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Opioid Litigation Daily Media Report 10/5/17
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The Lawyer Who Beat Big Tobacco Takes On the Opioid Industry (Includes AUDIO)
Oct 5, 2017 | Bloomberg Businessweek
By Esme E Deprez and Paul Barrett
AUDIO LINK: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-05/the-lawyer-who-beat-big-tobacco-takes-on-the-opioid-industry Seven years ago, Mike Moore stepped from the 2 a.m. darkness into the light of a small home off Lakeland Drive in Jackson, Miss., to find his nephew close to death. The 250-pound 30-year-old was slumped on the living room couch, his face pale, breath shallow, and chest wet with vomit. It was his fiancée who’d called Moore, waking him in a panic. Now they were both screaming in the man’s ears, dousing him with ice cubes and water, and pinching him as his respiratory system began to collapse. -
Northeast Texas county becomes first in state to sue pharma companies over opioid crisis
Oct 5, 2017 | Dallas News (TX)
By Sabriya Rice
Upshur County is suing more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies for their alleged role in opioid addiction, a problem taxing the resources of cities and states across the country. -
Upshur first county in state to sue opioid makers
Oct 5, 2017 | Longview News-Journal (TX)
By Staff
Upshur County has become the first governmental body in Texas to sue pharmaceutical companies for their role in the opioid painkiller epidemic, accusing them of inflating the drugs' benefits in treating chronic pain and downplaying the addiction risks. -
East Texas county sues drug companies, alleges role in opioid crisis
Oct 4, 2017 | The Texas Tribune (TX)
By Jim Malewitz
An East Texas county is suing a slew of prescription painkiller manufacturers and distributors in federal court, accusing them of fueling an opioid addiction epidemic that has gripped communities across the nation — in part by allegedly inflating the drugs' benefits in treating chronic pain and downplaying the addiction risks. -
'So Much Worse': Bowie County sues Big Pharma amid opioid epidemic
Oct 4, 2017 | Texarkana Gazette
By Lynn LaRowe
Bowie County has joined a growing list of counties, cities and states suing manufacturers and distributors of opiate-based painkillers in connection with the country's growing epidemic of prescription-drug abuse. -
Texas county sues drug companies amid opioid crisis
Oct 5, 2017 | The Texas Chornicle
By Robert Downen
A Texas county is suing pharmaceutical companies over their role in the opioid epidemic. -
New Jersey is about to hit opioid makers with a major lawsuit
Oct 5, 2017 | NJ.com (NJ)
By Claude Brodesser-Akner
Two major U.S. manufacturers of opioids are likely to be named in civil suits by New Jersey Attorney General Christopher Porrino as early as this week for deceptive practices in marketing the highly addictive drugs, two sources with direct knowledge of the situation tell NJ Advance Media. -
Consolidation of 66 opioid suits requested
Oct 5, 2017 | The Herald Dispatch (WV)
By Courtney Hessler
A Charleston attorney representing a majority of 66 counties and cities nationwide that have lawsuits filed against opioid distributors accused of fueling a national drug epidemic has requested the cases be consolidated into a multidistrict litigation and heard before one judge outside of West Virginia. -
County asked to join legal fight against drug makers
Oct 5, 2017 | Ozaukee Press
By Bill Schanen
For years, Ozaukee County has fought in criminal court to lock up drug dealers who peddle narcotic pain pills and heroin to feed a seemingly insatiable demand for addictive opioids. -
News Channel 25 Nightbeat
Oct 5, 2017 | KXXV (ABC)
By Waco, TX
Video Link: http://app.criticalmention.com/app/#clip/view/29912722?token=512b6095-5571-4f78-a83b-a724adb6fd7c -
News 4 San Antonio at 10p
Oct 4, 2017 | WOAI (ABC)
By San Antonio, TX
Video Link: http://app.criticalmention.com/app/#clip/view/29912742?token=512b6095-5571-4f78-a83b-a724adb6fd7c -
News 12 New Jersey
Oct 4, 2017 | N12NJ (News 12)
By New York, NY
Video Link: http://app.criticalmention.com/app/#clip/view/29912746?token=512b6095-5571-4f78-a83b-a724adb6fd7c
Mike Moore Bloomberg Businessweek Feature
Texas Counties Suits
Other Coverage
Broadcast Media Coverage
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The Lawyer Who Beat Big Tobacco Takes On the Opioid Industry (Includes AUDIO)
Oct 5, 2017 | Bloomberg Businessweek
By Esme E Deprez and Paul Barrett
AUDIO LINK: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-05/the-lawyer-who-beat-big-tobacco-takes-on-the-opioid-industry
Seven years ago, Mike Moore stepped from the 2 a.m. darkness into the light of a small home off Lakeland Drive in Jackson, Miss., to find his nephew close to death. The 250-pound 30-year-old was slumped on the living room couch, his face pale, breath shallow, and chest wet with vomit. It was his fiancée who’d called Moore, waking him in a panic. Now they were both screaming in the man’s ears, dousing him with ice cubes and water, and pinching him as his respiratory system began to collapse.
Moore had become familiar with the signs of an overdose since his nephew, for whom he’s a father figure, filled his first legal prescriptions in 2006 for Percocet, an opioid painkiller made by Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc. By 2010, his nephew, who asked not to be named, was obtaining generic fentanyl on the street. Another synthetic analog to the opium poppy, fentanyl—the drug that killed Prince—is as much as 100 times stronger than morphine. The night of the overdose, Moore’s nephew had been wearing a fentanyl patch on his arm and sucking on another. “An ordinary horse would have been dead,” Moore recalls in his Mississippi drawl.
Rather than waiting for an ambulance, Moore dragged his nephew to his car and raced toward the hospital. As doctors revived the unconscious man, the stares of the staff and other patients were made worse for Moore by recognition. Once his home state’s highest-profile public official, now he was just one more American confronting the opioid epidemic.
Moore, who’s 65, served as Mississippi’s attorney general from 1988 to 2004. In 1994, using an untested and widely derided legal strategy, he became the first state AG to sue tobacco companies for lying about nicotine addiction and hold them accountable for sick smokers’ health-care costs. A Democrat, he marshaled AGs from around the country along with private plaintiffs’ lawyers who stood to reap massive fees. He went on to negotiate the largest corporate legal settlement in U.S. history: a 50-state, $246 billion agreement that funds smoking cessation and prevention programs to this day. He even scored a Hollywood credit, playing himself in The Insider, the 1999 thriller about a tobacco industry whistleblower, starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe.
After his 16 years as AG, Moore left public service for a private-sector salary, opening a practice in the Jackson suburb of Flowood. The Mike Moore Law Firm specializes in complex disputes between states and companies. This spring he finished helping oversee negotiations between BP Plc and the federal government, five states, and 475 municipalities, which resulted in a $20 billion settlement for damages from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Moore now lives near Orlando, with his wife, four rescue dogs, and Jade, a capuchin monkey. He’s remained immersed in anti-tobacco efforts, chairing such nonprofits as the Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi and the Truth Initiative. But as he’s watched the tobacco victory pay off in declining smoking rates, he’s also seen easy access to powerful pain medication spark a new deadly crisis. He’s convinced this is the moment to work the same mechanisms on the drug companies that forced the tobacco industry to heel—and he’s committed himself to making that happen.
