The question is not: Shouldn't drugs be made as safe as possible? Of course they should. The question, rather, is: Can drugs ever be made safe enough to ward off the insinuations of the plaintiffs' lawyers, so ready to claim (if not necessarily believe) the worst about any product marketed by a deep-pockets company? The tobacco and asbestos suits have shown how it works. A lawyer who has picked venue and victims with any care can have the jury eating out of his hand in no time. The more self-styled victims who can be trotted out -- and lawyers have become adept at rounding them up, often using the Internet -- the greater the size of the settlement.

Hard cases make bad law, goes the old legal maxim. They can make bad medicine, also, causing pharmaceutical innovators to pull in their horns, knock off the experimenting and stick with the safe stuff -- the lawyer-immune stuff (if there is any such). Nothing seems likelier to set back medical progress, and hinder drug development, than a raft of lawsuits whose common denominator is the enrichment of the plaintiffs' bar. Sometimes, you wish these fine gentlemen could be forced to swallow their own, as it were, medicine. What about sensible citizens suing the American Trial Lawyers Association for attacking jobs and undermining economic stability?

On second thought, maybe not. What trial lawyer could be induced to file such a sensible pleading?