Did a blockbuster drug make hundreds gamble compulsively? A legal fight may decide what science can’t confirm
The casino didn’t always call out to Denise Miley.
At most, she and her husband, Brad, would drive over to the Mystic Lake Casino Hotel, just outside Minneapolis, a few times a year.
Then, in the fall of 2014, she got an itch to go more often. She’d ride her bike the 35 miles down to the casino and ask her husband to pick her up. It was just exercise, she’d tell him. Sometimes she would start driving to the office where she worked as an accountant. But when the freeway split off, she’d peel south and head to the slots.
“I didn’t have a word for it back then, but I was starting to feel compulsed,” she said. “I wanted to stay longer, and longer, and longer.”
She also had no idea her compulsion might be linked to a drug she began taking for depression and anxiety a few weeks before she began seriously gambling. By the time she stopped taking aripiprazole — an antipsychotic sold under the brand name Abilify — she’d stayed in the casino long enough to lose more than $150,000.
Miley, 41, filed a lawsuit in January 2016 against the drug makers Bristol-Myers Squibb and Otsuka, alleging the drug — one of the best-selling in the world — caused compulsive behavior. The suit contends that the companies knew or should have known it could create such urges, and didn’t adequately warn the thousands of people in the U.S. who use the medication each year.
Hundreds more people have since sued the companies, claiming that the drug caused them to gamble, eat, or have sex compulsively. And the Food and Drug Administration signaled its own concern in a 2016 , saying that uncontrollable with use of the antipsychotic.
