Activists sue Merck and Pfizer

Healthcare activists in Massachusetts sued Merck & Co. Inc. and Pfizer Inc. in separate lawsuits over marketing campaigns for their arthritis pain medications, alleging the companies misled consumers by advertising benefits of the drugs while not disclosing the full range of risks and shortcomings.

The suits, filed Thursday, were among the last, large class-action cases to be filed in Massachusetts state courts before a new law, signed by President George W. Bush yesterday, required such cases be filed in federal courts.

Under the new law, which was backed by the business lobby and opposed by consumer groups, class-action suits seeking $5 million or more would be heard in state court only if the primary defendant and more than a third of the plaintiffs are from the same state.

Thousands of personal injury lawsuits have been filed across the country in response to health concerns about Pfizer's Celebrex and Merck's Vioxx. Existing state cases will not be affected by the law.

A Merck spokeswoman declined to comment specifically on the case and a Pfizer spokesman said that the company had not seen the lawsuit.

The lawsuits filed this week on behalf of Massachusetts consumers differ from the personal injury claims. They attack the manufacturers' promotional practices, including hundreds of millions of dollars of TV and print advertising targeting consumers that fueled explosive sales growth.

"These are prime examples of overzealous marketing and advertising, to the point of misleading efficacy and safety representations," said the lawyer who filed the suits, Thomas M. Sobol, managing partner at law firm Hagens Berman in Cambridge.

Sobol works with the Prescription Access Litigation Project, a Boston consumer group that has organized cases against drug manufacturers over marketing and pricing abuses. The plaintiffs in the cases filed this week include Health Care for All, another consumer group based in Boston. The cases allege that drug makers introduced Celebrex and Vioxx as major improvements over existing remedies when that was not true.

"You had a hugely aggressive marketing campaign for both of these drugs," said Alex Sugerman-Brozan, director of the Prescription Access Litigation Project. "People requested prescriptions and paid a much higher price, without actually knowing all the information about whether it was worth that high price."

The wave of litigation across the country followed Merck's withdrawal of Vioxx from the market in September, after a study of high doses of the drug in cancer patients showed an increased risk of stroke and heart attack. Vioxx, Celebrex, and another Pfizer drug, Bextra -- all in a class of painkillers known as cox-2s -- had been under suspicion because of indications that they had a negative effect on the cardiovascular system.

Critics in Congress and elsewhere have used the history of warnings as ammunition against the Food and Drug Administration, which said this week it would establish a safety panel to conduct post-market safety reviews of drugs. Yesterday, an FDA advisory panel recommended that Celebrex and Bextra remain on the market and narrowly voted to recommend that Vioxx be allowed to return to the market.

The cases cited a recent study published in an academic journal, the Archives of Internal Medicine, that concluded the aggressive marketing campaigns for Celebrex and Vioxx spurred sales to patients who did not need the drugs. The lawsuits say an unspecified number of patients could have achieved the same level of pain relief using traditional over-the-counter remedies.

Both lawsuits seek an award for Massachusetts consumers that would compensate them for the difference in costs between the prescription cox-2s and the cheaper over-the-counter drugs.

Christopher Rowland can be reached at crowland@globe.com.