Johnson & Johnson Begins Paying for Ortho-Evra Harm

Brenda Fulmer

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Financial sources are reporting that Johnson & Johnson paid nearly $69 million in confidential settlement payments to resolve several hundred Ortho Evra claims in the first quarter of 2008. Further efforts to settle the remaining lawsuits are also purportedly underway. There are nearly 1,000 lawsuits pending in the Ohio federal multidistrict coordinated proceedings as well as several thousands cases pending in state courts against the contraceptive manufacturer.

Ortho-Evra is a birth control patch that has been heavily marketed to girls and young women with a message that its unique delivery mechanism is preferable for those patients who may not be consistent in taking a birth control pill each day. More than 9.5 million prescriptions were written for the patch in 2005. The patch is worn for three weeks and then removed for a week so that menstruation may occur. The drug is fraught with problems due to irregularities in the manufacturing process and design of the patch that result in the release of hormones at unsteady and excessive rates. In addition, since the hormones are being delivered through the skin, the patches contain higher dose hormones than are used in the most of today’s birth control pill formulations. In fact, the doses of hormones that are delivered through the Ortho Evra patch more closely resemble the antiquated high doses that were used in the first generation of oral contraceptives and were responsible for the first wave of heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots in its users in the Sixties and Seventies.

It is shameful that this particular product has been permitted to remain on the market by the FDA since 2001, and just as shameful that the manufacturer continues to market the product with actual knowledge that it is far more dangerous than alternative birth control options that provide equivalent effectiveness. The knowledge of these dangers make the marketing implemented by Johnson & Johnson even more reprehensible, as there has been a distinct effort to create demand for this particular product among teenagers with the use of cartoonish characters, online forums, teen-directed marketing, and social networking sites, very similar to the brazen use of Joe Camel over the years by Big Tobacco to lure a new generation of young smokers.