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UVM Settles Drug-Test Case for $800,000
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By Adam Silverman, Free Press Staff Writer, January 3, 2009
The University of Vermont agreed to pay $800,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of a man killed in a 2001 car crash that involved a participant in a drug study at the school.
UVM, which is facing an expected budget shortfall of tens of millions of dollars, also was billed for $410,000 in legal costs during the five years the case was pending, from 2003 until the sides resolved the claim this fall.
An insurance policy covered most of the $1.2 million total, leaving the university to pay from its own accounts $125,000 toward the settlement and a $150,000 deductible toward attorney fees and litigation costs.
The university disclosed those financial details this week following a request from The Burlington Free Press under Vermont’s public-records law.
“It’s not an insignificant cost, and it will be a challenge to account for it in this budget,” UVM spokesman Enrique Corredera said Friday. “But compared to the overall budget shortfall the university is facing, which is close to $30 million, it is a relatively small portion. The impact in that context is relatively small.”
The widow of Kevin Baker, 44, of Coventry filed the lawsuit in Orleans Superior Court in Newport after the death of her husband and two other men in a head-on crash in Johnson. The claim alleged a UVM research team acted negligently by allowing a man involved in testing a drug to treat heroin addiction to drive home after taking a dose.
Driver Theodore Pecor, then a 25-year-old student at Johnson State College, fell asleep at the wheel, drifted across the center of Vermont 15 and slammed into Baker’s oncoming car.
The drug at the center of the study, buprenorphine, is an alternative to methadone and helps people overcome addictions to “opioid” narcotics such as heroin or the painkiller oxycodone. Bupe, as the drug is known, has since won approval from the federal Food and Drug Administration and has become “the standard of care worldwide for the treatment of opioid-dependent individuals,” Corredera said.
University representatives and Baker’s attorney, David Sleigh, initially declined to release details of the settlement, citing a confidentiality agreement that is standard in resolving many lawsuits. But the Free Press argued the particulars should be public because they involved the expenditure of public money.
The crash occurred Nov. 21, 2001, after Pecor received his first dose of buprenorphine at a Burlington clinic, waited two hours, passed a sobriety test and was allowed to drive home.
Baker’s widow and three children alleged in the lawsuit that researchers failed to warn Pecor about possible sedative effects of the drug, ignored symptoms, improperly evaluated his sobriety and permitted him to leave alone. Pecor later pleaded guilty to criminal charges and served three years in prison.
The university made no admission of wrongdoing in making the settlement.
“The scientific evidence is really on our side in this case, and we are confident we would have prevailed in court,” Corredera said. “Settling this case was ultimately a business decision. Cases of this nature are very expensive to litigate and considerably more expensive to try. Our hearts will always go out to all the families that have been so deeply affected by that tragic accident, but we don’t believe that our clinical research in any way contributed to it.”
Sleigh took issue with Corredera’s defense of the study.
“That’s a hoot,” Sleigh said. “The evidence showed that bupe has sedative effects, and that everyone knew it, plain and simple. They denied it. It’s not true.”
Lyman Dezotelle Jr., 44, of Derby Line and Dean Fountain, 69, of Newport also were killed in the crash. A separate lawsuit involving Dezotelle’s survivors might be resolved “in the near future,” Corredera said.