State supreme court rules in fa­vor of Eli Lil­ly in case over warn­ing pa­tients of risks when DTC ads are in play

In a con­tentious case cen­ter­ing on prod­uct li­a­bil­i­ty, Wash­ing­ton state’s top court re­cent­ly ruled that Eli Lil­ly and oth­er drug­mak­ers do not need to pro­vide spe­cif­ic warn­ings to pa­tients, in ad­di­tion to the warn­ings they pro­vide to pre­scrib­ing physi­cians re­gard­ing the side ef­fects of drugs, even if a drug is ad­ver­tised di­rect­ly to pa­tients.

The suit in ques­tion in­volved David Dearinger, who suf­fered a stroke that caused him per­ma­nent dis­abil­i­ties less than two hours af­ter tak­ing Lil­ly’s erec­tile dys­func­tion drug Cialis. Dearinger sued Lil­ly in fed­er­al court un­der the Wash­ing­ton prod­ucts li­a­bil­i­ty act, claim­ing Lil­ly knew or should have known Cialis pre­sent­ed a risk of stroke to its users and failed to ad­e­quate­ly warn users of this risk.

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