By KEVIN CHIRI

Editor and Publisher

RESERVE — One of the most profitable lawsuits in Danny Becnel’s legal career was added to his list of successes recently when Pfizer Inc. confirmed they will settle the class action suit for pain-drugs Celebrex and Bextra.

Becnel filed the first suit on behalf of his clients in the case in late, 2004, and has been one of the lead attorneys on the massive case ever since it has been waged in out-of-court negotiations.

Pfizer finally announced that they will pay $894 million to settle approximately 90 percent of the cases that have been filed against them.

Once the final 10 percent of cases is settled, it will push the total award to over $1 billion, marking at least the seventh time Becnel has been involved in a case worth $1 billion or more.

His biggest case was the $238 billion California tobacco lawsuit.

“I’m satisfied with the settlement,” the St. John Parish attorney said. “When you’re my age, and you really don’t need to make the money, you try to settle these things when you think you have something that is in the best interest of your clients, not because you’re holding out for even more money.”

Becnel represented approximately 8 percent of the total cases, said to number close to 9,000 according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The Journal story said that the tentative agreement would give some clients around $200,000 on average for Bextra problems, and about $40,000 to $50,000 per Celebrex case.

But Becnel warned that those numbers are misleading since every case will be reviewed by an independent person hired to consider the severity of problems the individual had.

For that matter, during the four years of the case, a judge threw out any clients who had not taken more than 200 milligrams a day of the drugs, saying they did not ingest enough to warrant a claim.

“It is too hard to try and say how much each person will get in this case,” he noted, “since every case is completely different. What we do know is that we have a certain amount of money to be distributed for the people involved and we have agreed to the amount Pfizer has offered to satisfy those claims.”

Celebrex and Bextra belong to the same class of pain-drugs known as selective Cox-2 inhibitors, which were designed to provide pain relief while minimizing side effects as gastrointestinal problems associated with older pain relievers such as Ibuprofen. But studies began to emerge several years ago that suggest the drugs might increase the risk of heart problems.

The FDA finally asked Pfizer to voluntarily remove Bextra from the market in April, 2005 after concluding the drug had an unfavorable risk-benefit effect.

In the settlement, the New York drug maker said that it reached agreements in principle to resolve personal-injury cases, consumer-fraud cases and claims by state attorneys general regarding Bextra, which Pfizer pulled from the market in 2005.

Also, claims surrounding Celebrex, which remains on the market today, will be resolved following what Pfizer said were “key court rulings.”

The FDA finally asked Pfizer to voluntarily remove Bextra from the market in April, 2005 after concluding the drug had an unfavorable risk-benefit effect.

Most of the personal-injury lawsuits alleged that the drugs caused heart attacks and other problems, and claimed that Pfizer did not adequately warn about those side effects.

However with the settlement, Amy Schulman, senior vice president and general counsel of Pfizer, said she believed the company had satisfied the allegations involving the drugs.

“It puts the substantial majority of the civil litigation the company is facing with regard to Celebrex and Bextra behind us, and I think the view was, putting these matters substantially behind us was the right thing to do.”

Some of the other top cases involving a billion dollars or more for Becnel were the Phen-Phen drug case which was settled for $22 billion, the breast implant case for $7.2 billion, and the Vioxx case for $4.85 billion.

With Celebrex still on the market, Pfizer has strengthened the label, warning of the potential heart risk. The company had sales of the drug in 2006 that were up to $2.29 billion, up 12 percent from 2005.

“The biggest problem in all this is that the FDA needs to tighten their position on reviewing these drugs. The FDA has been asleep at the wheel when it comes to approving new drugs,” Becnel said. “They are just rushing drugs to market too quickly without enough research.”