June 16, 2003
The makers of "fat-burning" diet drugs are feeling the heat lately. A San Diego judge has ordered Cytodyne Technologies to pay $12.5 million to consumers who bought the company's "fat-burning" weight-loss drugs containing ephedra.
Judge Ronald Styn said the company overstated and misstated scientific findings and coaxed researchers to present their findings in a manner favorable to the company.
Styn ordered that the money, representing all the company's profits in California from 1997 to 2001, be placed in a distribution pool for consumers. He did not specify how it would be distributed.
The ruling in a class-action lawsuit is just the latest setback for the ephedra industry. The February death of 23-year-old Baltimore Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler was linked to the herbal substance, setting off a new wave of legislation and legal challenges to ephedra makers:
- The New York State Legislature is considering banning the sale of products containing ephedra.
- Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich recently signed a statewide Ephedra ban.
- The Florida Legislature has made it illegal to sell diet pills to minors. But the law does not take effect for another year, it carries minor fines, and it doesn't apply to all supplements.
- New Jersey-based NVE Pharmaceuticals is being sued by Kevin Riggins and his wife of Lincoln, Ill. Their son, Sean, had a fatal heart attack last September after taking an over-the-counter product called Yellow Jackets that contains the herbal supplement.
- The family of retired Texas fire captain Joseph Benjamin Farr Jr., 53, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Metabolife International, the Chemins Co., Alpine Manufacturing and G.C.R.S. Farr died March 26, 2000, of heart failure, after taking Metabolife 356, which contains ephedra.
- Diet book author Dr. Carlon Colker and several other people are being sued in three states on allegations of falsifying data to hide the dangerous effects of ephedra. Colker, 37, of Stamford, Conn., has been named as a defendant in lawsuits in Missouri, West Virginia and Illinois in connection with studies on Hydroxycut, an ephedra product made by Canadian company MuscleTech and used for weight loss and enhanced athletic performance.
In the California case, attorney James Frantz said the judge's ruling showed that drugs companies "can't make safety and benefit claims unless you can back them up -- and these claims aren't backed up."
