RESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Michael Undorf, Deputy Attorney General 
Anti-Trust Unit 
Phone: (302) 577-8924 
Date: July 19, 2005 

DELAWARE AND OTHER STATES DISTRIBUTE $24 MILLION IN ANTITRUST SETTLEMENT FUNDS

Consumers Compensated for Increased Drug Costs

(Wilmington, DE): Attorney General M. Jane Brady announced today the distribution of more than $24 million in antitrust settlement funds to consumers who purchased Cardizem CD, a prescription heart medication. 

Approximately 248 consumers in the State of Delaware will receive more than $79,000 to compensate for overpayment for Cardizem CD and its generic equivalents between 1998 and 2004. 

"These companies unfairly charged high prices to patients and providers. I am pleased we have been able to recover the overpayments for those consumers," said Attorney General Brady.

The distribution is the result of a 2003 settlement in which Attorney General Brady joined the attorneys general of the other 49 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia in a case against two pharmaceutical companies, Aventis and Andrx. The case charged that beginning in July 1998, Hoechst, a pharmaceutical company acquired by Aventis in 2000, paid Andrx not to market a generic version of Cardizem CD. The delay in the availability of the generic form of Cardizem CD meant that consumers, medical insurance companies and the government had to purchase the higher priced brand name version of the drug for at least an extra year.

Nationwide, the distribution will compensate more than 76,000 individual consumers. The states' plan to distribute money to consumers was approved by United States District Court Judge Nancy Edmunds on May 31, 2005, after the United States Supreme Court refused on May 23, 2005, to review judicial approval of the settlement.

###