On June 20, 1997, a coalition of state AGs stood behind a podium in the grand ballroom of the ANA Hotel in Washington to announce the culmination of a four-year effort. They’d filed so many individual, expensive lawsuits that tobacco companies were cornered into negotiating a collective settlement instead of fighting each one separately. The agreement punished the industry for past misconduct, created a fund to pay for tobacco-related medical costs, and banned using Joe Camel in advertisements. “We wanted this industry to have to change the way they do business—and we have done that,” a youthful Moore said to the roomful of journalists and cameras.
Twenty years later, in mid-July 2017, he was back at the same hotel, now a Fairmont. In a third-floor meeting room, he and more than a dozen private attorneys sat around a rectangular conference table discussing strategies for the legal battle they’d helped ignite with companies that make, distribute, and sell opioids.
Aided by the lawyers in the room (and others, including high-profile and high-profiting alumni of the tobacco wars, such as Joe Rice and Steve Berman), 10 states and dozens of cities and counties have sued companies including Purdue Pharma, Endo, and Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals—beginning in 2014 but mostly in the past few months. (Forty state AGs have launched preliminary investigations as a way to gauge the viability of litigation.) The suits allege that the companies triggered the opioid epidemic by minimizing the addiction and overdose risk of painkillers such as OxyContin, Percocet, and Duragesic. Opioids don’t just cause problems when they’re misused, the suits argue: They do so when used as directed, too.
The opioid epidemic cost the U.S. economy $78.5 billion in 2013, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a quarter of which was paid by taxpayers through increased public costs for health care, criminal justice, and treatment. The industry, the suits contend, should bear the financial burden of this wreckage.
Paul Hanly Jr., a Manhattan attorney who’s filed on behalf of almost a dozen cities and counties, opened the discussion at the Fairmont with lessons from previous suits. P. Rodney Jackson, a lawyer from West Virginia, got heads nodding with his recommendation that suits targeting manufacturers should be amended to add distributors who sell pills to pharmacies. A retired agent from the Drug Enforcement Administration, one of several consultants, laid out the fines that distributors and pharmacies have already paid after failing to follow federal requirements to report suspiciously large pill orders.
Officially, Moore’s name is listed only on cases filed by Mississippi, which was the first state to sue, and Ohio. But this belies his outsize role in convening the like-minded while envisioning the long-term, big-picture strategy. “We’re trying to build coalitions, because it won’t get done with me and our little team,” he says, referring to a core group of longtime friends that includes former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods, the first Republican AG to join the anti-tobacco crusade, and Chip Robertson, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri who helped his state sue tobacco companies.
Just as he did during the tobacco-litigation era, Moore has been traversing the country to recruit people to his cause. His trip to Washington was one of more than 50 he estimates he’s taken in the past six months to meet with hundreds of private attorneys, about 30 AGs, and professionals in law enforcement and public health. An alumnus of Ole Miss, where he wore his hair long and jammed on a synthesizer in a rock band, Moore’s expertise is in glad-handing and dealmaking. “My talents are not writing briefs, they are not researching the law,” he says. “I know people. I know how to deal with people. I treat people fairly.”
Moore and his allies hope to corral at least 25 states to exert enough pressure, collect enough evidence, and drive potential damages so high that it will be cheaper for opioid manufacturers to back down. They’re confident that the epic scale of the crisis ravaging the country has gotten too big to dodge. What was once considered a problem only among the Appalachian poor now touches every demographic. The most recent data, from 2015, show the opioid death toll exceeded 33,000 that year.
The goal, according to Moore, isn’t to simply win a pile of money to be allocated haphazardly into government coffers. One of his regrets from the cigarette windfall is that some of the money didn’t go where intended. This time, he wants a comprehensive, company-funded national program that would make treatment more widely available—currently just 1 in 10 addicts has access—as well as expand prevention education and force a change in doctors’ prescribing habits. Despite having fallen since its 2010 peak, the number of opioid prescriptions in 2015 was three times what it was in 1999, the CDC says.
“Litigation is a blunt instrument; it’s not a surgical tool,” Moore says. “But it provokes interest quicker than anything I’ve ever seen.”
While the government lawsuits filed so far target combinations of drug companies, they consistently single out Purdue. With its aggressive marketing of OxyContin—the Kleenex or Google of opioids—Purdue established the market as we know it and invented many of the practices the government suits now seek to frame as unlawful.
Tenacious promotion is woven into Purdue’s DNA. In 1952 three brothers, Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler, all psychiatrists, bought a little-known laxative maker in New York. From it they built the modern Purdue, still a family-owned company. During those early years, Arthur Sackler pioneered now-common pharmaceutical marketing techniques—for example, sending “detailers,” or specialized salesmen, to pay calls directly on physicians.
As recently as a quarter-century ago, few doctors prescribed the opium-derived drugs (and synthetic versions of them) for chronic pain related to backaches, headaches, or arthritis. This class of medications was distributed primarily to postoperative patients and those dying of cancer. That wasn’t much of a market, though. In the late 1980s a handful of researchers and pain doctors began to argue that pain was vastly undertreated, and one company more than any other—Purdue—grabbed the opportunity. Almost single-handedly, it turned what had been a niche product into one of the most prescribed classes of drugs.
Outspoken experts such as Dr. Russell Portenoy, a New York-based pain specialist, argued in journal articles and Purdue-paid talks to doctors that opioids weren’t inherently addictive and could safely be prescribed over extended periods. In 1995 the American Pain Society, a Purdue-funded group over which Portenoy later presided, urged physicians to monitor pain as a “fifth vital sign,” along with blood pressure, body temperature, pulse, and respiration. In 1996, Purdue unveiled OxyContin, which paired oxycodone, an opium derivative, with Continus, a time-release formula. Approving the pill, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration accepted Purdue’s contention that because the drug entered the bloodstream gradually, it wouldn’t cause the surging highs and subsequent lows that kindle addiction.
Purdue put its full energy into selling OxyContin, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report in 2003. The company doubled the number of detailers devoted to the drug, from 318 in 1996 to 767 in 2002. Total annual cash bonuses tied to sales soared from $1 million to $40 million. Purdue directed its reps to call on primary care physicians, despite their scant training in the treatment of serious pain. In videos and publications, it relied on a dubious statistic—that only 1 percent of patients treated with narcotics would become addicted—even though the figure came not from a peer-reviewed scientific study, but from a one-paragraph 1980 letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine. The company gave away OxyContin-branded fishing hats, plush toys, and golf balls. Detailers handed out big-band music CDs titled Swing in the Right Direction with OxyContin, and 34,000 coupons for a free one-time prescription.
Purdue also embraced a questionable condition called “pseudoaddiction,” which holds that behaviors normally associated with addiction—requesting drugs by name, displaying a demanding or manipulative manner, or seeking out more than one doctor to obtain opioids—might be signals that a patient needs more pain medication, not less. The concept was promoted in a 2007 publication called Responsible Opioid Prescribing, distributed by the Federation of State Medical Boards and co-sponsored by Purdue. It had been coined almost two decades earlier by a pain doctor named J. David Haddox. He became a Purdue employee in 1999 and remains vice president for health policy. Purdue declined to make him available for comment, but company spokesman Robert Josephson contends that the FDA takes the concept seriously. OxyContin’s FDA-approved label says “preoccupation … with achieving adequate pain relief can be appropriate behavior in a patient with poor pain control.”
