Drug firms seek high court’s vision in eye drop row

Drops too large, wasting medication, patients say

WASHINGTON — Eye drop users everywhere have had it happen. Tilt your head back, drip a drop in your eye and part of that drop always seems to dribble down your cheek.

But what most people see as an annoyance, some prescription drop users say is grounds for a lawsuit. Drug companies’ bottles dispense drops that are too large, leaving wasted medication running down their faces, they say.

Don’t roll your eyes. Major players in Americans’ medicine cabinets — including Allergan, Bausch & Lomb, Merck and Pfizer — are asking the Supreme Court to get involved in the case.

On the other side are patients using the companies’ drops to treat glaucoma and other eye conditions. Wasted medication affects their wallets, they say. They argue they would pay less for their treatment if their bottles of medication were designed to drip smaller drops.

The companies, for their part, have said the patients shouldn’t be able to sue in federal court because their argument they would have paid less for treatment is based on a bottle that doesn’t exist and speculation about how it would affect their costs if it did. They point out that the size of their drops was approved by the Food and Drug Administration and redesigned bottles would require FDA approval. The cost of changes could be passed on to patients, possibly resulting in treatment that costs more, they say.

If a drop-size lawsuit can go forward, so too could other packaging design lawsuits, like one by “toothpaste users whose tubes of toothpaste did not allow every bit of toothpaste to be used,” wrote Kannon Shanmugam, a frequent advocate before the Supreme Court who is representing the drug companies in asking the high court to take the case.

Letting the drop-size lawsuit go forward would also make not-sonutty a lawsuit against “peanut-butter producers that sell their wares in traditional jars, rather than jars that unscrew at both ends (thus leading to less wasted peanut butter),” he wrote.

Patients see the case differently. A person’s eye can only hold a certain amount of liquid, they say. And they point to research showing that drugmakers’ drops come out of their bottles at a much larger size and that at least half of every drop of medication goes to waste. A glaucoma patient paying for eye drops without insurance could spend $1,100 a year on medication that goes to waste, according to one study.

If the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, 17-1337 Alcon Laboratories v. Leonard Cottrell, it would be argued sometime after the court returns from its summer break.