The Dalkon Shield Outrage

...With Slugg at the wheel, we drove several miles over back roads to a comfortable, almost sumptuous, farmhouse where Davis received us and, after a pleasant lunch, took us to a nearby mobile home outfitted as an office...

...Throughout Davis's bizarre presentation—"paranoid" was a word that crossed both our minds—he insisted that our session together was his affair alone, and did not involve A.H...

...The cost of this Dalkon Shield defensive maneuver, Davis insisted, was being borne by himself—the mobile home, Slugg, the rented car...

...16.95...

...Davis, with scant credentials in reproductive biology, developed the device that would become the Dalkon Shield while at the Johns Hopkins medical institutions in Baltimore...

...Perhaps the nastiest aspect of this whole nasty business was Robins's legal effort to drive complainants into the closet by using smear tactics...

...Robins and the Dalkon Shield ranks well toward the top...

...ins's corporate determination to squeeze the last possible buck from a device that from the start was suspect...

...Those who know him sometimes call Mintz "the last angry man," and in the present instance he has plenty to be angry about...

...the works...

...This is a legitimate avenue of inquiry to some extent, but to ask a woman, in a suit over pelvic inflammatory disease, whether she engaged in oral sex, is going too far...

...Lord is as close as the cast of this morality play comes to having a hero...

...Then, when caught up in the web of its own sins of omission and commission, Robins reacted in the instinctive fashion of a venomous reptile caught in a corner...

...Readers of The Progressive are already familiar with this scandal through an excerpt from Morton Mintz's new book, At Any Cost, in the November 1985 issue...

...If there is one glaring omission in all three of these books, it is a comprehensive listing of all products marketed by A.H...

...LORD'S JUSTICE by Sheldon Engelmayer and Robert Wagman Anchor Press/Doubleday...

...On the way back to the restaurant parking lot, however, Slugg unwittingly let the cat out of the bag...

...We were to meet by prearrangement at the parking lot of a seafood restaurant on Kent Island, where a man introduced himself as Melvin Slugg, Dr...

...There, for several hours, he briefed us on his conspiracy theory and offered to let us examine—but not have copies of—the massive collection of records that he said would prove his point...

...Feeling uneasy about her going alone, we went together...

...Both At Any Cost and Nightmare are indexed, which is helpful in threading one's way through a labyrinth as convoluted as this one...

...Of the three books, Mintz's At Any Cost, in our judgment, is the one to put your money on...

...As reporters for the Chicago Sun-Times (Hines) and the now-defunct Washington Star (Randal), one day in the early 1970s we were introduced to Dr...

...Court-appointed magistrates could not crack the stone wall Robins built around itself...

...He tested the device in rudimentary fashion before organizing a company to market it, but falsified the efficacy data on which Robins based its initial decision to commercialize the Shield...

...Lord was nearly pauperized, in the end, by the necessity to defend himself against charges of "gross abuse of judicial discretion and power" for having reprimanded Robins's principal officers in open court for their unrepentant attitude in the face of gross corporate misdeeds...

...by William Hines and Judith Randal In the annals of corporate villainy, the story of A.H...

...From start to finish, the actions of Robins—an old and until then respected corporation—and its agents were marked by the "Watergate morality...

...Hugh Davis, inventor of the Dalkon Shield, just after the device's safety and reliability began to be called into question...

...Davis called Randal, whose writings on intrauterine devices he had read, and told her that adverse reports about the Shield were part of a plot by a competitor (G.D...

...Suffice it to say that women suffered, were rendered sterile, or died to further RobWilliam Hines is Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Sun-Times...

...Mintz has preached for years the need for revision of a situation in which "immersion in a corporation washes away human responsibility...

...The story of the Dalkon Shield has dramatic aspects, including a mad scientist and his Igor...

...No one knows better than Mintz, who has written or collaborated in the writing of half a dozen books on the theme of corporate irresponsibility, that the Dalkon Shield outrage was not the first to be perpetrated on the American people, nor will it be the last...

...In En-gelmayer and Wagman's book, Lord's Justice, he is not only the hero but the central figure around whom the story is told...

...One plaintiff, subjected to this sort of interrogation by lawyers for Robins, remarked that the questions sounded like an obscene telephone call...

...Judith Randal is a contributing writer on health affairs for Newsday...

...The tragedy that flowed from the Dalkon Shield scandal needs no detailing here...

...All three of these books, written by investigative journalists, document—from the same official records—the conscienceless course of action that Robins subsequently followed...

...Davis's bodyguard...

...The ability of Robins's legal staff to pervert the system—as detailed in all three books—is almost beyond belief...

...which is to say, no morality at all...

...300 pp...

...Perry and Dawson begin Nightmare with a cast of characters, which is handy to turn to when identities become blurred...

...The whole book, along with two others—Nightmare by Susan Perry and Jim Dawson and Lord's Justice by Sheldon Engelmayer and Robert Wagman—covering the same dark and bloody ground, is now available to readers who wish to know more about one of the most outrageous chapters in the history of the oxymoronically named ethical drug industry...

...The only justice to be found in this whole morality play is the fact that in the end the Shield cost Robins many, many times more than the corporation could have hoped to make from it...

...False witness, pettifogging, stonewalling, delaying tactics, intimidation, destruction of records, the use and overuse of lawyers who had long since forgotten their role as officers of the court—all these were everyday occurrences in the years during which the scandal ran its course...

...Searle, whose Copper-7 IUD is now the target of mass liability actions), and that he could prove it with documentation if she would agree to a clandestine meeting at a place on Maryland's Eastern Shore some fifty miles east of Washington...

...Perhaps the timing of the Dalkon Shield scandal was more than coincidence: It came to a head in the early 1970s at the time of Watergate...

...But by acting as officers and agents of a legal but soulless corporation, they got off with their lives, their fortunes, and what little was left of their honor...

...Repeatedly and as a matter of policy, lawyers for the corporation probed into the most intimate sexual practices of plaintiffs, ostensibly to determine whether unhygienic lifestyles might have contributed to the reproductive problems alleged by the injured parties...

...Robins...

...But certainly, considering the nature of the toll it exacted from its victims, it was one of the worst...

...261 pp...

...NIGHTMARE: WOMEN AND THE DALKON SHIELD by Susan Perry and Jim Dawson Macmillan...

...Robins and its subsidiaries so as to inform people who would just as soon not do business with such an outfit...

...indeed, even Chief District Judge Miles W. Lord of Minnesota was subjected to what can only be described as contempt when he attempted to enforce legitimate orders against the corporation...

...Before Robins put Davis's flawed device on sale, it changed the formulation of the material from which it was made, thus substituting for an inadequately tested product one that was not tested at all...

...In reminiscing about his past career in law enforcement—he had formerly been on the Baltimore police force—he revealed he was now on the Robins payroll as an attendant and bodyguard for Davis...

...Had the principal players in the Dalkon Shield outrage perpetrated their felonious acts as individuals, they would have gone to jail as they richly deserve...