State judge unseals documents in Missouri drug-tampering case

By The Associated Press

09.13.02

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A judge unsealed thousands of pages of documents yesterday, shedding little new light on the Robert Courtney drug-tampering case but offering a glimpse of what jurors will see if a cancer patient's civil case goes to trial Oct. 7.

Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Lee Wells, who's presiding over the first of about 400 civil lawsuits filed by hundreds of cancer victims and their relatives, ruled that many of the documents that had been filed under seal should be released.

After the hearing, plaintiffs' attorney Michael Ketchmark said Wells' order unsealed all but three documents related to the case. Reporters were ordered out of the courtroom for much of the hearing.

Many of the documents are sales charts for drug-makers Eli Lilly & Co. and Bristol-Myers Squibb and depositions from witnesses in the case. Much of the testimony from the depositions had been quoted in publicly accessible motions.

Courtney pleaded guilty in February to federal charges of diluting chemotherapy medications he prepared at a Kansas City pharmacy he owned. He awaits sentencing on those charges and now faces trial on civil lawsuits that claim cancer patients were harmed by his actions.

The documents show that in 1998, Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers Squibb both noticed discrepancies between the amount of drugs sold to Courtney and the amount of drugs prescribed to cancer patients.

Jurors will have to decide whether that discrepancy means the companies knew or should have known about Courtney's dilution scheme — as the plaintiffs say — or whether it was just a problem with the collection of drug sales data, as the drug companies say.

Unable to solve the problem, Lilly salesman Darryl Ashley gave up, according to his testimony in a deposition released yesterday.

"I decided that I'm tired of monkeying around with missing data and having to find it and all of this. So I made a conscious decision" that his time would be better spent telling doctors about the drug, "not to go around and try to find invoices, not to find who's doing what. Let's get back to the business of treating these cancer patients," he said.