The tactics worked. OxyContin sales rose from $45 million in 1996 to more than $1.5 billion in 2002. But the drug’s huge success as a treatment for long-term chronic pain—and much of the marketing that drove it—had no basis in meaningful science, according to Andrew Kolodny, a physician and co-director of opioid policy research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. There was no controlled, double-blind research—and there’s none still—that supports the notion that opioids are effective for treating chronic pain over a period of many months, let alone years. “For the vast majority of patients, the known, serious, and too-often-fatal risks far outweigh the unproven and transient benefits,” the CDC said in 2016.
States have tried to legally challenge opioid marketing practices, aiming mostly at Purdue, since at least 2001. But these earlier attempts produced only modest, piecemeal settlements—including $10 million for West Virginia in 2004, and $19.5 million for 26 states and Washington, D.C., in 2007.
In private practice, Moore was involved in a cluster of suits instigated in 2003 against Purdue by people who claimed they or loved ones got hooked on prescription opioids despite obtaining them legally and taking them as directed. In conducting his investigation, Moore visited pain clinics and interviewed users, doctors, and people who’d advertised and marketed the company’s drugs. The effort ended in 2007 when claimants, represented by lawyers including Hanly, the Manhattan attorney, settled for $75 million. Purdue admitted no wrongdoing, and the court agreed to keep the corporate documents gathered in discovery confidential. The case may not have done much to waylay Purdue, but it did give Moore early insight into how opioid litigation could work and helped him establish connections with attorneys who are now among the most active filers.
In a federal criminal prosecution, also resolved in 2007, Purdue and three of its top executives pleaded guilty to “misbranding” OxyContin and collectively agreed to pay some $630 million in civil and criminal penalties. The company specifically acknowledged that it trained its sales representatives to mislead physicians about opioid risks. Purdue emphasized that its plea covered misconduct only from 1995 through 2001. “We accept responsibility for those past misstatements and regret that they were made,” the company said.
More than a dozen years of scattershot litigation “accomplished absolutely zero” in terms of preventing or stemming the crisis, says Woods, the former Arizona AG and Moore ally. “Some lawyers made money. States put some money in coffers. But the problem is greater today than it’s ever been.” The difference this time, Woods and his colleagues say, is that such a large group will pool their resources and evidence.
Most of the current lawsuits target multiple companies based on the allegation that while Purdue pioneered misleading marketing tactics, its competitors subsequently replicated them as sales of OxyContin exploded. The complaints charge that Purdue and its rivals never stopped their alleged campaign of misinformation carried out by means of industry-funded experts and pamphlets, online publications, and medical educational programs. (Josephson declined to comment on any of Purdue’s marketing tactics, citing the pending litigation.)
Portenoy, the Purdue-affiliated pain doctor, recanted publicly in 2011, conceding that research he relied on to push his and Purdue’s pro-opioid campaign didn’t prove anything about the treatment of chronic pain. (He wrote in an email that no one “anticipated the widespread overdosing and medication misuse we see today.”) He and other industry-funded physicians, described as “key opinion leaders,” are named as defendants in a handful of the current government lawsuits.
Ohio is representative of how lethal and costly the opioid epidemic has become and how the government lawsuits work. In 2012 prescriptions reached a peak, 793 million opioid doses, according to state statistics—enough to medicate every resident with 68 pills apiece. Half of the state’s foster-care population is made up of children with opioid-addicted parents, and the rate of babies born addicted to opioids grew almost eightfold from 2006 to 2015. In 2014, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, a Republican, began considering litigation. With his own office lacking manpower and expertise, he invited pitches from a half-dozen teams of outside lawyers. Moore’s group won the assignment.
Filed in May in state court, Ohio’s suit accuses drugmakers of “borrowing a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook” by concealing addiction risks. According to the state, Purdue, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Janssen, Endo, and Allergan invested millions to change attitudes about opioid prescribing. Janssen distributed a patient education guide calling opioid addiction a “myth,” for example, while Endo advertised that an abuse-deterrent reformulation of one of its most popular opioids, Opana ER, made it crush-resistant, despite its own studies disproving that claim. From 2001 through 2015, Purdue hosted the website inthefaceofpain.com, which promoted “the notion that if a patient’s doctor does not prescribe what, in the patient’s view, is a sufficient dosage of opioids, he or she should find another doctor who will.”
Ohio accuses the companies of creating a public nuisance, violating state laws against unfair sales practices, and committing Medicaid fraud by spurring unnecessary prescriptions that the state reimbursed. The conduct dates to at least 1996 and continues through the present, says Jonathan Blanton, who heads the AG’s consumer protection unit. The companies, DeWine says, have reaped unjust profits while devastating communities and fueling a heroin resurgence. “It’s clear they’re not going to be part of the solution unless we drag them to the table.”
Like most of the current lawsuits, Ohio’s complaint isn’t specific about how much money it aims to recoup. But Ronny Gal, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., views the litigation as a material threat to companies, with potential aggregate damages “in the many billions.”
While the evidence marshaled by Ohio and other plaintiff governments is compellingly grim, whistleblowers and smoking-gun documents would help turn these suits into tobacco-scale winners. Moore predicts that insiders willing to testify are bound to materialize as plaintiffs’ lawyers continue to investigate. Jeffrey Wigand, a star whistleblower (and subject of The Insider), didn’t emerge until a year after Moore filed suit on behalf of Mississippi in 1994.
Denying any wrongdoing, all of the companies say they want to help resolve the crisis, but not through litigation, which they call wasteful and unfair. “We firmly believe the allegations in these lawsuits are both legally and factually unfounded,” Janssen spokesman William Foster says in a representative statement. “Janssen has acted responsibly and in the best interests of patients and physicians with regard to these medicines.” The only company willing to discuss the litigation on the record—as opposed to issuing a boilerplate statement—is Purdue. It declined to make any executives available for interviews or allow a reporter to visit its headquarters in Stamford, Conn., but it dispatched Josephson and an outside lawyer to discuss the cases. Purdue has the most to lose: More than half of its revenue comes from opioids, Josephson says. It doesn’t release financial information, but Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. estimates that OxyContin alone generated sales of $1.3 billion in 2016. (Opioid sales overall totaled $8.6 billion last year, up from $1.1 billion in 1992, according to Quintiles IMS Holdings Inc.) Of drugs made by the other four most commonly named defendants in the government suits, the next biggest was Johnson & Johnson’s Duragesic (fentanyl), with sales of $288 million. J&J derives 0.4 percent of its revenue from opioids and could stop making them tomorrow with barely any impact on its bottom line.
