criticism". Strict liability for defective products finally came to Europe as a result of the thalidomide scandal and the victims' ensuing struggle during the 1960s to obtain adequate compensation, especially in the UK and West Germany. The thalidomide scandal highlighted the need for a strict product liability claim sounding in tort because the affected infants were mere bystander victims, as distinguished from product buyers or users. After the UK formed the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, 80% of pharmaceuticals were provided to patients through the NHS. By assuming financial responsibility for the provision of drugs, the government had thereby barred the majority of mothers (the actual product users) and their infants from bringing breach of warranty claims sounding in contract. For such victims, their only possible claim was a negligence claim sounding in tort, but it is so difficult under English law to prove the standard of care of a reasonable drug manufacturer that as of late 1993, none had ever been held liable in an English court under a negligence theory (although there had been a number of out-of-court settlements). The first international effort in Europe to harmonize product liability resulted in the Council of Europe Convention on Products Liability in regard to Personal Injury and Death (the Strasbourg Convention) in 1977, which never entered into force: while it was signed by Austria, Belgium, France and Luxembourg, it was ratified by none of them. On July 25, 1985, the then-European Economic Community adopted the Product Liability Directive. In language resembling what Traynor wrote in Escola and Greenman, the Directive's preface states that "liability without fault on the part of the producer is the sole means of adequately solving the problem, peculiar to our age of increasing technicality, of a fair apportionment of the risks inherent in modern technological production." The Directive gave each member state the option of imposing a liability cap of 70 million euros per defect. Unlike the United States, the Directive only imposed strict liability upon "producers"—that is, manufacturers of raw materials, component parts, and finished products, as well as importers—and deviated significantly from the American model by deciding not to impose strict liability on purely domestic distributors or retailers. By using the 20-year-old Section 402A as their model, the Directive's drafters decided not to include a number of changes such as the subsequent differentiation between three major types of product defects used in the