Lawsuit Abuse Fortnightly #3-4 (pdf)

A Beaumont, Texas jury awarded more than $1 billion to the family of a woman who died from a lung disease it claimed she contracted after taking the diet drug Pondimium, part of the fen-phen combination removed from the market by the FDA in 1997. Only problem is, fen-phen has been linked to heart valve damage, not lung disease. Even worse, the judge in the case would not allow the defendant drug company to introduce evidence that the woman had stopped taking Pondimium four years before developing her lung condition, and that four other diet drugs she took in the intervening years did warn against that particular lung disease. From The Houston Chronicle and the Web site of the American Tort Reform Association