On March 24, Judge Robert Okun of the DC Superior Court signed a dismissal that closes, for now, the only live legal effort to force the retraction of Study 329, the SmithKline-funded 2001 trial that called paroxetine “generally well tolerated and effective” for depressed teenagers and that the Department of Justice later cited in a $3 billion guilty plea over the off-label promotion of Paxil. The order says nothing about whether the paper is honest. It holds that a peer-reviewed journal article is not a “consumer good or service” under the District’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act, and so no individual reader, including the plaintiff, attorney George W. Murgatroyd III, has standing to make a journal stop selling it.

The dismissal is without prejudice, so Murgatroyd can refile under a different theory. The paper itself, Keller et al. 2001, remains in the literature, indexed, downloadable, cited.

The article ran in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in July 2001 under the title “Efficacy of Paroxetine in the Treatment of Adolescent Major Depression,” and concluded that paroxetine was “generally well tolerated and effective.” The trial was sponsored by SmithKline Beecham, which became GlaxoSmithKline. The manuscript was drafted by Sally K. Laden of Scientific Therapeutics Information, a pharmaceutical communications firm, across six drafts billed at $17,250. Martin Keller, then chair of psychiatry at Brown University, was the listed lead author. Murgatroyd’s complaint alleged that ten of the twenty-two named authors made no substantial contribution under the standards the journal now applies.

What the trial actually showed is not in serious dispute by anyone working from the data. The 2015 independent RIAT reanalysis in The BMJ, by Joanna Le Noury, Jon Jureidini, John Nardo, David Healy, and colleagues, drew on the trial’s full clinical study report and reported paroxetine no more effective than placebo on the prespecified primary or secondary outcomes. It also documented clinically significant increases in suicidal ideation, suicidal behavior, and serious adverse events in the adolescents who took the drug. The 2001 paper had buried both findings.

The Department of Justice already collected on the conduct. In July 2012, GlaxoSmithKline pleaded guilty in federal court in Massachusetts and paid $3 billion to resolve federal criminal and civil liability that included the off-label promotion of Paxil to patients under eighteen. GSK’s sales force had distributed Study 329 to physicians as evidence that Paxil worked in teens. The company generated more than a billion dollars from what it itself called the “adolescent market” before the settlement landed.

JAACAP has not retracted the paper. It has now declined to retract it for twenty-five years. Multiple formal retraction requests, from named clinicians and from the authors of the BMJ reanalysis, have been filed and rejected. Elsevier is the publisher.

On September 30, 2025, weeks after Murgatroyd filed his complaint, the journal issued an Expression of Concern. The notice reads, in full: “JAACAP is publishing this expression of concern in order to alert readers to concerns that have been raised about the article. Further review is underway, and an expression of concern will continue to be associated with the article until an outcome is reached.” It names no concerns. It identifies no reviewer. It commits to no timeline. Peter Doshi, senior editor at The BMJ, called it “devoid of detail.”

Murgatroyd’s theory was creative and narrow. The District’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act lets DC residents sue over the sale of misleading consumer goods, and a paid subscription to JAACAP, in his reading, qualified. Judge Okun disagreed. The statute defines a consumer good as something purchased for “personal, household, or family use,” and the court found the plaintiff had not plausibly alleged that a peer-reviewed psychiatry journal article meets that definition. Read narrowly, the ruling is not a finding about the paper. It is a finding about who has legal standing to make a publisher pull a fraudulent article under DC law. The answer the court arrived at, in this filing: not a reader, not even a reader who can document, citation by citation, that the paper was tied to a federal $3 billion guilty plea.

The other parties who plausibly could act have not. The listed authors have not requested retraction. Brown University, where Keller chaired the department whose name still anchors the article, has issued no public finding. Elsevier, asked after the dismissal, did not respond to Retraction Watch’s request for further comment. The Committee on Publication Ethics’ guidelines are advisory. The FDA’s boxed warning on pediatric SSRI use, issued in October 2004, stands; it does not require the literature to clean itself.

The Expression of Concern’s “further review” has no published charter, no published members, no published deadline. Elsevier has not released its internal correspondence with the JAACAP editorial board on the retraction question. Brown has not released its own record on Keller’s authorship of a paper a federal court accepted as evidence of misbranding. The DOJ’s settlement documents are public.

The record does not show that no one inside JAACAP wants Study 329 retracted. It shows that for twenty-five years, no one inside JAACAP has. The legal route Murgatroyd tried, as Maryanne Demasi reported, has closed for now. The paper, “generally well tolerated and effective,” is still indexed in the searches a clinician runs when looking for guidance on paroxetine in teenagers. The journal and the publisher know it. The DOJ said it in court, and the court that just dismissed the suit did not disagree.

The receipts have been on the desk for a decade. Who pulls the paper now is a question only JAACAP, Brown, and Elsevier can answer. The court has made sure no one else can answer it for them.

Sources

  1. DOJ Office of Public Affairs, “GlaxoSmithKline to Plead Guilty and Pay $3 Billion to Resolve Fraud Allegations and Failure to Report Safety Data” (July 2, 2012)
  2. Keller et al., “Efficacy of Paroxetine in the Treatment of Adolescent Major Depression: A Randomized, Controlled Trial,” JAACAP 40(7):762–772 (July 2001)
  3. Le Noury, Nardo, Healy, Jureidini, Raven, Tufanaru, Abi-Jaoude, “Restoring Study 329: efficacy and harms of paroxetine and imipramine in treatment of major depression in adolescence,” BMJ 2015;351:h4320 (September 16, 2015)
  4. Retraction Watch, “Judge tosses lawsuit over controversial Paxil ‘Study 329’” (April 2, 2026)
  5. Retraction Watch, “Controversial Paxil ‘Study 329’ earns expression of concern after critic sues publisher” (October 16, 2025)
  6. Maryanne Demasi, “Study 329 lawsuit collapses” (June 11, 2026)
  7. Brownstone Institute, “Study 329: The Big Fraud Is Finally Under Review”
  8. Wikipedia, “Study 329” (ghostwriting drafts, authorship dispute, BMJ RIAT reanalysis, DOJ settlement)