You know, I am a real stickler for not forming a real strong opinion about something until I feel I know all of the facts.
"Toxicology tests confirmed "significant amounts" of an over-the-counter supplement containing ephedra led to Bechler's heatstroke, along with other factors, the medical examiner said."
I don't know what this means. Even this hyped up article concedes that many factors lead to this guy's death.
If we assume that ephedra did in fact lead to his death, it appears to me that his apparent misuse of the product at best contributed to his demise, if it wasn't 100% responsible.
It does irritate the hell out of me that so many people in our society refuse to accept responsibility for their own negligence "Nothing could ever possibly be my fault!" However, I don't think this is unique to the US at all.
I do a lot of thinking about our legal system, I'm a lawyer. I've experienced our system from a lot of different perspectives - I've represented both plaintiffs and defendants, I've been a plaintiff in two lawsuits myself, and I've worked on the staff of 2 courts and essentially made decisions for the courts (as a practical matter judges have to delegate all sorts of weighty decisions to clerks, and then decide whether to follow their clerk's recommendations).
Our system isn't perfect, but its damn good. Due process is important. Everybody feels the system is unfair until they've been harmed or injured and want a remedy.
Things are being done to discourage frivolous lawsuits, and more needs to be done, but think about the nuts and bolts of it. You can't just decide on the day someone makes a claim whether it should be allowed to go forward or not. Very often a case has to be filed in order for the plaintiff to have subpeonas and all sorts of other processes available to investigate whether what they think happened really did happen or whether or not it can be proved.
This ends up costing a lot of money. But its better than having no remedy at all. If there was no remedy, there would be no incentive at all for companies and individuals to take care not to go around injuring or killing other people. There have to be consequences for negligence, or for example, selling dangerous products.
I'm pretty convinced that ephedra isn't dangerous enough for the manufacturers to be held liable for its use or misuse, but think about situations like the Ford Pinto.
Ford built a car and decided not to make the gas tank safe. They knew they would have a lot of fires and explosions and people would be horribly burned and die, but they calculated out what they thought it would cost them to settle all those claims, and decided that the total cost would probably be less than it would cost them to protect the gas tank. Basically, we'll burn and kill x number of people and still come out ahead.
They got sued and slapped with a huge punitive damages award. Those kinds of awards are so damn rare its silly, but when they happen they always get a lot of publicity. The punitive damage award was intended to go beyond what the burned survivors and the families of the dead burned people actually lost because of the bad gas tanks, it was intended to punish Ford and make an example of them.
By doing this, we discourage companies and individuals from making these kinds of cold decisions like "a burned baby is worth $400,000" or something like that. We encourage them to take more reasonable measures to make their products more safe.
As I said, these types of awards are almost never awarded although they are sought all the time.
OK I think I've rambled and ranted enough.
Bottom line, this lawsuit is bullshit and probably won't get this lady a dime. Our legal system isn't perfect, but its pretty damn good.
