Preview Newsletter
Opioid Litigation Daily Media Report - 3/9/18
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DOJ Leaning More On FCA In Fight Against Opioid Abuse
Mar 8, 2018 | Law360
By Daniel Wilson
A senior U.S. Department of Justice official on Thursday said the DOJ is ramping up its use of the False Claims Act to crack down on unnecessary prescriptions for opioid painkillers, as part of broader focus on fighting opioid abuse. -
House to hold two-day hearing to consider more than 20 opioid bills
Mar 9, 2018 | CNN
By Daniella Diaz & Maegan Vazquez
The House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee will hear a set of more than 20 bipartisan bills during its second hearing focusing on addressing the opioid crisis, CNN has learned. -
After Addiction Comes Families’ Second Blow: The Crushing Cost of Rehab
Mar 8, 2018 | Wall Street Journal
By Jeanne Whalen
Michelle and Darin Vandecar have spent nearly all their time and energy in recent years trying to help their drug-addicted sons stay clean. They’ve spent nearly all their money, too. -
An IT solution to the opioid crisis
Mar 8, 2018 | Diginomica
By Denis Pombriant
At the annual HiMMS conference in Las Vegas this week, we take a look at how the cloud can be used to fill the gaps in healthcare provision. -
Heroin in Philadelphia
Mar 8, 2018 | The Economist
By Staff
WHEN Brian Abernathy was first asked about setting up a supervised place for people to take drugs, his response was “Hell, no.” The first deputy managing-director of the City of Philadelphia, who looks after public safety, says he still feels very uneasy about shooting galleries sanctioned by the city. But a visit to Vancouver, where safe-injection sites have operated since 2003, and to Seattle, which is considering the idea, persuaded him that the help they provide outweighs the risks of encouraging lawbreaking. -
Drug addiction is a brain disease: Dr. Drew Pinsky
Mar 8, 2018 | Fox Business
By Staff
Dr. Drew Pinsky, a practicing physician and addiction expert, said on Thursday that the White House opioid summit gave him hope that the government is willing to put a stop to the opioid epidemic. -
New data shows opioid crisis is just getting worse
Mar 8, 2018 | The Hill
By Reid Wilson
The number of Americans turning up in emergency rooms suffering from opioid overdoses has risen sharply in recent years, according to new federal data, as the size and scope of a devastating public health crisis evolves in ways officials say is difficult to combat. -
County eyes legal action on drug makers
Mar 9, 2018 | The Express (PA)
By Sarah Paez
Clinton County has had enough. -
LYNNFIELD RETAINS CONNECTICUT FIRM IN OPIOID LITIGATION
Mar 9, 2018 | The Daily Item (PA)
By Adam Swift
The town is retaining a Connecticut law firm for a potential class action suit against opioid manufacturers and distributors. -
Spartanburg Co. files suit against drug makers over opioid costs
Mar 8, 2018 | WSPA (SC)
By Ben Hoover
Spartanburg County has joined a growing list of municipalities in the state and nationwide that have sued pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies over the opioid epidemic. -
Local governments hire lawyers to sue opioid drug makers
Mar 8, 2018 | WEAR (FL)
By Allie Horton
Pensacola is one of the hundreds of cities and counties in the country that are suing major opioid drug makers and distributors to recover the costs spent on opioid abuse. Escambia County is joining the fight. -
County files suit against drug companies
Mar 8, 2018 | La Porte County Herald-Argus (IN)
By Jon Gard
La Porte County joined hundreds of other municipalities across the nation by filing a lawsuit of its own this week against prescription drug manufacturers and distributors “for causing the opioid addiction crisis that has devastated the community and depleted resources from the county.” -
Lawmakers pass resolution urging Utah AG to sue opioid manufacturers directly
Mar 8, 2018 | Deseret News Utah (UT)
By Ben Lockhart
Legislators emphasized their focus on opioid addiction this session with a Thursday vote passing a resolution urging Attorney General Sean Reyes to directly sue manufacturers of those drugs. -
3 in the Morning at 6:00AM
Mar 9, 2018 | Mobile, AL
By WEAR (ABC)
Video Link: http://app.criticalmention.com/app/#clip/view/33421129?token=1f24dd93-e99f-4c27-a789-1e85811562de -
7 News at 6AM
Mar 9, 2018 | Greenville, SC
By WSPA (CBS)
Video Link: http://app.criticalmention.com/app/#clip/view/33421148?token=1f24dd93-e99f-4c27-a789-1e85811562de -
7News This Morning
Mar 9, 2018 | Watertown, NY
By WWNY (CBS)
Video Link: http://app.criticalmention.com/app/#clip/view/33421154?token=1f24dd93-e99f-4c27-a789-1e85811562de
Commentary and FYIs
Northeast (PA)
Southeast (SC, FL)
Midwest (IN)
West (UT)
Broadcast Media Coverage
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DOJ Leaning More On FCA In Fight Against Opioid Abuse
Mar 8, 2018 | Law360
By Daniel Wilson
A senior U.S. Department of Justice official on Thursday said the DOJ is ramping up its use of the False Claims Act to crack down on unnecessary prescriptions for opioid painkillers, as part of broader focus on fighting opioid abuse.
Speaking at the Federal Bar Association’s Qui Tam Conference, Deputy Associate Attorney General Stephen Cox said it was particularly important to the DOJ to preserve “independent medical decision-making in the context of controlled substances” like opioids, according to a transcript of the speech.
Amid both the heavy loss of lives stemming from opioid abuse and addiction — an average of 175 deaths per day, according to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions — and Sessions' focus on the issue, the FCA is “a tool we are increasingly using to address the opioid crisis," Cox said.
“The False Claims Act provides the government with a powerful tool to pursue all of those in the opioid distribution chain that are responsible for the improper marketing, distribution, prescription and diversion of opioids — from pharmaceutical manufacturers to physicians, and everyone in between,” he said.
Cox pointed to the specific example of a DOJ settlement from September 2017, involving claims that Galena Biopharma, manufacturer of potent opioid Abstral, paid kickbacks to doctors to induce them to prescribe the drug. He further noted that two of those doctors were sentenced to prison for overprescribing opioids, among other issues that had affected their professionalism.
Cox, standing in for the recently departed Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand, also discussed the DOJ’s FCA efforts more broadly, noting for example that while there is “no shortage of FCA allegations that we can pursue ... we want to focus our attention on the most worthy of cases,” while considering both what is fair and in the interests of “the American people.”
As such, he reiterated the stance put forward by Brand in her eponymous January memo — in line with the Trump administration’s broader goal of regulatory reforms and repeals — that the DOJ shouldn't use nonbinding guidance documents as de facto regulations, part of what Cox said was a broader DOJ effort to “avoid any attempts to push the envelope by seeking to regulate through our enforcement efforts.”
