Another Group of Plaintiffs Drops Ritalin Lawsuit

And then there was one. Early last month Puerto Rico joined the growing list of jurisdictions where huge class-action suits against APA and the maker of Ritalin have reached the end of the legal road.

APA learned on August 15 that another group of plaintiffs who had filed a class-action suit against it and Novartis Pharmaceuticals told the judge reviewing the case that they had decided to withdraw it. The suit, which had been filed in a U.S. district court in Puerto Rico, also named the advocacy group Children and Adults With Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD) as one of the defendants.

The plaintiffs decided to withdraw their litigation while the judge was evaluating dismissal motions submitted by APA and the other defendants.

The Puerto Rico suit, along with now-defunct ones in California, Texas, and Florida, alleged that in the last several editions of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), APA defined the criteria for the diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, and then attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, in an overly broad manner as part of an illegal arrangement with Novartis to boost profits the company makes off the sales of Ritalin, its brand of the stimulant methylphenidate. The suit charged CHADD with receiving money from Novartis and then conspiring with the company to promote the use of Ritalin for children who show signs of hyperactive behavior.

Earlier this year judges in California and Texas questioned the charges the plaintiffs leveled at APA, Novartis, and CHADD, though on different grounds. After the plaintiffs in both cases failed to take advantage of an opportunity the judges offered them to improve their lawsuits, the judges dismissed the suits. The Texas judge ruled that the plaintiffs had not alleged facts sufficient to constitute fraud or conspiracy, and the California judge decided the case filed there had no valid legal basis and that most of the defendants’ activities that were at issue fell within statutes protecting free speech.

After learning of the decisions in those two states, the plaintiffs who filed a similar suit in Florida decided to halt their legal action before a judge could decide whether it had sufficient merit to proceed (Psychiatric News, May 18, June 15, August 17).

These developments leave New Jersey as the only remaining state in which one of these copycat suits is still alive.

In all five of the cases the named plaintiffs were parents who had purchased Ritalin that a physician had prescribed for their children who had been diagnosed with ADHD. The suits were alleged to be class actions, which the plaintiffs’ attorneys indicated they were filing on behalf of all families in their respective jurisdictions who had bought Ritalin prescriptions for children diagnosed with ADHD. The plaintiffs were asking for a huge monetary award that would reimburse everyone included in the suit for the cost of their Ritalin purchases. The suits did not name the makers of generic or other brand-name versions of methylphenidate.

Ritalin was introduced in the United States in 1955 by Ciba-Geigy, which in 1997 merged with Sandoz Pharmaceuticals to form Novartis. ▪