked it off the market in May 1997 -- and hid their research from an unsuspecting public. Which left the defense spluttering that Ms. Lovett’s obesity carried its own risks; she knew what she was getting into. The jury didn’t buy it. "It’s not like cigarettes, where everyone supposedly knows they’re bad for you. This was a marketed drug whose dangers turned up later," says Cohen. "Any accusation that Wyeth-Ayerst knew about it beforehand is really going to resonate with a jury." And with Americans, as a population, reaching ever-higher levels of obesity, that’s a lot of sympathetic juries.