Karen Barth Menzies among ten Lawyers of the Year for 2004 chosen by Lawyers Weekly USA
Karen Barth Menzies - Los Angeles Pharmaceutical Specialist
A Crusade For Suicide Warnings On Antidepressants
By Reni Gertner
Few lawyers throw the weight of their entire career behind a single issue, arguing day after day with the same unbridled passion.
One such lawyer is Karen Barth Menzies, a Los Angeles litigator who has spent the past 14 years trying to prove to the public, doctors and federal regulators that antidepressants increase the risk of suicide in children and adults.
What started as a single case in 1990 - two years before Barth Menzies entered law school - has become her life's work.
In October, her crusade finally paid off when the Food and Drug Administration mandated that drug companies add the most serious type of warning for a drug - a black box - to more than 30 antidepressant medications, including Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil. The warning states that these drugs can increase the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior in children.
"If you had asked me three years ago if [this] would be happening now, I would have said it wasn't possible," said Barth Menzies, 38, who is a partner at Baum Hedlund in Los Angeles.
Barth Menzies' involvement in antidepressant litigation began in the early 1990s while she was working as a paralegal for George "Skip" Murgatroyd, III, currently of-counsel to Baum Hedlund and one of the first attorneys to work on suicide cases involving patients who took Prozac.
"I was really introduced even before law school to the serious risk related to these drugs," said Barth Menzies, who graduated from the University of California School of Law at Davis in 1995.
Although she briefly worked in criminal law after graduating, something drew her back into the cause.
"To me, it was compelling because it felt like we were exposing white collar crime in a way regulators couldn't," she said. "Drug companies could appear to be complying with the regs and at the same time be covering up this potentially fatal risk by blaming the disease."
In 2002, the FDA intervened against the plaintiff in a Zoloft suicide case and "we said we are going to do all we can to expose not only the failures of the agency, but also the cover-up," said Barth Menzies, who contends the agency hid data that links the drugs to suicidal behavior.
Today, Barth Menzies is lead counsel for many of the firm's approximately 100 clients who are suing over suicide or suicide attempts allegedly caused by Zoloft, Paxil and Effexor. She is also spearheading the national multi-district litigation, which involves [MDL-1574, In re Paxil Products Liability Litigation].
It hasn't been easy to convince the world that these groundbreaking antidepressants - medications that continue to transform the lives of millions of people - have a potentially lethal side effect.
But this year, more than a decade of work paid off when she and her colleagues finally convinced the FDA to take action on behalf of consumers. In February, Menzies testified before an FDA advisory committee about antidepressants and the risk of suicide in children.
"I spent a long time trying to [tell the committee] how personally offended I have been that we are still dealing with this litigation after 14 years," she said. "I said, 'I have focused my entire career on this side effect. That is ridiculous and that is wrong.'"
Menzies challenged committee members to, "Put me out of business for the right reasons" - by approving the warning.
That hearing produced the FDA's first pro-consumer action on the subject - an advisory asking manufacturers of 10 commonly prescribed antidepressant medications to add warning labels suggesting that doctors carefully monitor patients on this medicine for sudden signs of suicidal thinking.
"We'd been working at this for so long that I was fearful the FDA would never do anything about it, so when they warned physicians in March about [possible risks in] adults and not just kids, it was really a turning point for me," she said.
Then, after Menzies testified at another hearing, the FDA took action in October by issuing the blackbox warning for child suicide cases.
"It was no small feat, and the fight [over the drugs] is certainly not done yet," she said. "But it's a huge milestone a lot of us have been working toward for a long time."
When the going gets tough, it's the clients who keep Menzies going.
"It's the parents of the children in these cases," she said. "I look at the strength they have to allow themselves to be personally attacked and mischaracterized and further victimized. If they have the power to still endure that, I am going to do everything I can to help them prove that it was really the drug that caused this behavior."
She said the next battle is to force the drug companies to issue a more explicit warning to consumers that the medication can induce suicidal thoughts and violent behavior in adults.
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