In the context of the FCA, that means the DOJ won’t use noncompliance with a nonbinding guidance document to prove a violation of a related law or regulation, even if that guidance, for example, involves the agency’s interpretation of an otherwise ambiguous law, Cox claimed.
“We hope we can serve as an example for other agencies to follow,” he said.
Cox also discussed the so-called Granston Memo, an internal document authored by DOJ civil fraud director Michael Granston publicly leaked in January. In the memo, Granston laid out the circumstances for when DOJ attorneys should use the agency’s rarely invoked authority to ask for “meritless” qui tam whistleblower FCA cases to be dismissed, which some attorneys have suggested will lead to more dismissals of such cases.
Monitoring meritless cases “is not a good use of department resources,” litigating them is not a good use of judicial resources, and forcing defendants to defend against them is “not in the interests of justice,” with bad cases also potentially leading to bad law, Cox said. And sometimes, the government simply believes it has suffered no harm even from what is technically a false claim, he added.
Further, if the DOJ fails to use its dismissal authority when it declines to intervene in a qui tam case, courts may end up “lumping together close cases with frivolous ones, potentially causing courts to skeptically view all declined cases,” hurting both the government and legitimate qui tam cases over the long term, according to Cox.
“Ultimately, it is in the interests of everyone — including the federal government and, importantly, qui tam relators — for the United States to exercise its dismissal authority in appropriate cases,” he said. -
House to hold two-day hearing to consider more than 20 opioid bills
Mar 9, 2018 | CNN
By Daniella Diaz & Maegan Vazquez
The House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee will hear a set of more than 20 bipartisan bills during its second hearing focusing on addressing the opioid crisis, CNN has learned.
While most hearings on legislation don't last more than a day, this hearing is scheduled to begin on March 21 and will last for two days, committee Republican aides tell CNN.
Last week at the US Chamber of Commerce, Energy and Commerce Committee chair Greg Walden announced four of the bills that would be included among the more than 20 being considered later this month. They include:
· GOP Rep. Bob Latta's bill, the INFO Act, which would streamline efforts within health organizations for grants and other funding related to opioids
· The bipartisan bill called Jessie's Law, which would require the Department of Health and Human Services to develop standards for hospitals and physicians to show a patient's history of opioid addiction when receiving treatment
· GOP Rep. Richard Hudson's GAO request for research on ways to properly dispose of unused opioids
· The bipartisan ACE Research Act, which would expand research efforts into opioids for the National Institutes of Health
The committee wants to send all of the opioids-related bills to the House floor for passage by Memorial Day.
This marks the second of three hearings the committee will hear on opioid-related legislation. Earlier this month, the subcommittee held a hearing to discuss eight bills, which focused on drug scheduling guidelines, disposal of medications, updating patient care laws and expanding access to underserved communities.
The committee is simultaneously conducting an investigation into high concentrations of opioid pills being distributed to pharmacies in communities in West Virginia, also known as "pill dumping."
The House's push for opioids legislation comes amid other Republican-led efforts in Washington to combat the opioid crisis, including the White House's public campaign to address the issue.
But so far, it's unclear exactly how much of an impact, if any, the federal response has had on preventing overdose addiction and death among the American population.
A Vital Signs report released Tuesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that the problem may actually be getting worse. The report shows that emergency department visits due to suspected opioid overdoses continued to climb -- by about 30% -- from July 2016 to September 2017 across the country.
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After Addiction Comes Families’ Second Blow: The Crushing Cost of Rehab
Mar 8, 2018 | Wall Street Journal
By Jeanne Whalen
Michelle and Darin Vandecar have spent nearly all their time and energy in recent years trying to help their drug-addicted sons stay clean. They’ve spent nearly all their money, too.
The Salt Lake City-area couple amassed $120,000 of credit-card debt, took out a home-equity loan and cleaned out part of their 401(k) to pay for multiple rounds of addiction treatment for their three sons, aged 18, 20 and 23. Their insurance covered some of the costs, but because their out-of-pocket expenses were so steep, they sold motorcycles and other belongings to raise cash.
Lasting results have eluded them. The Vandecars’ oldest son just entered his third round of rehab for heroin after more than a year of homelessness. Their middle and youngest sons are smoking pot and attempting to stay off other drugs that have caused multiple overdoses.
The addiction crisis that is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year is also creating a financial crisis for many families, compounding the anguish caused by a loved one’s destructive illness. Families are burning through savings and amassing huge debt paying for rehab that often doesn’t work.
The predicament reflects both the difficulty of treating addiction and the haphazard rehab and insurance system many patients face.
The rehab field is highly fragmented, with thousands of small providers offering treatment that often isn’t grounded in science. Some lack medical professionals or licensed counselors, reflecting the field’s roots in 12-step sobriety principles rather than medicine. Yet rehab services often cost big money, which insurers don’t always cover.
Parents and family members desperate to keep their loved ones from overdosing find themselves shelling out again and again through rounds of recovery and relapse.
Federal data show that 22.5% of admissions for substance-abuse treatment involve someone who has already had one previous round of treatment. Another 21% involve people who have had two or three previous rounds, and 20.2% are for those who have had four or more, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
The insurance claims of Americans with employer-provided coverage show the rising burden. From 2012 through 2016, spending for substance-use admissions to inpatient facilities rose 54% per person in this group, which includes about half the U.S. population, according to an analysis of insurance claims by the nonprofit Health Care Cost Institute. Total health-care spending per person in this population grew 15%.
Consumers’ out-of-pocket spending for these substance-use admissions soared 80% per person, versus 12% growth for their health-care services over all.
For some families, bankruptcy is the outcome. Theo Haskins, a 57-year-old accountant in the Salt Lake City area, says her son’s yearslong fight with addiction contributed to her bankruptcy filing in 2013. She says she spent tens of thousands of dollars on nearly a dozen rounds of rehab, even after insurers kicked in more than $300,000.
Last year, her son Mitchell died of an overdose.
“I spent literally every penny I had,” Ms. Haskins says. “After all this, I failed.”
Addiction experts say the system is too ineffective to cope with the growing health crisis. One common approach involves sending addicts to 30- or 60-day residential programs, or to short-term detox, and then releasing them with little follow-up care, which specialists say isn’t enough time and support to have a lasting impact.
“We have an institutionalized addiction treatment system that really can’t provide the kind of care that we now know is appropriate,” says Thomas McLellan, former deputy director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, who is part of a public-private task force attempting to impose some standards on the field.
A better system would treat addiction like a chronic disease, he said, with regular primary-care visits, drug-testing, counseling and medication.
The medical expenses don’t relate just to rehab treatment—many parents are shelling out for ER visits when a child overdoses, sober-living homes where they can live long-term with others in recovery and plane tickets to fly loved ones to treatment centers in other states. In a panic, parents sometimes send their children to the first rehab with a vacancy, even if it’s outside their insurer’s network, adding to the cost.
