Products Liability Law Reporter

A federal district court granted dismissal for a generic drug maker in a lawsuit alleging that ranitidine, the generic version of Zantac, caused a patient’s Parkinson’s disease to progress.

Harry Davallou brought a products liability action against Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, Inc., alleging that his ingestion of the recalled drug ranitidine led his Parkinson’s disease to progress. The defendant moved to dismiss.

Granting the motion, the district court noted that in California, a prescription drug manufacturer may be strictly liable for injuries where the product is defectively manufactured or distributed without adequate instructions or warnings. Citing case law, the court said that to succeed on a defective manufacturing claim, a plaintiff must show that the product at issue caused injury because it deviated from the manufacturer’s intended result or from identical units of the same product line. Here, the court found, the plaintiff did not allege that his ranitidine tablets deviated from other ranitidine tablets manufactured by the defendant or that they deviated from the drug’s intended design. Moreover, the plaintiff failed to allege causation in that he did not specifically claim that ranitidine caused his worsened Parkinson’s disease but that his consumption of the drug and his worsened condition occurred simultaneously, the court said. To show a manufacturing defect, the court said, the plaintiff must show a plausible connection between the ranitidine he ingested and the worsening of a specific medical condition.

Turning to the plaintiff’s warranty claim, the court also concluded that the plaintiff had failed to allege that the defendant did not warn or insufficiently warned his doctor about the risks ranitidine poses to patients with Parkinson’s disease. Ranitidine’s alleged carcinogenic effect does not demonstrate how the defendant’s alleged failure to warn on this issue led to the progression of the plaintiff’s Parkinson’s disease, the court concluded. Also, the court said that any claim based on the defendant’s alleged failure to provide additional warnings on the ranitidine label would have been precluded under federal law, which preempts state law claims involving generic drug labels or warnings.

Thus, the court dismissed the plaintiff’s complaint but held that he was entitled to file an amended complaint curing the above deficiencies within 30 days.

Citation: Davallou v. Glenmark Pharms., 2020 WL 4284965 (S.D. Cal. July 27, 2020).