A key defense that Purdue and the other opioid makers have to deploy involves causation. The companies contend that between the time a manufacturer sells pills to a wholesaler and when those pills cause social harm, several other actors—pharmacies, prescribing doctors (some negligent or even criminal), drug abusers, and pill traffickers—break the chain of causation. Suits filed by municipalities against firearm manufacturers in the late 1990s failed, in part, because some judges ruled that gunmakers shouldn’t be held liable for the misuse of their otherwise lawful products. For a pistol to be misused, another actor—a criminal, a suicide, or a curious child—has to intervene and pull the trigger. Similarly, when opioids are misused, blame should rest elsewhere, says Mark Cheffo, one of Purdue’s outside lawyers.
Purdue and its rivals also argue that the evidence, even if incriminating, is too old. In the opioid cases, many of the allegations are based on events—such as the publication of suspect medical literature—that took place 10 years or more in the past, beyond some states’ statutes of limitations on proving fraud. Josephson says the company hasn’t received an FDA warning letter about its marketing since 2003—“14 years!” he adds for emphasis. He also complains that the suits fail to give Purdue credit for switching in 2010 to a new “abuse-deterrent” version of OxyContin that’s more difficult for addicts to crush, break, or dissolve. On its website, the company calls itself “the new Purdue Pharma,” which “has learned from the past and is focused on the future.” It says it’s investing in research and development for non-opioid pain medication, has widely disseminated the CDC guidelines for prescribing among doctors and pharmacists, and joined with the National Sheriffs’ Association in an $850,000 program to provide naloxone kits and training for police officers.
Another defense is that the states and localities should really be suing the makers of generic painkillers. Of the roughly 234 million annual opioid prescriptions, only 4 million, or 1.7 percent, are for Purdue drugs. “We don’t see how you solve this problem when you don’t have the biggest players involved,” Josephson says.
While generic medicines cause harm, they generally aren’t promoted, Moore says. Going after the branded manufacturers makes sense because they created the environment in which generics later thrived. Even so, he adds, “When this is all said and done, all the companies will be sued one way or the other.”
Moore’s nephew first became acquainted with opioids at 26, after he woke up from a four-day medically induced coma following an altercation with his then-girlfriend that ended with him being shot in the chest with his own .45. Neither party filed charges, and his recollection of the night is so hazy he doesn’t know who pulled the trigger. The gunshot caused extensive damage to his subclavian artery and surrounding nerves that would require almost 30 operations.
Doctors administered intravenous morphine while he was in intensive care; once at home, he received prescriptions for various combinations of Percocet, Norco, Dilaudid, fentanyl, and Demerol. About a year and a half later, while working full time as a manager at a Nissan auto plant in Jackson, he began finishing a month’s worth of medication after only three weeks, then two weeks, as his tolerance increased. Soon he was turning to the black market for Lortabs, hydrocodone, and fentanyl patches. At one point, during an appointment to which Moore accompanied him, a doctor assured him that he suffered from pseudoaddiction—and needed not fewer opioids, but more.
After seven years, two stints in detox, and dozens of trips to the hospital following overdoses or suffering from debilitating withdrawals, he says it was his move to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast to be closer to family that enabled him to gain some control over his addiction. He’s now 37. Despite his history, he still has a prescription for the opioid Opana IR, which he’s convinced he can use sparingly because his fear of going through withdrawal again is greater than his desire for the drug.
Moore acknowledges that weak regulation, lax prescribing practices, and abuse play a role in his nephew’s and the nation’s addiction problem. “But a huge part of it is because of the externalities of greedy companies. It wasn’t enough to make this much money,” he says, holding his hands a foot apart. “They wanted to make this much money,” he says, widening his arms as far they’ll go.
“If you ask Big Pharma right now, Mike Moore is the devil,” says Robertson, the former chief justice of Missouri. “But they haven’t talked to him. And when they sit down, he’s going to walk in and say, ‘We’ve got a business problem. Let’s figure out a business solution.’ ”
Moore is confident that the opioid industry will be driven to negotiate for the same reasons tobacco companies were: to end the demonization and obtain financial predictability. “The vilification of this industry has not even begun yet,” he says. “In other words: This litigation will vilify them. It won’t make the companies look like they’re legitimate businesspeople. It’ll make them look like they took advantage and made billions of dollars on lots of people who died from their products. And they can claim misuse and abuse all they want to—it’s too many.”
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Northeast Texas county becomes first in state to sue pharma companies over opioid crisis
Oct 5, 2017 | Dallas News (TX)
By Sabriya Rice
Upshur County is suing more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies for their alleged role in opioid addiction, a problem taxing the resources of cities and states across the country.
The lawsuit announced Wednesday makes the North Texas county the first governmental body in the state to sue over opioids. Cities like Cincinnati and Louisville filed lawsuits earlier this year. So have four counties in New York, two in California and a handful in other states.
At least six states have also filed claims so far, including New Hampshire, Ohio, Missouri, Oklahoma, Mississippi and South Carolina, according to Bloomberg.
The Upshur County case was filed Sept. 29 in the U.S. District Court in Marshall. It names pharmaceutical giants like Purdue Pharma, Johnson and Johnson, Teva Pharmaceutical, Abbott Laboratories, Allergan, Pfizer, and McKesson as defendants, among others.
The lawsuit alleges that the companies used deceptive marketing practices to tout the benefits of opioids for chronic pain, including using third parties who were seemingly independent but were actually funded by the companies.
Opioids are in a class of medications that include illegal substances like heroin, but also legally available prescription pain relievers, like brand names like OxyContin and Vicodin, and drugs like codeine and morphine. Their addictive capabilities have resulted in what has been deemed an opioid crisis in the United States.
As many as one in every three patients that is prescribed an opioid for chronic pain ultimately misuses the pills, and in 2015 more than 33,000 Americans overdosed on the drugs, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The crisis has drawn national and local attention.
In 2010, Texas introduced a "pill mill" legislation that is attributed to a clinically significant reduction in opioid dose, volume, prescriptions and pills dispensed in the state.
Pharmacies in Texas and other states began offering the opioid overdose-reversal drug, naloxone without prescriptions. The federal government has awarded millions to states to help them curb high rates of opioid overuse. The union Teamsters protested the executive pay given to pharmaceutical company executives saying the distributors aggravate the epidemic.
Upshur County is being represented by Dallas firm of Simon Greenstone Panatier Bartlett. The firm also represents six counties in East Texas, and additional lawsuits are expected, a news release said.
"While the pharmaceutical industry pulls in huge profits, local governments are bearing the weight of these industry marketing and sales tactics, having to find a way to pay for increased health care and community services, such as courts, child services, treatment centers and law enforcement," said Jeffrey Simon, co-founder of the firm, in the release.
Some experts say litigation against Big Pharma over the opioid crisis could rival similar cases against Big Tobacco in the 90s, which ended with attorneys generals from 46 states winning a settlement of more than $200 billion from large tobacco companies over the costs of treating smoking-related illnesses.
Texas has not yet said whether it will sue pharmaceutical companies, but Attorney General Ken Paxton has joined a bipartisan group of attorneys general in a multi-state investigation into the role the drugmakers may have played in the opioid crisis.
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Upshur first county in state to sue opioid makers
Oct 5, 2017 | Longview News-Journal (TX)
By Staff
Upshur County has become the first governmental body in Texas to sue pharmaceutical companies for their role in the opioid painkiller epidemic, accusing them of inflating the drugs' benefits in treating chronic pain and downplaying the addiction risks.