“You are in an extreme hurry because your kid is on heroin. I had to find a place, not knowing anything, within 48 hours, or he was going to go and start using,” says Susan Carlton Oquendo, a Utah mother who took about $50,000 from her retirement savings to fly her son to a Florida rehab facility she found online after a frantic Google search.
When they are sober, people suffering from addiction often express guilt over the toll on their loved ones.
Betsy LeGallais of Pensacola, Fla., estimates she and her mother have spent $120,000 over the years on addiction treatment for her 25-year-old daughter, Anna Lewis, who started using heroin in her late teens and then turned to alcohol.
A few months ago, copayments for Ms. Lewis’s latest round of detox took what little savings Ms. LeGallais had begun to build back up again. She sat down at her laptop to write her daughter a letter.
“I would give the last breath that I breathe to make you happy and healthy but I know that that has to come from you,” she wrote. “We are tired and funds have been exhausted.”
On a recent afternoon near Birmingham, Ala., where she is in a sober-living home, Ms. Lewis teared up, saying the letter felt like “a blow to the knees.” She said she is painfully aware of the money her mother and grandmother have spent, and has felt obligated to pay back what she could when she has been able to work. “I think that I always will,” she said.
The Vandecars’ medical crisis began in 2012, when their middle son, Colton, was hospitalized after attempting suicide. Repeated ambulance rides and high copays for inpatient stays to treat his suicidal tendencies and drug use began to add up.
Their financial stress worsened in 2013, when Colton and his younger brother Jake entered residential addiction treatment around the same time. Jake had just overdosed on a powerful cough medication containing dextromethorphan, which can generate euphoria and hallucinations. His mother found him collapsed on the sofa taking rapid, shallow breaths, and called an ambulance. Colton had previously overdosed on the same drug and was also abusing it with his brother that day.
“You just feel like a failure,” Ms. Vandecar says, her voice breaking as she recalls that day. “You never think it’s going to be your kids.” She took out her frustrations by writing a faux Christmas letter she never sent, summarizing her sons’ year of drug and alcohol use and the “enormous pile of tissues from all the tears that I have cried.”
A local hospital recommended a treatment facility called Youth Care, which is part of Acadia Healthcare Co. , a Tennessee-based mental-health-care provider in 39 states. It required an upfront payment of $12,000, which equaled the family’s annual out-of-pocket spending limit on their insurance. “The treatment centers would check with insurers and say, ‘what is the maximum out-of-pocket?’ And then they wanted that upfront,” Mr. Vandecar says.
They used what was left in their health-savings account, and then a combination of savings and credit cards to make the payment—and did the same again a few months later, in January 2014, when their sons were still in treatment. The insurance calendar-year had reset, with a new $12,000 limit to meet.
Ms. Vandecar said the treatment facility seemed well-run, and she was “very hopeful it would work.” It didn’t, she thinks, because “my boys really did not want to get clean.”
Trina Packard, chief executive of Youth Care, said relapse is part of the treatment process, particularly among adolescents not ready to give up substances. “We see a very high rate of families who do need treatment more than once for addiction,” she said, adding that a family’s upfront costs depend on their insurance plan.
After the brothers left residential treatment, Jake attended a Youth Care day program that included therapy and school, but was kicked out for coming to class high after snorting prescription drugs and abusing marijuana and cough medicine, his mother says.
Colton also started using again, and would soon branch out to cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and acid. The Vandecars put another $10,000 on their credit cards to pay for weekly counseling sessions at home for the family, which their insurer, UnitedHealthcare, wouldn’t cover, they say.
Mr. Vandecar was earning more than $150,000 a year at the time as an executive at an information-technology company, but the couple also had two daughters to feed, along with mortgage and car payments. They started tapping their 401(k) to pay down some of the card balances, Mr. Vandecar says.
Over the years they drained about $300,000 total from retirement to pay credit-card bills and other expenses, including legal fees related to their sons’ troubles with the law, he says.
Undermining their retirement savings didn’t feel good, the 53-year-old says, but they decided “we’ve got to put the life of our boys first.”
In late 2014, a drug court ordered Jake back to rehab, after he failed a drug test and overdosed on alcohol. He entered a state-run facility about an hour from Salt Lake City, where he stayed till the summer of 2015. Halfway through the facility sent the Vandecars a bill for $15,000. After opening it, “I just sat in the car and cried,” Ms. Vandecar, 45, says. “We’d just already paid so much.”
They eventually got that bill reduced through court proceedings, but they were struggling.
“For a long time food bills went on the credit card because we didn’t have the money to pay for it,” Ms. Vandecar says.
At one point, when they needed to pay a medical bill, they decided, “What can we sell?” Mr. Vandecar remembers. They settled on his KTM motorcycles, a pair of Austrian bikes that sold for $8,000 on a local website.
In 2015 they moved to a less-expensive home—and then took out a home-equity loan on the new house to pay down more of their credit-card debt.
Around the same time, drug problems were becoming worse for their oldest son, Zak.
He had begun using marijuana in middle school and progressed to prescription medication, acid and then oxycodone when he got a prescription for the painkiller after breaking his big toe. Eventually one of Zak’s brothers told his parents he was using heroin.
In early 2016, the then-21-year-old went to a small rehab run by privately held Turning Point Centers, which was one of the few places insurance would cover in the Salt Lake City area under a new job Mr. Vandecar had started. The couple used a credit card to pay $2,500 upfront—their annual out-of-pocket maximum per family member at the time. Zak stayed for about a month and then moved home, but within a few weeks his mother found needles in the garbage can. He had relapsed.
Zak returned to Turning Point. The insurance stopped paying after about 12 days. His parents moved him to a sober-living home that cost them $600 a month. He soon relapsed again.
Turning Point offers residential and outpatient treatment and recommends that patients commit to 90 days of care, but families and insurers don’t always follow that advice, said Chris Mackintosh, chief executive of Turning Point. He said relapses are common in most chronic diseases.
When the Vandecars needed a rehab facility again, they chose a different institution. This time it was for Colton, who had been abusing a variety of drugs, including heroin, since his last round of residential addiction treatment in 2014. In mid-2016 Jake found him on the floor choking on his own vomit after an overdose, his mother says.
His parents sent him to Recovery Ways, a facility partially owned by private-equity firm Chicago Pacific Founders. Colton went through three separate monthlong stays there. After each visit he would go to a sober-living house, relapse, and repeat the now-familiar cycle, accumulating thousands of dollars in more copays and fees.
After he got out of rehab at the end of August, Colton says he tried to overdose on drugs in an attempt to end his life. When he didn’t succeed, he says he decided to strive for sobriety. He drew inspiration from a fellow patient at Recovery Ways who had spoken glowingly about a previous period of abstinence. Since then Colton says he has been smoking pot but staying off other drugs. “It’s the only part of the last few years that has been worth living, that I can remember,” he says.
