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At the beginning of 2010, a jury in New Jersey awarded more than $25 million in compensatory and punitive damages to a plaintiff who had developed a severe side effect following the use of an acne medication. The award was more than any previous litigation had established, though it also opened the legal flood gates to a host of lawsuits against the maker of the acne medication.

The name of the drug in question is Accutane, and it was produced and distributed by Roche Pharmaceuticals in the early part of the year 2000. For the plaintiff in the case – one of thousands of Accutane patients so afflicted – the severe side effect was in fact Crohn’s disease, a condition that poses a lifetime of discomfort and debilitating complications.

For the plaintiff, the onset of Crohn’s disease forced the surgical removal of his colon, an extreme complication, to be sure, but one that is not too uncommon for the acne patients who used Accutane.

What Is Accutane?

Accutane is a powerful and potent acne medication derived from the chemical isotretinoin, itself made from vitamin A. It was developed to treat the most severe cases of acne. Described by Roche Pharmaceuticals and doctors as an acne treatment “of last resort,” it was made especially for patients who had little to no success with any previous forms of acne treatment. Considering the severe nature of Accutane’s long term and dangerous side effects, this classification seems a little too prescient for its own good.

Roche Pharmaceuticals still claims that Accutane, an all-natural derivative of a chemical that occurs naturally in the human blood stream, is completely safe. They also insist that the side effects are either coincidental or that they were fully disclosed to patients prior to prescription, during consultation with doctors. The fact that Roche Pharmaceuticals claims potentially contradictory defenses for Accutane should raise a few legal concerns about what Roche Pharmaceuticals knew, and when they knew it.

Most of the dangerous and deleterious of Accutane’s side effects is the rapid onset of a host of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) that include Crohn’s disease, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, ulcerative colitis and a couple of different forms of liver damage.

The reported list of Accutane side effects made no mention of any of these, however, listing only severely dry skin, nosebleeds, rashes, and the onset of possible depression and suicidal thoughts in adolescent patients.

Accutane Lawsuit Information

Due to the rapid influx of lawsuits over Accutane’s side effects, the court dockets in New Jersey are being deluged by cases, numbering in the thousands, by patients adversely affected by their use of Accutane. There are some preliminary moves to make these cases into a single class action suit, but due to the very personal and debilitating nature of these side effects, it is likely that few plaintiffs will want to form a class action and reduce the potential judgment that they could win.

In the fall of 2009, Roche Pharmaceuticals took Accutane off of the market, issuing a recall of all remaining products from doctor’s offices and pharmacies from all over the world.