Bowie, Delta, Hopkins, Lamar, Red River and Smith counties also are expected to file lawsuits working with the law firm of Simon, Greenstone, Panatier & Bartlett of Dallas.
Rusk County on Wednesday also agreed to join the litigation.
"I think the thing we're interested in is trying to recoup some of our indigent health care costs, if we can," said Rusk County Judge Joel Hale. "I don't think there's any guarantee that we'll be able to do that. There's no cost to the county. If they recover something, we will be able to recoup some of those costs. If they don't get anything, they're out the money. We're not."
The Upshur County lawsuit against more than a half-dozen companies and their affiliates or subsidiaries was filed Friday in federal court in Marshall.
Opioids are a family of drugs that includes prescription painkillers, such as hydrocodone; illegal drugs, such as heroin; and synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl.
According to the Upshur County lawsuit, opioids were tightly regulated for short-term acute pain treatment and to ease end-of-life suffering until the industry made a push in the late 1990s to encourage doctors to expand prescribing painkillers. Relying on now-debunked studies and the assurances of key medical opinion leaders, primary care doctors were inundated with a message that opioids were a safe, non-addictive means to treat even moderate chronic pain on a long-term basis, the lawsuit states.
"While the pharmaceutical industry pulls in huge profits, local governments are bearing the weight of these industry marketing and sales tactics, having to find a way to pay for increased health care and community services, such as courts, child services, treatment centers and law enforcement," said attorney Jeffrey Simon of Simon, Greenstone, Panatier & Bartlett.
The development comes as Attorney General Ken Paxton has inserted Texas into a 41-state investigation of companies that manufacture or sell opioids.
The states this past month served investigative subpoenas or other requests to eight such companies and their affiliates, including some named in Upshur's lawsuit.
Upshur County commissioners voted this past week to retain legal counsel in the litigation.
Also this past week, County Judge Dean Fowler said the goal of the lawsuit is to try and recoup the cost of the opioid epidemic.
"It costs our taxpayers to take care of people who are addicted to opioids, and the cost to the public is very high," he said.
In Upshur County, there are people on the county's indigent health program who abuse opioids, and the county must treat jail inmates who are addicted to the drugs, Fowler said this past week.
Based on the 2015 national average, Fowler estimates Upshur County records about seven deaths annually because of opioid addiction.
The county has about 40,000 residents.
"I want to make very clear that we are not talking about suing any local doctors or health care providers," Fowler said earlier. "We are merely targeting the manufacturers, marketers and distributors that mislead them."
Defendants in the Upshur County lawsuit include: Purdue Pharma, Endo Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Allergan, AmerisourceBergen Corp., Cardinal Health, McKesson Corp., Abbott Laboratories and Johnson & Johnson.
The drug companies refuted the allegations Wednesday and pointed to policies that they said deter painkiller abuse.
"The people of Cardinal Health care deeply about the devastation opioid abuse has caused American families and communities and are committed to helping solve this complex national public health crisis," said Geoffrey Basye, a spokesman for Cardinal Health. "We will defend ourselves vigorously in court and at the same time continue to work, alongside regulators, manufacturers, doctors, pharmacists and patients, to fight opioid abuse and addiction."
In its own statement, Purdue Pharma said: "We are deeply troubled by the opioid crisis and we are dedicated to being part of the solution. ... We vigorously deny these allegations and look forward to the opportunity to present our defense."
Simon said the lawsuit would not interfere with the states' investigation of companies involved in manufacturing and distributing opioids.
"There is no direct relationship with the investigation that AG Paxton has joined," he said. "Both will work in parallel, but the more information that is developed through the combination of these efforts, the better the public is served by revelation of the truth."
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East Texas county sues drug companies, alleges role in opioid crisis
Oct 4, 2017 | The Texas Tribune (TX)
By Jim Malewitz
An East Texas county is suing a slew of prescription painkiller manufacturers and distributors in federal court, accusing them of fueling an opioid addiction epidemic that has gripped communities across the nation — in part by allegedly inflating the drugs' benefits in treating chronic pain and downplaying the addiction risks.
In filing the lawsuit, Upshur County became the first of what could be more Texas governments to seek financial damages from companies alleged to have played a role in the opioid crisis.
Lawsuits are also expected from the East Texas counties of Bowie, Delta, Hopkins, Lamar, Red River and Smith, lawyers representing those governments — and Upshur County — said Wednesday.
The development comes as Attorney General Ken Paxton has inserted Texas into a 41-state investigation of companies that manufacture or sell opioids. The states last month served investigative subpoenas or other requests to eight such companies and their affiliates, including some named in Upshur County’s lawsuit.
Defendants in the Upshur County challenge, filed in U.S. district court in Marshall, include: Purdue Pharma, Endo Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Allergan, AmerisourceBergen Corporation, Cardinal Health, McKesson Corporation, Abbott Laboratories, and Johnson & Johnson.
Opioids are a family of drugs including prescription painkillers like hydrocodone, as well as illicit drugs like heroin.
Prescription and illegal opioids account for more than 60 percent of overdose deaths in the U.S., a toll that has quadrupled over the past two decades, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Drug overdose deaths in 2015 far outnumbered deaths from auto accidents or guns.
Texas saw 1,186 opioid-related deaths in 2015, while the nation as a whole had 33,000 such deaths that year. Researchers have flagged opioids as one possible factor in Texas’ staggering rise in women’s deaths during and shortly after pregnancy.
In its lawsuit, Upshur County argues it “has spent and continues to spend large sums combatting the public health crisis created by Defendants’ negligent and fraudulent marketing campaign,” and is seeking an unspecified amount in damages.
“There is no denying that we have an opioid crisis in America, and that the human misery and financial damage it causes is enormous,” said Jeffrey Simon, co-founder of Simon Greenstone Panatier Bartlett, who is representing Upshur County in the suit. “Although accidental overdoses have become the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50, the pharmaceutical industry has not been fully held accountable for its role in creating this epidemic.”
The drug companies refuted the allegations on Wednesday, and pointed to policies that they said deter painkiller abuse.
“The people of Cardinal Health care deeply about the devastation opioid abuse has caused American families and communities and are committed to helping solve this complex national public health crisis,” said Geoffrey Basye, a spokesman for Cardinal Health. “We will defend ourselves vigorously in court and at the same time continue to work, alongside regulators, manufacturers, doctors, pharmacists and patients, to fight opioid abuse and addiction.”
In its own statement, Purdue Pharma said: “We are deeply troubled by the opioid crisis and we are dedicated to being part of the solution. ... We vigorously deny these allegations and look forward to the opportunity to present our defense.”
Simon, the attorney representing Upshur County, said his lawsuit would not interfere with the states’ investigation of companies involved in manufacturing and distributing opioids.
“There is no direct relationship with the investigation that AG Paxton has joined,” he said in an email. “Both will work in parallel, but the more information that is developed through the combination of these efforts, the better the public is served by revelation of the truth.”