His friend from rehab recently died of an overdose, he says.
Andrew Sidoli, executive clinical director of Recovery Ways, says the facility delivers the “highest quality” care, with a staff including an addiction psychiatrist and masters-level therapists.
Jake, whose use of meth last year landed him in the ER, is living at home. His mother says he acknowledges smoking pot but is trying to stay off other substances. He declined to comment.
In late 2016 the Vandecars kicked Zak out of the house for using drugs and stealing their belongings, which they said he was pawning for cash.
Zak spent about a year living in his car. After getting caught shoplifting for food, he recently began another round of treatment, this time at Recovery Ways—where Colton had relapsed and returned several times. He wasn’t reachable for comment there. “We always want to keep trying,” says Ms. Vandecar. “I think it’s just desperation, hoping this time it will work.”
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An IT solution to the opioid crisis
Mar 8, 2018 | Diginomica
By Denis Pombriant
At the annual HiMMS conference in Las Vegas this week, we take a look at how the cloud can be used to fill the gaps in healthcare provision.
To understand where CRM in healthcare is going, you should focus your gaze on the HiMMS conference in Las Vegas this week. At the same time, if you wish to understand the opioid epidemic and how it will be resolved, you can get a glimpse in courtroom 18B, in the federal courthouse in Cleveland, OH site of settlement proceedings involving more than 400 federal lawsuits brought by cities, counties, and Native American tribes against a variety of figures in the opioid crisis including doctors, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare organizations, pharmacy chains and more.
To understand how these disparate events intersect, keep reading.
According to an article in the New York Times, Federal Judge Dan Arron Polster is implementing a somewhat novel (it has been tried before but it is not considered mainstream) approach to resolution. Said the Times:
During the first hearing in the case, in early January, the judge informed lawyers that he intended to dispense with legal norms like discovery and would not preside over years of “unraveling complicated conspiracy theories.” Then he ordered them to prepare for settlement discussions immediately.
The approach goes by the abbreviation MDL for multidistrict litigation and its purpose is to by-pass potential years of discovery and individual litigation to achieve a settlement fair to all parties. In this case perhaps even an end to the opioid crisis. The Times said Polster:
Believes that when parties have gotten this far down the road in a lawsuit, they already have at least 80 percent of the information they need to negotiate; the longer litigation continues, he said he has found, the more entrenched each side can become.
In addition to trying to stir the legal pot Polster is also going after root causes of the opioid epidemic, said one lawyer involved in an early hearing in the case, “His questioning focused on reducing the number of pills in the chain of distribution.” But the parties, while eager to approach root causes, appear to not understand what those causes are. One unidentified lawyer in the article floated some approaches that are almost guaranteed to prolong the problem including taking the strongest doses off the market and funding addiction treatment and public education. Interesting approaches if you want to maintain the status quo while saving more lives but not addressing the problem.Distribution
The key to a solution is in understanding the distribution channel mentioned above. The distribution channel is entirely manual. There might be computer systems managing inventory at distribution centers and pharmacies and there are certainly systems of record used by providers to record diagnoses and prescriptions. But the only distribution channel that counts involves handing a prescription to a person or phoning in the order, manually counting out pills and affixing a (computer generated) label to a bottle and handing it to a patient (consumer).
Too often, the consumer doesn’t take all the pills prescribed, forgets where they are, gets overlapping prescriptions, or sells them on the black market. This is inventory shrinkage and it was solved decades ago in the manufacturing process. But you can’t solve this human supply chain problem with manufacturing techniques. People are not robots, after all.
To get a sense of what a root causes-focused solution might look like, fly a couple thousand miles west of Cleveland to Las Vegas to the Healthcare and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference this week. On Monday Salesforce introduced Health Cloud Care Gaps which, according to a Salesforce press release, “enables providers to monitor a patient’s adherence to a care plan and proactively fill gaps.”
Such a solution might be useful in tightening up the human supply chain to enable a more just-in-time approach to opioid distribution.
Technologies like outbound calling, long a staple of enterprise sales and marketing can easily be tuned to patient outreach. In fact one of the most important trends in medicine today is converting from a break-fix model of healthcare to one of wellness or preventing recurrence of illness by keeping patients engaged in their treatment plans.
Not long ago Aetna insurance and CVS, a large pharmacy chain, announced they were merging. CVS is building out a chain of in-house clinics designed to attend to the needs of the communities each store serves. This would be an ideal situation to introduce cloud computing into specifically to check patients’ adherence to treatment plans. It would enable doctors and pharmacists to keep running totals of pills in a patient’s possession and enable rapid resupply when needed. This won’t stop the opioid epidemic in its tracks, but it will take a great deal of supply out of the system that really doesn’t need to be there and only causes downstream problems.
With almost no computer gear to install other than PC’s and a small network with Internet access, a local health clinic might be able to use some combination of Salesforce’s technology along with population health care technology offered by various healthcare software suppliers. At HIMSS this week software giant Cerner announced its partnership with Salesforce to deliver an advanced solution. It seems the big pieces are falling into place and that Judge Polster may be prescient.My take
The healthcare industry is a notorious late adopter of information technology. Although it has used systems of record for decades, it is somewhat behind the curve on developing systems of engagement and even systems of intelligence. But don’t blame the industry. Data security has always been of paramount importance in healthcare and the enterprise record of keeping data safe is unacceptably low.
Also, you can’t say that the healthcare industry can’t afford modern IT solutions; more than one in every six dollars of GDP flows through the allied health industries in the US.
Providing healthcare is a big and hairy problem to solve and half measures don’t usually cut it. That’s why the announcements coming out of HIMSS this week and the stark reality of the opioid crisis make such an interesting mashup. The crisis represents a dead end in care delivery that doesn’t get better on its own no matter how much education you give to doctors, pharmacists, and 16 year-olds. But it is a problem amenable to a 21st century solution which appears to be on the horizon.
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Mar 8, 2018 | The Economist
By Staff
WHEN Brian Abernathy was first asked about setting up a supervised place for people to take drugs, his response was “Hell, no.” The first deputy managing-director of the City of Philadelphia, who looks after public safety, says he still feels very uneasy about shooting galleries sanctioned by the city. But a visit to Vancouver, where safe-injection sites have operated since 2003, and to Seattle, which is considering the idea, persuaded him that the help they provide outweighs the risks of encouraging lawbreaking.
The idea is counterintuitive: in the next year the city will permit an NGO to provide a place for drug users to go and inject themselves with potentially lethal drugs, while trying to encourage them to seek treatment for their addiction. Staff will hand out clean needles and administer naloxone, a drug that temporarily reverses heroin’s effect on the brain and jump-starts breathing in those who overdose.
