A number of decisions in America have effectively led to manufacturers of generic drugs to be incapable of being successfully sued. A Supreme Court decision in America last year said that generic pharmaceutical companies do not have control over their labels, and thus cannot be sued for failing to alert patients about the risk of taking the drugs. They don’t have any control over the label because the law in America provides that they must simply use whatever label was used by the original drugs manufacturer, as updated from time to time. This was a split decision of the Supreme Court on a 5-4 basis.

Essentially the majority ruled that generic companies cannot be held responsible for not alerting patients about problems with the drugs they are selling and that is the responsibility of the brand name company that develops the drug. In other words, if you took the brand name drug and you had a problem, you would be able to sue them but if you took the generic, you cannot sue the brand name company, because you were not using their product. The generic drug manufacturer would be able to avoid responsibility on the basis that the labelling and the warnings on the various medications are not their responsibility. The generic companies say that they should never be held responsible for the cost of updating their labels, because that would turn their cheaper versions of the pills into more expensive pills, because of all the extra costs involved and thus consumers would not benefit as they do now from reduced costs.

It leaves one in a very difficult situation where effectively, in case something ever goes wrong with you, you would need to take the brand name drug, and not the generic drug, so that if something did happen to you, you would at least have a legal case against the manufacturer of the original drug. One would hope that the American laws will be changed in time because this sort of situation is unacceptable – and it is really unfair that somebody takes a pill that is identical to a brand name, is effectively left without any legal remedy to sue for compensation when something goes wrong.