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'So Much Worse': Bowie County sues Big Pharma amid opioid epidemic
Oct 4, 2017 | Texarkana Gazette
By Lynn LaRowe
Bowie County has joined a growing list of counties, cities and states suing manufacturers and distributors of opiate-based painkillers in connection with the country's growing epidemic of prescription-drug abuse.
The county filed suit Monday in the Texarkana Division of the Eastern District of Texas, the same court where a multibillion-dollar settlement against Big Tobacco was overseen in the late 1990s. The suit accuses a bevy of companies of spreading false and deceptive information that led doctors and the public to believe long-term opioid use was safe for most people, in order to reap giant profits."This epidemic did not occur by chance."
"We've been realizing the epidemic through our indigent, inmate and mental health populations in particular," said Bowie County Judge James Carlow. "It's getting so much worse."
None of the lawyers representing Bowie County could be reached for comment Wednesday.
"The economic burden caused by opioid abuse in the U.S. is approximately $78.5 billion, including lost productivity and increased social services, health insurance costs, increased criminal justice presence and strain on judicial resources, and substance abuse treatment and rehabilitation," the complaint alleges. "This epidemic did not occur by chance.
"Defendants manufacture, market, distribute, and sell prescription opioids, including brand name drugs like OxyContin, Vicodin, Opana, Percocet, Percodan, Roxicodone, Avinza, and generics like oxymorphone and hydrocodone, which are powerful narcotic painkillers. Other defendants manufacture, market, distribute, and sell prescription opioids, including brand-name drugs like Fentanyl, Fentora, Duragesic, Ultram, and Ultracet."
Bowie County is one of many governmental entitities in at least a half-dozen states to file suit. Cases filed in or transferred to a federal jurisdiction may eventually be consolidated into a multi-district litigation to ensure consistency in rulings among the cases and provide judicial economy.
Bowie County's complaint alleges the pharmaceutical defendants are guilty of using a variety of tricks to induce doctors to prescribe opioids and to convince health insurance companies to cover their costs. The deception alleged includes using supposedly third-party doctors and "front groups" to tout the benefits of the drugs when they were in fact receiving financial and other benefits to mislead their colleagues. According to the complaint, the companies collectively tripled their spending on opioid marketing between 2000 and 2011 from $91 million to $288 million.
"The escalating number of opioid prescriptions written by doctors who were deceived by defendants' deceptive marketing scheme is the cause of a correspondingly dramatic increase in opioid addiction, overdose and death throughout the U.S. and Bowie County," the complaint states. "The costs and consequences of opioid addiction are staggering. For example, in 2007, the cost of health care due to opioid abuse, dependence and misuse was estimated at $25 billion, the cost of criminal justice was estimated at $5.1 billion, and the cost of lost workplace productivity was estimated at $25.6 billion."
The suit alleges Big Pharma was well aware of the risks via warnings from the Food and Drug Administration, scientific studies and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A 2016 CDC report found that opioid prescriptions have quadrupled since 1999.
"There was also an increase in Bowie County's child protection agencies in the number of children in foster care driven by parental drug addiction," the complaint alleges.
The complaint accuses all the defendants of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, RICO, by engaging in concert in a sophisticated scheme to sell and distribute the dangerous drugs with an eye on profits and a complete disregard for patient health and the rippling, negative effects widespread addiction has on families and communities.
The complaint alleges the defendants are guilty of creating a public nuisance in Bowie County and of committing fraudulent acts to entice patients to request opioids and to induce doctors to prescribe them. Negligence in marketing by downplaying the risks of opioids is alleged as well.
The suit alleges gross negligence is exemplified by the defendants' use of a marketing scheme to maximize profits at the expense of public health and that the companies should be ordered to pay punitive and exemplary damages meant to punish and deter similar future conduct. The suit accuses the defendants who distribute opioids of violating the Texas Controlled Substances Act.
The suit was filed on Bowie County's behalf by the Texarkana-based Dunn, Nutter & Morgan firm; the Tyler, Texas-based Martin Walker firm; and the Dallas-based Simon Greenstone Panatier Bartlett firm. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Robert Schroeder III.
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Texas county sues drug companies amid opioid crisis
Oct 5, 2017 | The Texas Chornicle
By Robert Downen
A Texas county is suing pharmaceutical companies over their role in the opioid epidemic.
The suit, filed on Sept. 29 by a Dallas lawfirm on behalf of Upshur County, is the first of its kind in Texas, and joins a growing number of legal actions taken by governments amid a worsening national health crisis related to painkillers.
It accuses more than a half-dozen pharmaceutical companies and their affiliates of using "now-debunked studies" to push for more access to powerful painkillers.
"While the pharmaceutical industry pulls in huge profits, local governments are bearing the weight of these industry marketing and sales tactics, having to find a way to pay for increased health care and community services, such as courts, child services, treatment centers and law enforcement," Jeffrey Simon, of Simon Greenstone Panatier Bartlett, P.C., said in a statement.
"There is no denying that we have an opioid crisis in America, and that the human misery and financial damage it causes is enormous," he said. "Although accidental overdoses have become the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50, the pharmaceutical industry has not been fully held accountable for its role in creating this epidemic."
Among the companies listed is Purdue Pharma, which is already facing lawsuits from other counties and states for their alleged role in the painkiller crisis. The company has denied such charges, and has said it is "committed to working collaboratively to find solutions" to the epidemic.
Purdue has contended that it is not liable for deaths and injuries related to one of its signature products, Oxycontin, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for public use.
Purdue has made at least $31 billion since unveiling the potent painkiller in 1996, according to a 2016 investigation from the Los Angeles Times.
In 2007, the company and three executives pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the misbranding of Oxycontin, according to Reuters. The same year, the privately held company also settled with 26 states and the District of Columbia for $19.5 million.
In 2015, Purdue paid $24 million in a suit filed by Kentucky, Reuters reported.
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New Jersey is about to hit opioid makers with a major lawsuit
Oct 5, 2017 | NJ.com (NJ)
By Claude Brodesser-Akner
Two major U.S. manufacturers of opioids are likely to be named in civil suits by New Jersey Attorney General Christopher Porrino as early as this week for deceptive practices in marketing the highly addictive drugs, two sources with direct knowledge of the situation tell NJ Advance Media.
The drug makers at the center of New Jersey's probe are the Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin and the Arizona-based Insys Therapeutics, which makes a version of Fentanyl aimed at cancer patients.
The aim of the New Jersey attorney general's investigation is to cut into the widespread use of opioids in New Jersey. It will seek to refute drug makers' public claims that opioids are safe for managing severe pain when prescribed under a doctor's care and taken according to directions, a source with direct knowledge of New Jersey's inquiry said.
This source, who is not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity, disclosed that "dozens if not hundreds" of New Jersey doctors have so far been subpoenaed about Big Pharma's opioid sales and marketing practices here.
Lawsuits filed in other states allege deceptive marketing practices included rewarding doctors for writing more prescriptions for preferred drugs. Unscrupulous doctors have also been named for deceiving insurers into paying for drugs they prescribed.
Porrino would not confirm or deny whether he planned to sue Purdue, which has offices in Cranbury, or Insys.