The experiences at more than 100 injection sites in 66 cities around the world, including some in Canada, Switzerland and Germany, speak for themselves. Safe-injection sites reduce overdose deaths by as much as one-third in the immediate vicinity and lessen injection-related infections and the transmission of diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C and B. They help addicts to seek treatment for their addiction and other medical problems, as well as providing a point of access to municipal housing and social services. And they make neighbourhoods ravaged by drugs safer, by reducing drug use and the disposal of drug equipment in public places.
Philadelphia, with its fine-art museums, grand avenues and imposing statues of heroes of the war of independence, is perhaps the most cruelly affected of big cities by the opioid epidemic. In 2016 deaths from drug overdoses increased from 702 in the previous year to 907, or 60 deaths per 100,000 residents, more than three times higher than in Chicago and four times more than New York. Around 80% of overdose deaths involved opioids, pain-relieving drugs that include both prescription painkillers such as OxyContin and illegal ones such as heroin. Most of the victims of opioids were men (nearly three times more than women), white (double the rate of African-Americans) and aged between 35 and 59. Last year was even worse: the city estimates that around 1,200 people died, four times the number of murders in a city once nicknamed “Killadelphia”.
City officials do not have an answer to why the opioid scourge is hitting Philly so hard. Poverty is one reason. After decades of manufacturing jobs leaving the city, around a quarter of the population live below the federal poverty line. Availability of drugs is another. Philadelphia’s dealers sell the cheapest and purest heroin on the east coast, perhaps even in the country. It is piped in by Sinaloa, the Mexican “cartel” led until recently by Joaquín “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzmán, who is awaiting trial in a jail in Manhattan. Addicts travel to Philadelphia from New York and New Jersey and even states in the Midwest to stock up on white-powder heroin and fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, which is around 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more powerful than morphine.
Jim Kenney, Philadelphia’s progressive mayor, is trying to use every tool he can to get the epidemic under control. Last summer the city and Conrail, a railway company, cleared out El Campamento, an open-air heroin market and shooting gallery beneath sunken railway tracks in the Kensington neighbourhood that every day saw scenes of pain and desolation reminiscent of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. He set up a task force that came up with 18 recommendations to fight the scourge, including the introduction of supervised injection sites, a media campaign about the risks of opioids and more education about access to and use of naloxone.
The voices of friends
In January Philadelphia filed a lawsuit against manufacturers of prescription opioids seeking to halt the companies’ “deceptive” marketing practices and to get them to pay for the rocketing cost to the city of treating addicts. According to the city’s health department, one in three adults has received a prescription for opioids in the past 12 months and one in seven, or some 168,000 residents, are now taking them.
The introduction of safe-injection sites, which has also being announced in San Francisco and discussed in Baltimore and New York, was by far the most controversial of the mayor’s recommendations. The state’s attorney-general, Josh Shapiro, opposes them because he says they are illegal. On the other hand Larry Krasner, the city’s district attorney, promises not to prosecute users or staff at the sites as he considers them helpful. Yet the best argument for such spaces, says Eva Gladstein of Philadelphia’s city government, is that they could save up to 76 lives a year. Moreover, they could contain the cost of the epidemic, estimated at $26m a year, by saving up to $1.9m a year in costs related to treating skin infections and hundreds of thousands of dollars thanks to fewer trips to hospital and a reduced use of ambulances and emergency rooms.
Supervised drug-use sites are not a silver bullet, but they help to keep needles clean and off the streets. No one has ever died in a legal shooting-gallery. And most crucially, says Susan Sherman at Johns Hopkins University, one of the authors of a report on the costs and benefits of such sites, they connect people to recovery. Between 2003 and 2006 46% of drug users at Vancouver’s Insite, North America’s first legal safe-injection site, entered rehab.
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Drug addiction is a brain disease: Dr. Drew Pinsky
Mar 8, 2018 | Fox Business
By Staff
Dr. Drew Pinsky, a practicing physician and addiction expert, said on Thursday that the White House opioid summit gave him hope that the government is willing to put a stop to the opioid epidemic.
“First optimism I ever had was at that opioid meeting and there was movement from the attorney general, there’s movement by the HHS, there’s movement by the VA to really be proactive and spend some money and really go after this…I was optimistic leaving that conference,” he told FOX Business’ Kennedy.
A bipartisan group of governors testified before the Senate Health Committee to address the opioid problems in their states. Last week, the White House held an opioid summit, which was designed to help the Trump administration share their proposals on how to get a better handle on the crisis.
Many experts argue that cannabis could be a great substitute for opioids. According to the American Journal of Public Health, medical cannabis laws are associated with significantly lower state-level opioid overdose mortality rates.
“I would much rather treat somebody on cannabis than opioids, that’s for sure, they’re not going to die of that,” Pinsky said.
Dr. Pinsky explained that his patients usually die from a combination of a Benzodiazepine, which is a class of psychoactive drugs (Klonopin, valium) and an oral opioid.
“It’s very difficult to overdose on an oral opioid, but when you combine it with a Benzodiazepine, it’s very easy to overdose…so my patients, if they are going to die of their addiction, they die with two bottles by their bedside, prescribed by one doctor, all of the time. Every week that happens to me and I’m sick of it,” he said.
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New data shows opioid crisis is just getting worse
Mar 8, 2018 | The Hill
By Reid Wilson
The number of Americans turning up in emergency rooms suffering from opioid overdoses has risen sharply in recent years, according to new federal data, as the size and scope of a devastating public health crisis evolves in ways officials say is difficult to combat.
Data released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show emergency room visits for suspected opioid overdoses increased by 30 percent between July 2016 and September 2017.
Rust Belt states have been hardest hit, with emergency room visits rising 108 percent in Wisconsin, 80 percent in Pennsylvania and 65 percent in Illinois. Indiana and Ohio also experienced substantial growth in overdose treatments.
While the crisis began in rural America among low-income whites, it has now moved into larger urban areas, where minority communities now account for the fastest growth among overdoses and deaths. Emergency room visits in large cities rose by 54 percent over the last year, the CDC data show.
“We often talk about the opioid epidemic as a singular epidemic. But if you look at it it’s actually two distinct epidemics going on simultaneously,” said Jon Zibbell, a senior public health scientist at RTI International, a public health nonprofit. “In some states, prescription opioids were driving the epidemic. In other states, illicit opioids are driving the epidemic. And in some states it’s both.”
Those watching the epidemic unfold say deaths caused by opioid overdoses will rise before they fall — perhaps dramatically.
Opioid overdoses killed an estimated 33,000 Americans in 2015, more than half the total number of deaths caused by drug overdoses, according to the latest data made available by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. As recently as 2001, fewer than 10,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses.
The number of total drug overdose deaths has more than tripled since the turn of the century; preliminary figures peg the number of drug overdose deaths in 2016 at more than 64,000.
Experts say the crisis is metastasizing, opening new fronts for state and local governments. Controls on prescription opioids have succeeded in flattening the once-exponential growth of legal opioids, but an influx of illicit opioids has moved into the market to meet demand.
