Pillboxed in.

• Author: Mundy, Alicia

Alan Cropsey should be a trial lawyer's worst nightmare. A former schoolteacher and current state senator in Michigan, Cropsey is a devout evangelical Christian and conservative Republican who doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, and doesn't lose elections. In his 25-year career, he's done two separate stints in both chambers of the state legislature, hung out his shingle in private practice, and was Michigan field director " the Republican Majority Issues Committee, a PAC affiliated with Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas). "I'm driven," he says, "by moral principles." Consistently anti-abortion and pro-gun, Cropsey was also a vigorous proponent during the 1980s of so-called "tort reform," or legislation to limit lawsuits against business.

Today, however, Cropsey considers the tort reform movement "misguided." What helped convert him was a decision made last March by the Michigan Supreme Court to throw oat lawsuits from female victims of the drug fen-phen, a once-popular weight-loss aid blamed for hundreds of deaths in the mid 1990s. Many of the women have pulmonary, hypertension, the usually-fatal lung disease linked to Pondimin, the "fen" in fen-phen. Yet despite indications that Wyeth, the manufacturer of Pondimin, had sat on knowledge of the drug's dangers while the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was reviewing it, the court ruled that the company could not he sued. Why? Under a 1995 law pushed by then-Gov. John Engler and backed by a well-founded array of business groups and conservative activists, if a drug had been approved by the FDA, its manufacturer cannot be sued in Michigan for any harm it may cause--even if the manufacturer knew in advance of potential hazards. Cropsey calls the law "horrible," saying his opposition is "a matter of moral principle." The women, he argues, "are being denied justice."

In fact, similar "shield laws" exist in Utah, New Jersey, Oregon, Colorado, and Arizona, while several other states, including Ohio, are considering their own version--thanks to a sophisticated squeeze play by pharmaceutical lobbyists and tort-reform activists. On one side, they've been pushed to defang the FDA: In 1994, after complaining about the spiraling costs involved in getting a drug approved by the agency, pharmaceutical companies convinced Congress to pass legislation forcing the FDA to approve drugs more quickly. The legislation has enabled some groundbreaking new drugs, including some lifesaving new AIDS medications, to get on file...