But in a written statement sent to NJ Advance Media on Tuesday, he acknowledged "it's no secret that we're taking a hard and close look at the marketing and sales practices of certain pharmaceutical manufacturers when it comes to these highly addictive opioid pain killers."
Calls to an Insys spokesman were not returned. Beverly Sackler, the 93-year-old owner of Purdue Pharma, defended Purdue's track record in a brief interview on Tuesday afternoon.
"I don't know what I can say about the company except that they've been so careful always to keep from harming anybody," Sackler said.
A spokesman for Purdue, Robert Josephson later emailed a longer statement Wednesday:
"We are deeply troubled by the opioid crisis and we are dedicated to being part of the solution. As a company grounded in science, we must balance patient access to FDA-approved medicines, while working collaboratively to solve this public health challenge. Although our products account for approximately 2 percent of the total opioid prescriptions, as a company, we've distributed the CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain, developed the first FDA-approved opioid medication with abuse-deterrent properties and partner with law enforcement to ensure access to naloxone. We vigorously deny these allegations and look forward to the opportunity to present our defense."
Purdue Pharma was sued last week by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Washington state and the city of Seattle over alleged deceptive marketing of its prescription opioid OxyContin.
In May 2007, three of Purdue's executives narrowly avoided jail by pleading guilty to federal criminal charges of misleading regulators, physicians and patients about OxyContin's addiction risk.
Purdue was ordered to pay some $600 million in fines and penalties as part of the settlement.
Also last week, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed a civil suit against Insys Therapeutic, alleging it plied doctors with pricey honoraria in exchange for their agreeing to write more prescriptions for its drug Subsys, an orally administered Fentanyl spray 50 times more powerful than heroin.
Arizona's suit also alleges that corrupt doctors committed fraud by writing more than $33 million worth of prescriptions for Subsys from March 2012 to April 2017 and then tricking insurers into paying for it by making them think their patients using the drug had cancer when, in fact, they did not.
Michael Moore, a former attorney general of Mississippi whose law firm is currently advising the Ohio, Mississippi and Washington state attorneys general in their own suits filed against Purdue earlier this summer, told NJ Advance Media that New Jersey joining the legal battle is crucial.
"Getting New Jersey in the case is extremely important," Moore said. "Because it's taken us six months to get 10 states on board. It's a very large state and it's been impacted a lot. And many of the companies reside in New Jersey, so it sends a clear signal that this is a serious effort to hold these companies accountable."
New Jersey's rate of opioid overdose deaths has been exceeding the exploding national average. In 2015, it was 2.5 times the national average, with 1,901 Garden State residents dying from fentanyl-related or heroin overdoses.
Last year, New Jersey overdose deaths likely topped 2,000, according to analysis by NJ Advance Media conducted last month.
Moore said the surge in opioid prescriptions was extremely profitable for Purdue and its owners. Forbes Magazine estimates owners Raymond and Beverly Sackler had assets of $18 billion in 2016, an increase of $4 billion from the previous year. Raymond Sackler died in July at age 97.
"They've made billions of dollars and they need to clean up what they've caused," said Moore. "The drug companies aren't 100 percent responsible, but they're hugely responsible."
Moore has had success in cleaning up such messes. While serving as Mississippi's attorney general in 1997, he landed a $4 billion settlement for his state from the nation's four largest tobacco companies. And in 1998, he helped negotiate a $206 billion, 25-year payout from Big Tobacco to 46 states, including New Jersey.
Today, a similar coalition -- this time, of 41 state attorneys general, not including New Jersey's-- is coming together around opioids.
Last month, those attorneys general -- led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman -- announced they'd begun issuing subpoenas to investigate the drugmakers' marketing practices.
"These cases are going to get resolved all at once," said a source with knowledge of New Jersey's investigation. "They are going to want to get everybody together and come to some grand arrangement."
Moore agrees, adding that "with all 50 states already active on this opioid crisis, we will soon see some type of resolution" to fund drug addiction treatment and prevention efforts.
Such a settlement could reach as much as $60 billion, he said.
Eight in 10 Americans addicted to heroin started with prescription medications, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 75 percent of all opioid misuse begins when people start using medication that wasn't prescribed for them, obtaining it either through friends, family or an illegal drug dealer.
"For cancer pain it works. So nobody's worried about that. But for people who have a shoulder surgery, there's no study that says it's safe to take this stuff long term for chronic pain," said Moore.
"Doctor-prescribed addiction really does occur and it occurs a lot. It's a national emergency that we're losing 150 people a day," he added. "If 150 people died in a plane crash today, and tomorrow the same thing happened, and the same thing the day after that, after three days, we would shut down the air till we figure out what happened."
Meanwhile, New Jersey's Attorney General's Office has also sent subpoenas to Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen, which was first to make and market the synthetic opioid drug Fentanyl. However, a source with direct knowledge of the New Jersey probe said only Purdue and Insys are expected to be among those named in a planned civil action to be filed later this month.
The publicly traded, New Brunswick-based Johnson & Johnson had previously acknowledged the New Jersey attorney general's subpoenas in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in March.
A spokesman for Janssen on Tuesday declined to comment on the subpoenas.
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Consolidation of 66 opioid suits requested
Oct 5, 2017 | The Herald Dispatch (WV)
By Courtney Hessler
A Charleston attorney representing a majority of 66 counties and cities nationwide that have lawsuits filed against opioid distributors accused of fueling a national drug epidemic has requested the cases be consolidated into a multidistrict litigation and heard before one judge outside of West Virginia.
In a motion filed Sept. 25 with the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, Charleston attorney James C. Peterson said all 66 cases filed in 11 districts nationwide make similar claims, and consolidation would create better cohesion and efficiency as the cases move forward against the "Big Three" distributors - McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen Drug Corp. Peterson's firm represents clients in 46 of those cases.
Various pill manufacturers are also named in various lawsuits, including Purdue, Teva/Cephalon, Janssen, Endo, Actavis and Mallinckrodt.
The original allegations made by Huntington at the beginning of 2017 started a rippling effect of cases being filed across the nation. Currently, lawsuits are pending in federal courts in West Virginia, Illinois, Alabama, California, Kentucky, Ohio, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Washington.
The cities and counties allege drug firms breached their duty to monitor, detect, investigate, refuse and report suspicious orders of prescription opiates coming into the states over the past several years - a duty the lawsuits claim companies have under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
"West Virginia lawsuits are seeking damages and reimbursement for "the costs associated with past efforts to eliminate the hazards to public health and safety."
The 66 lawsuits claim the businesses were negligent in creating a public nuisance and participated in corrupt practices, Peterson said.
"Every day, more than 90 Americans lose their lives after overdosing on opioids," he said.
"The economic burden of prescription opioid misuse alone is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of health care, lost productivity, addiction treatment and criminal justice expenditures."
A Charleston Gazette-Mail investigation revealed that between 2007 and 2012, McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen shipped 423 million pain pills to West Virginia, which has about 1.8 million citizens, before the number of pills started to decrease.
According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, people who are addicted to prescription opioid painkillers are 40 times more likely to become addicted to heroin.
Paul T. Farrell Jr., who represents several counties throughout the country, said the companies had paid millions in fines and had licenses suspended for similar allegations.