The rise in emergency room visits is evidence of an evolving crisis, those experts said. When prescription opioids are less available, illicit opioids like heroin and fentanyl fill demand. The potency of those drugs vary widely, leading to more overdoses by drug users.
“The ER visits are to be expected, because as doctors write for fewer narcotics, the drug dealers are there to pick up the slack,” said Rick Blondell, vice chairman for addiction medicine at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Buffalo.
The number of prescriptions that doctors are writing for opioids has flattened out after more than a decade of explosive growth, according to federal and state-level data. But those drugs have been replaced by illicit fentanyl, a synthetic opioid manufactured overseas that can be shipped into the United States in a package as small as a regular business envelope.
“The introduction of the fentanlys have completely changed the situation. We now have deadlier drugs and thus deadlier drug combinations,” said Kevin Sabet, a former top official in the Office of National Drug Control Policy under the Obama administration.
Fentanyl has exacerbated the crisis in rural America, and created one in urban areas too.
“The prescription opioids really started in those rural areas, Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the Deep South and the West,” Zibbell said. “A majority of [fentanyl] markets are in urban areas, so I think we’re seeing the transition into urban areas more because we’re seeing the expansion of the illicit side of the epidemic.”
The Trump administration has held several high-level meetings on the opioid epidemic, which the Department of Health and Human Services has called a public health emergency. But skeptics have said few solutions have actually come out of the White House or Congress.
Blondell, of the University of Buffalo, likened the response to the campaign against tobacco companies in the 1990s and early 2000s, when state governments sued to win concessions from an industry that created a public health threat. He said a part of the solution would include getting pharmaceutical manufacturers to spend money to address a crisis they in part created.
“We gotta go after the pharmaceutical industry. They made and continue to make drugs way in excess of what we need. Whether that’s production quotas or taxes or limits on their marketing campaigns, whatever,” Blondell said. “They knew what they were doing, so I think they have to pony up the money to help address the problem.”
States, counties and cities have filed more than 100 lawsuits against opioid manufacturers. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said last month the Justice Department would file a statement of interest in an Ohio case, essentially backing plaintiffs who have sued manufacturers over false and deceptive marketing practices.
But those suits address only one front in the crisis. The second, the growing illicit market, is made more difficult as the sources and types of illegal drugs proliferate.
“We have a lot of sourcing of fentanyl. We have a lot of it coming across the southern border, but we also have a lot of it coming through the post via the internet,” Zibbell said. “There’s so much fentanyl and there’s so many different players that people are having a hard time adapting to the market.”
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County eyes legal action on drug makers
Mar 9, 2018 | The Express (PA)
By Sarah Paez
Clinton County has had enough.
As of Thursday, county commissioners are considering legal action against pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors of opioid prescription drugs.
Clinton is just one of many Pennsylvania counties seeking retribution against the pharmaceutical industry for the influx of pharmaceutical prescription drugs that led to 1,160 overdoses across the state in 2016.
Several counties have already filed lawsuits–with Dauphin County, home of the state capitol, as the most recent–most of which allege that certain pharmaceutical companies used false marketing to misrepresent the safety and effectiveness of long-term opioid use for chronic pain management. Some also accuse distributors of ignoring suspicious orders of large opioid quantities and being negligent in product oversight.
Commissioners have not specified any more details of a potential lawsuit, but at Thursday’s voting meeting, they approved a letter of agreement with Boni and Zack LLC through local representation of the law firm Rosamilia, Brungard and Rosamilia “in litigation against pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors of opioid drugs, on a contingent fee basis of 33.33 percent of any financial recovery or award received,” according to the resolution.
Boni and Zack LLC is a Bala Cynwyd-based law firm specializing in complex civil litigation, with a focus on plaintiffs in antitrust and consumer actions. They represented Lock Haven local Aaron Fisher, known as “Victim No. 1” in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal, in a settlement with Penn State University in 2013.
“There are few law firms in the state of Pennsylvania who are taking the lead for county governments,” said Commissioner Pete Smeltz.
Commissioner Jeff Snyder said commissioners have been working on an agreement with the law firm for a while.
“We are sending the message that we’ve had enough and we’re going to hold (pharmaceutical companies) accountable for it,” he said.
Smeltz said commissioners, like so many others across the state, noticed the uptick in drugs pouring into the community, most of which were prescribed by doctors. He said the potential legal action would go hand in hand with Gov. Tom Wolf’s new initiative to remove barriers for people receiving medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder. That action includes waiving the prior authorization guideline for opioid use disorder treatments, which could delay MAT up to 24 hours in some cases.
Snyder mentioned that after his spinal surgery, his surgeon prescribed him 150 OxyContin pills. “That was excessive,” he said.
He said that he was in a lot of pain, but ended up using 50 pills for pain management and put the rest into a drug take-back box in the sheriff’s office.
“All the cost to the county governments… all the extra stuff, programs, counseling… is because the pharmacies are dumping chemicals into our population, and who bears the cost?” said Smeltz. “We’re saying stop it, and if you’re going to do it, then you’ll have to pay the price for what you’re doing to our society.”
If the courts award damages in a potential lawsuit, Clinton County would receive “a portion of that payment,” said Smeltz.
Commissioners closed out the topic with a discussion of reforming the health care system to include alternative pain relief therapies that could be covered by health insurance.
“But large pharmaceutical companies won’t have anything to do with it,” Smeltz said.
“We’ve got to get this figured out,” Snyder said. “We have a long way to go on this, though.”
“(Addiction) is a disease as opposed to a personal choice,” Smeltz said.
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LYNNFIELD RETAINS CONNECTICUT FIRM IN OPIOID LITIGATION
Mar 9, 2018 | The Daily Item (PA)
By Adam Swift
The town is retaining a Connecticut law firm for a potential class action suit against opioid manufacturers and distributors.
“On behalf of the board of selectmen, I began to investigate national, state, and local litigation against major opioid manufacturers in the United States,” said Town Administrator Robert Dolan.
State Attorney General Maura Healey and a number of municipalities are joining in a lawsuit attempting to hold the companies accountable for many issues, including the cost to local governments as a result of their actions, Dolan said.
Selectmen approved Town Counsel Thomas Mullen’s recommendation that the town retain the Connecticut-based firm of Scott & Scott for a potential class action suit against the opioid pharmaceutical companies.
“I’ve received a number of solicitations from law firms for the towns I represent,” said Mullen. “Frankly, I’ve been leery to get involved. First, because I am not familiar with the out-of-state law firms that control the litigation, and second, because lawyers who specialize in plaintiff class action suits are generally an unsavory crew.”
But Mullen said there were several factors that lifted Scott & Scott well above the typical “unsavory crew.”
He noted that Scott & Scott have worked with the Boston-based firm of Anderson & Krieger, a well-regarded firm that specializes in municipal work.
Scott & Scott is representing cities in five states with pending opioid legislation, including Springfield, Worcester, and Haverhill in Massachusetts.
