Coming Down Hard (Season 15, Episode 4)
Premise: Two students at the same university fall to their deaths within a week, and both turn out to have been paid subjects in a high-dose antidepressant trial whose sponsor kept its worst results hidden.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 15, Episode 4
- Detectives
- Det. Joe Fontana (Dennis Farina), Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Serena Southerlyn (Elisabeth Röhm), DA Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson)
- Guest stars
- Peter Strauss as Dr. Paul Cedars, Philip Goodwin as Dr. Russell Toomey, Boris McGiver as Hjalmar Forskerskoler, Amy Hohn as defense attorney Laura Dixon, Boyd Gaines as James Rillard
- Director
- Richard Dobbs
- Writers
- Davey Holmes
Summary
The Investigation
“Coming Down Hard” opens with an apparent suicide: Peter Jenlow, a 19-year-old Atlantic Eastern student, falls from his 12th-floor dorm window. There is no note and no sign of drugs, and Fontana thinks he jumped while Green is unsure. A notebook on his desk lists dates, check marks and figures such as 250 and 500, and though Jenlow quit his job months earlier, he planned to move to the East Village.
Roommate Terry Lipsky claims he was in the park with his girlfriend, Karen Coleman, but phone records show a call to her from the room just after the fall, and a narcotics detective warns that Coleman, a major campus dealer, is under surveillance. Bluffed into thinking she has talked, Lipsky admits he was in the bathroom when Jenlow went out the window; he says Jenlow wrote Coleman’s papers and did research work.
Then Alicia Cameron, another student, jumps from an 18th-floor ledge, leaving an identical notebook. Both were paid subjects at Atlantic Eastern Labs, where Dr. Russell Toomey is testing the antidepressant Lumedapine for OCD at two to four times the usual dose; the notebooks log milligrams, and two earlier subjects attempted suicide. Toomey says the sponsor, Barden Pharmaceutical, had him track only hair loss and fatigue, and his assistant admits he told her not to record complaints. Toomey is arrested.
The Trial
Toomey’s lawyer cites two articles calling the drug safe, but a journal editor tells McCoy their publisher is a Barden-funded doctors’ group. Barden’s CEO, Dr. Paul Cedars, guards his unpublished data. Southerlyn traces a Danish trial to researcher Hjalmar Forskerskoler, who recalls subjects talking of death and one stabbing herself with a pencil. Cedars and Barden are charged with murder, and the judge refuses to dismiss or to exclude the studies.
Forskerskoler testifies that his trial tied doses of 250 milligrams and up to mania and suicidal behavior, and that Barden released only one of twelve trials, the lone favorable one. Former subject Stephanie Lawson describes her suicide attempt on the drug. Cedars defends risk as the price of new medicine, but when McCoy suggests the new trials were a way to extend Barden’s patent, the judge excludes a privileged letter Southerlyn found in discovery and tells the jury to disregard it.
Spoiler, the ending: With the jury out, McCoy drops the murder charges in exchange for a plea to criminal negligence with no jail time, and Barden must make its Lumedapine studies, and those of every future drug, available to doctors through a medical database. Cedars admits hiding eleven trials. McCoy then heads off to meet a class-action lawyer, and Branch asks him to see that the victims share in any money.
Why it stands out
- Prosecutors shift from the doctor running the trial to the drug maker’s CEO after learning the company released only one of twelve studies of the drug.
- The plea deal forces the company to open its studies of the drug, and of every future drug, to doctors through a medical database.
- Peter Strauss guest stars as Barden CEO Dr. Paul Cedars.