Peterson wrote that the federal government has recently fined McKesson a record $150 million for failure to report suspicious orders and Cardinal Health was fined $44 million for similar allegations.
Peterson also pointed to Purdue's agreement to pay approximately $600 million in fines in 2007 for deceptive marketing regarding the addictive nature of OxyContin.
Peterson argued the best location for the cases to be heard would be Ohio because of its central and easily accessible location, underutilized court system and because it is one of the hardest hit areas represented in all the lawsuits.
He also wrote the Big Three each maintains facilities or is headquartered in the state. Illinois would also be satisfactory, he wrote.
"As this national calamity continues to unfold, the federal judiciary should respond with a cohesive and efficient judicial methodology, rather than risking inconsistent decisions on pre-trial issues and duplication of efforts in different federal courts," he said.
The cases have not been progressing in West Virginia recently. Attorneys in the seven original lawsuits have been waiting since June for a federal judge's ruling on whether the lawsuits against the Big Three would be dismissed.
In August, representatives of Cardinal Health caught heat after it listed nearly 2,000 doctors, pharmacists, facilities and organizations that could be "wholly or partially at fault" for the state's opioid crisis, including Lily's Place, which provides medical care for infants suffering from prenatal drug exposure.
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County asked to join legal fight against drug makers
Oct 5, 2017 | Ozaukee Press
By Bill Schanen
For years, Ozaukee County has fought in criminal court to lock up drug dealers who peddle narcotic pain pills and heroin to feed a seemingly insatiable demand for addictive opioids.
Now the county is being asked to join other counties in a civil court battle against the pharmaceutical companies that make and market the drugs blamed for a national addiction epidemic that is sapping the local, state and federal agencies tasked with helping those whose lives have been shattered by opioids, a class of drugs that includes prescription pain-killers such as oxycodone and morphine, as well as illegal drugs like heroin.
“Opioid addiction and mental health issues, which are pretty much intertwined, drive a significant amount of our budget,” County Administrator Jason Dzwinel said. “Look at our case load in the child protective services and you’ll see it’s drastically up. We don’t have enough foster homes for kids. This is being driven by mental health problems and opioid addiction.”
The County Board was asked Wednesday to sign onto a lawsuit being organized by the Wisconsin Counties Association against so-called Big Pharma, the pharmaceutical companies that, according to background information distributed to supervisors, “flooded the market with highly addictive drugs claiming they were safe and efficacious for long-term use, manufactured studies to support these false claims and knowingly misrepresented the addictive nature of these drugs.
“As a result of these misrepresentations, millions of American lives have been impacted or destroyed. The opioid epidemic has in turn imposed huge costs on both county and state governments around the country ....”
The goal of the lawsuit is to “hold Pharma responsible for their role in creating the opioid epidemic and return to the counties the money spent battling the epidemic at the expense of other critical programming,” according to county documents.
Ozaukee County and others that join the lawsuit would not bankroll the legal effort. Instead, the law firms representing the counties — the Milwaukee-area firms of van Briesen & Roper and Crueger Dickinson and the national firm of Simmons Hanly Conroy — would bear all costs of litigation and be reimbursed only if there is a judgment in the plaintiff’s favor.The responsibility of the counties involved in the lawsuit would be to work with lawyers to document the cost of dealing with opioid addiction.
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Oct 5, 2017 | KXXV (ABC)
By Waco, TX
Video Link: http://app.criticalmention.com/app/#clip/view/29912722?token=512b6095-5571-4f78-a83b-a724adb6fd7c
Rough Transcript: an east texas county is the first in our state to sue pharmaceutical companies... claiming they're to blame for our country's opioid cris. the dallas morning news reports that upshur county is suing more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies. the case... filed late last month.. names pharmacy giants like johnson and johnson, allergan, and pfizer. it claims those companies used deceptive marketing practices to show the benefits of using opioids for chronic pain... but that their addictive qualities have contributed to a deadly epidemic.
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Oct 4, 2017 | WOAI (ABC)
By San Antonio, TX
Video Link: http://app.criticalmention.com/app/#clip/view/29912742?token=512b6095-5571-4f78-a83b-a724adb6fd7c
Rough Transcript: and just 24 hours after we reported the bexar county commissioners are filing a lawsuit against opioid drug makers, well we've learned now that a college student here is making a national push trying to end the opioid epidemic on college campuses. news 4 san antonio's ashley king tonight with more on his plan. >> opioids are one of the most common pain relievers doctors prescribe and it's also a drug that claimed more than 33,000 lives. >> it's not like marijuana or cocaine all the hard drugs you hear commonly about. >> jonah is a political science student in university. he has a personal drive to stop opioid drives on college campuses. >> i got a call how one of his friends pass add way at the university of alabama from an 11:15 PMopioid overdose. the student o. d.'d. they contacted the residential life person. the residential life person showed up. they thought it was alcohol poisoning so it was misidentified to begin with. and the student died. >> they started a group called students for opioid solutions. >> currently we're in nine states and 13 campuses. >> they're pushing all student governments that would require laws traing for residential life and campus police to recognize opioid overdoses and administer drugs that would reverse the o. d. they also want colleges to chem a record of opioid o. deast on campus and give am necessarify for students who report them. >> we're developing a field program to go onto each college campus of the united states to get this legislation passed so we can sa save lives. >> dr. lucy from the university of incarnate word, there's a reason we're seeing more opioid deaths. >> when we look at statistics from the 1990s to now, what we see is that the prescribing rate has quadrupled. >> she said bring ag wareness to college students could be a life saver and said if this prevents one death then it's all worth it. >> we're going to continue to grow. we will continue to reach out to students. >> ashley king, news 4 san antonio. >> and they're also working with students here at utsa as well as uiw trying to bring awareness to the opioid epidemic.
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Oct 4, 2017 | N12NJ (News 12)
By New York, NY
Video Link: http://app.criticalmention.com/app/#clip/view/29912746?token=512b6095-5571-4f78-a83b-a724adb6fd7c
Rough Transcript: several state attorneys general are banning together to launch an investigation into a handful of pharmaceutical companies to determine what role, if any, they may have played in the current opioid epidemic. here to talk about this issue is paul harding from martin, harding & mazzotti. welcome back. >> thank you. >> what exactly what the state attorneys general investigating and what are they hoping they can find? >> well, they are taeurbing the position and very popular 12:16 PMposition these days that these opiates are not the right for long-term pain management. it becomes less effective the more you use taxi the argument is this, did they deceptively market this to the general population? >> so what at this point, what is likely going to be the next step if the investigation does uncover some sort of, you know, evidence into this? >> if they find out that they've done this, there will be lawsuits everywhere. we've already seen the beginning of that. we've got lawsuits that begun by counties and states. they want to recover the money they've spent treating the victims of this and money they spent through the county program. that's the first step. beyond that could be individual claims. >> could include something like marketing tactics. >> they are going to dig through and say did they know or should they have known, did they not provide adequate notice of that? >> so what role is the state of new york playing in this ongoing situation. >> they decided to take a little different approach. they are going county by county. the nine counties so far that have signed on and filed lawsuits against these opioid manufacturers.
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