“Their theory of the case is that manufacturers and distributors, knowing the dangers of addiction, promoted among doctors the idea of opioids as routine pain relievers rather than the extreme end of life cancer medication that it had been,” said Mullen. “This led to a crisis that our town and many others across the country are suffering from.”
Tactically, Mullen said Scott & Scott wants to avoid the federal courts, where hundreds of cases have been consolidated before a single judge in Ohio who is urging a quick settlement and refusing to move the cases along.
“They want to file in the state courts so they can control the litigation,” Mullen said.
The offer from Scott & Scott appears to be risk free, with a pure contingent fee arrangement, said Mullen. The firm would take 22.5 percent of any recovery from the pharmaceutical companies as a fee. If there was not any recovery, the firm would forgive all expenses.
“The worst case scenario for the town is zero, it’s not negative,” said Mullen. “I like the idea of an aggressive and active posture. I would not recommend a firm that would want to park our case in Ohio and take a cut of whatever negotiation there is without working on it.”
When asked by selectmen about expectations of what the town could get through a settlement, Mullen was hesitant to throw out a dollar figure. But, he said any settlement that could potentially pay for some kind of employee in the schools working on drug and addiction issues would be a huge win for the town.
Mullen said Scott & Scott would look to file a lawsuit in state court this year, possible within the next few months.
“I honestly don’t see any reason that we wouldn’t want to be part of this,” said Selectman Phil Crawford. “There is only an upside for the town.”
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Spartanburg Co. files suit against drug makers over opioid costs
Mar 8, 2018 | WSPA (SC)
By Ben Hoover
Spartanburg County has joined a growing list of municipalities in the state and nationwide that have sued pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies over the opioid epidemic.
A 132-page lawsuit filed Monday in Spartanburg County Court of Appeals names 37 defendants including big drug corporations like Purdue, the maker of OxyContin, Janssen, Eno, and Teva.
The suit also lists unidentified doctors and pharmacies, including Wal Mart, Rite Aid, and CVS.
The lawsuit claims Spartanburg County spends millions of dollars each year to cover costs related to the treatment, addictions, and overdoses of opioid painkillers, like Percocet and OxyContin.
One of the main complaints details defendants that have “manufactured, promoted, and marketed opioids for the long-term management of chronic pain.”
It goes on to state big pharma companies have reaped “blockbuster profits” through a “coordinated, sophisticated, and highly deceptive marketing campaign that began in the late 1990s” and “continues to the present.”
In February 2017, Spartanburg County Emergency Management Services, the Coroner’s office, and Sheriff’s Department publicly spoken about the effects of the opioid epidemic, in particular, the increasing use of Naloxone, an antidote that quickly revives someone who has stopped breathing after overdosing on painkillers and other opioids.
The lawsuit used the same statistic in making its case stating the number of times county personnel have administered Naloxone.
Records kept with the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control show in 2015 the antedote was administered 311 times. The number increased to 454 in 2016.
The lawsuit continues to state that opioids generated $8 Billion in revenue for drug companies in 2012 and while they profited counties like Spartanburg County spend millions each year to combat this “public nuisance.”
The lawsuit seeks “unspecified punitive and actual damages.”
Greenville and Anderson Counties recently filed similar lawsuits.
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Local governments hire lawyers to sue opioid drug makers
Mar 8, 2018 | WEAR (FL)
By Allie Horton
Pensacola is one of the hundreds of cities and counties in the country that are suing major opioid drug makers and distributors to recover the costs spent on opioid abuse. Escambia County is joining the fight.
Last week, county officials hired a local law firm to take on the "big pharma."
"We're forcing big pharma in these lawsuits to be held accountable for the loss, the cost they've shoved on taxpayers," Peter Mougey said.
Mougey is a Partner at Levin Papantonio and he is the main lawyer leading the charge for many cities and counties. He said Escambia County and Pensacola are two of roughly 300 municipalities in the country that have hired lawyers.
Mougey said the reason that so many local governments are taking the issue to court is because of the burden taxpayers have had to endure because of the opioid crisis.
"Big pharma has internalized the profits and externalized the costs and we're trying to say you can't take all the profits and push the costs on the community," Mougey said. "You have to shoulder those costs along with the taxpayers."
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2016 there were 113 opioid prescriptions written per 100 people in Escambia County. A spokesperson for Escambia County told WEAR-TV they have seen an increase in cost because of overdoses, specifically because of Emergency Medical Services, county Medicaid contributions, jail inmates and law enforcement. The county does not have an estimate as to how much it has cost so far.
Mougey said he is waiting for the numbers from the national database which tracks how many pills are going to a particular area. That way lawyers can get an idea of how much each community was impacted. Mougey said he believes the information will show that these companies were reckless and allowed the abuse of opioid drugs.
"They have most of the answers to a lot of the problems we're seeing around the country, the roadmap for finding where the holes are, where these millions and millions of pills are escaping," Mougey said.
However, getting the information from the database has been a task in itself. The Drug Enforcement Administration, which is in charge of the database, tried to block the information from becoming public. Mougey said that did not work out and it is expected to be released in the next couple weeks. He said then they can put together a case to bring to court.
"Helping clean up the mess, helping fix the problem," Mougey said. "That's to me what gets me motivated and passionate about what we're doing here."
Many local governments have agreed on a contingency plan where lawyers will do the work for free, but will take a portion of the winnings.
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County files suit against drug companies
Mar 8, 2018 | La Porte County Herald-Argus (IN)
By Jon Gard
La Porte County joined hundreds of other municipalities across the nation by filing a lawsuit of its own this week against prescription drug manufacturers and distributors “for causing the opioid addiction crisis that has devastated the community and depleted resources from the county.”
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in South Bend on Wednesday, alleges drug manufacturers “deceptively marketed the appropriate uses, risks and safety of opioids,” contributing to a 60 percent increase in the number of overdose deaths in the county in 2017.
In addition, three opioid distributors named in the suit “failed in their duty to report and stop suspicious orders of opioids that flooded La Porte County,” which recorded as many as 128 opioid prescriptions per 100 people in the county in 2012, a number that has since declined but remains high.
“Plaintiff brings this action to eliminate the hazard to public health and safety caused by the opioid epidemic, to abate the nuisance caused thereby, and to recoup monies spent because of Defendants’ actions,” the lawsuit states.
The county Board of Commissioners approved a contract with attorneys on Feb. 21 to pursue the case.
La Porte County Emergency Medical Services handled 106 suspected overdoses from opiates in 2016, according to the lawsuit. In 2017, as of December, that number had grown to 142.
Hundreds of cities and counties around the U.S. are suing opioid companies and distributors over their role in the addiction crisis, litigation consolidated in a federal court in Cleveland late last year.
Judge Dan Polster in January called for a quick settlement to avoid drawn-out trials, but he hedged his optimism in a court filing Wednesday.
“Parties reported important and substantial progress on several fronts but also identified various barriers to a global resolution,” Polster wrote.
"To varying degrees, the parties agreed that the quickest way to surmount at least some of these barriers is to put into place a limited litigation track, including discovery, motion practice and bellwether trials.”
The Indianapolis law firm of Cohen & Malad, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of La Porte County as well as separate lawsuits from other cities and counties in Indiana — including the cities of Hammond, Lafayette and Indianapolis, as well as St. Joseph, Lake and Marshall counties, among others — issued a news release Thursday announcing the filling.
Board of Commissioners President Rich Mrozinski, in the release, said he has seen “the terrible damage that has been inflicted by this opioid epidemic” among his fellow military veterans. He also credited fellow Commissioner Vidya Kora with bringing the need for the lawsuit to the attention of the board.
“I know all three of us on the County Commission feel good that we are doing something to try to recover the costs on law enforcement, EMS and other county agencies as we all struggle to deal with the impact this is having and provide resources for prevention and treatment going forward,” Mrozinski said.
Lynn Toops, an attorney with Cohen & Malad, said the suit will help the community recoup the resources it needs to fight the crisis.
“This lawsuit seeks to hold opioid manufacturers and distributors accountable for their roles in creating this horrible epidemic and to put the county on the path to recovery,” Toops said.
The 160-page lawsuit names prescription drug manufacturers Purdue Pharma, Cephalon Inc., Teva Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Noramco Inc., Endo Pharmaceuticals, Mallinckrodt PLC, Allergan PLC and Watson Pharmaceuticals as defendants.
Opioid distributor defendants are AmerisourceBergen Drug Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp.
Healthcare Distribution Alliance, a national trade association representing drug distribution companies, including the three named in the lawsuit, is pushing back against the allegations and issued a statement of its own in February after the county announced it planned to file the lawsuit:
“The misuse and abuse of prescription opioids is a complex public health challenge that requires a collaborative and systemic response that engages all stakeholders,” HDA spokesman John Parker said.
“Given our role, the idea that distributors are responsible for the number of opioid prescriptions written defies common sense and lacks understanding of how the pharmaceutical supply chain actually works and is regulated,” Parker said. “Those bringing lawsuits would be better served addressing the root causes, rather than trying to redirect blame through litigation.”
Another defendant named in the lawsuits, Purdue Pharma, issued a statement in February acknowledging it had been stung by civil and criminal allegations against the company and some of its officers.
“We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation, and our sales representatives will no longer promote opioids to prescribers,” the company said.
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Lawmakers pass resolution urging Utah AG to sue opioid manufacturers directly
Mar 8, 2018 | Deseret News Utah (UT)
By Ben Lockhart
Legislators emphasized their focus on opioid addiction this session with a Thursday vote passing a resolution urging Attorney General Sean Reyes to directly sue manufacturers of those drugs.
House Joint Resolution 12 urges Reyes to "immediately and publicly commit to directly filing suit against prescription opioid manufacturers, instead of joining a suit with other plaintiffs, in order to seek the maximum award for damages from prescription opioid manufacturers for the citizens of the state."
The resolution states that opioid manufacturers have played a "clear and reckless role in perpetuating the crisis" of addiction to the substances.
Sen. Jim Dabakis, the resolution's floor sponsor, said Thursday that it is meant as "a wake up call" to Reyes with regard to suing manufacturers directly.
"Right now we find an opioid crisis that I need not describe to you that is wreaking havoc in or state," Dabakis said.
The Senate passed the resolution 26 to 1. Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, R-South Jordan, cast the only dissenting vote.
The House of Representatives passed HJR12 unanimously last month.
Reyes said at the beginning of the session that Utah is among 41 states involved in combined ongoing civil action, but is also "ready to pull the trigger" on its own lawsuit in case manufacturers are properly cooperating.
Despite HJR12's easy passage, a pair of bills which would have significant policy implications related to opioid prescriptions failed to get enough support during the session.
HB260, which would allow specified law enforcement officers to request doctor prescribing data from the state Division of Professional Licensing without a warrant, was defeated in the Senate this week a few days after heated debate in committee over whether it violated the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The Senate vote was 9-18.
HB446, which would make it a class B misdemeanor for a person not to report that a "health practitioner is involved in diversion and knowingly fails to report the diversion to (police)," stalled in committee late last month after several concerns were raised about how it could be interpreted.
HB400, which instructs doctors to discuss the risk of opioid addiction with patients prior to prescribing, passed the House but got demoted from the reading calendar at the Senate to that body's Rules Committee.
However, HB399, which requires that pharmacists affix opioid addiction warning labels to prescriptions, passed both the Senate and the House unanimously.
Senate Concurrent Resolution 4, which warns about the potential for prescribed opioids to fatally depress breathing as a side effect and calls on hospitals and researchers "to collect more data about the risks of taking an opioid after surgery," passed the Legislature without any dissenting votes.
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Mar 9, 2018 | Mobile, AL
By WEAR (ABC)
Video Link: http://app.criticalmention.com/app/#clip/view/33421129?token=1f24dd93-e99f-4c27-a789-1e85811562de
Rough Transcript: escambia county during the fight against big pharma. the county one of about 300 municipalities including the city of pensacola suing opioidmanufacturers and distributors. this week county hired a law firm to represent them at no cost to taxpayers. the firm will do the work for free and take part of the winnings. what is the cost to all of us is the spike of opioid overdoses in the county. many local governments are joing lawsuits to recover the cost. >> big pharma has internalized the profits and externalize the costs. we are trying to say you can't take all of the profits and push the cost on the community. you have to shoulder those costs along with the taxpayers. >> jared: the cdc said in 2016 many prescriptions for opioidswritten in escambia county.
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Mar 9, 2018 | Greenville, SC
By WSPA (CBS)
Video Link: http://app.criticalmention.com/app/#clip/view/33421148?token=1f24dd93-e99f-4c27-a789-1e85811562de
Rough Transcript: another county joins the list, in the upstate, that are suing pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies over the opioid epidemic. spartanburg county filed a lawsuit this week that names 37 defendants, that includes purdue pharma, which makes oxycontin. pharmacies including rite aid, walmart and cvs are also name. the suit claims spartanburg county spends millions each year to cover costs for treatment, addictions, and overdoses of opioidpainkillers.
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Mar 9, 2018 | Watertown, NY
By WWNY (CBS)
Video Link: http://app.criticalmention.com/app/#clip/view/33421154?token=1f24dd93-e99f-4c27-a789-1e85811562de
Rough Transcript: warrants county lawmakers are suing big pharma companies over the opioid opiate crisis and they say those companies not local doc is our the surgeon legal opiate has ruled overdose that illegal drug use and crime says the counties lost is one of hundreds filed by counties across the nation ... and the people on the lines of the opioid
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