Lt. Gov. announces lawsuit against drug companies
McKee and a group of RI mayors hold press conference touting civil action against companies that manufacture and distribute opioids
NORTH PROVIDENCE – With 14 municipalities already signed on as plaintiffs, Lt. Gov. Daniel McKee disclosed Monday he’s joining a national movement to file suit against the manufacturers and distributors of opioids, seeking to hold them accountable for the costs of the addiction crisis that are increasingly borne by cities and towns.
Flanked by dozens of police officers and municipal leaders, including many from northern Rhode Island, McKee made the announcement in Town Hall here, predicting that more cities and towns would sign on as plaintiffs after continued briefings with officials in the days ahead.
Among those who praised McKee’s efforts in leading the legal blitz for the state were former Health Director
Michael Fine, who presently serves as head of Central Falls-based Blackstone Valley Community Health Care; Central Falls Mayor James Diossa; Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien; and Cumberland Mayor William Murray. Also on hand were lawyer Eva Mancuso, who will serve as Rhode Island counsel to the suit, and two Florida-based lawyers whose firms already represent about two thirds of some 300 municipally-driven lawsuits from other regions of the U.S. against the manufacturers and distributors of pharmaceutical opioids.
“We’re not new to the game but what we’re doing here today is new and different and will bring more resources to the issue,” said McKee. “I know how powerful our small state can be when our municipal leaders work together.”
The lawsuit was variously described as a “mass tort” and a “civil RICO” action by Mancuso, invoking a term more commonly used in criminal cases involving mobsters and for-profit criminal conspiracies. RICO stands for Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations.
In the case at hand, the nub of the argument is that the manufacturers and distributors of heroin-like drugs such as Oxycontin, Percocet and similar opioid-based painkillers knowingly reneged on their legal duty to monitor and restrict the supply of those pharmaceuticals in the face of hard data that they were over-saturating the market and putting lives in jeopardy.
“The manufacturing companies pushed highly addictive, dangerous opioids, falsely representing to doctors that patients would only rarely succumb to drug addiction, while their distributors breached their legal duties to monitor, detect, investigate, refuse and report suspicious orders of prescription opioids,” McKee explained.
Because prescription opioids are so addictive, Congress designed a system in 1970 to control the volume of pills sold in the country. Only a handful of wholesalers were granted the right to distribute the pills – in exchange to their promise to curb sales for suspicious orders and take measures to prevent the drugs from being used unlawfully, McKee said.
Beyond the soaring toll of overdose deaths, Fine said cities and towns have largely been left on their own to shoulder the cost of cleaning up the mess. The freight for managing the epidemic of opioid addiction stretches from the obvious – increased public safety costs associated with opioid-related ambulance runs – to the unexpected: public works crews collecting used hypodermic syringes from recreational areas for proper disposal as medical waste.
To win the war on opioid addiction, Fine said the state will have no choice but to finance a more nimble, greatly expanded therapeutic response, including “treatment on demand,” “harm reduction” zones and “safe injection sites.”
As emergency response resources are increasingly gobbled
up by the opioid crisis, Fine said there are fewer to spare for everything else – a hypothetical guy in Central Falls having a heart attack, for example.
“It puts the whole community at risk,” said Fine. “It’s something we all need to do together but we can only do if we have the resources.”
After overdose fatalities steadily rose through the early 2000s to 336 in 2016, Fine was cautiously optimistic that the number would taper slightly in 2017 – the final data isn’t in yet.
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IDENTIfiED AS DEFENDANTS in the suit are the wholesale distributors, McKesson; Cardinal Health; and AmerisourceBergen Drug. The defendant manufacturers are Perdue Pharma; Teva Pharmaceutical Industries an its subsidiary, Cephalon; Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals; Endo Health Solutions; Allergan, Activis and Watson Pharmaceuticals.
As lead counsel for Rhode Island, Mancuso is associated with the law firm of Hamel, Waxler, Allen & Collins. The firm has teamed up with several other large, out-ofstate firms who are coordinating the sprawling legal action, including Levin, Papantonio, Thomas, Mitchell, Rafferty & Proctor; Baron & Budd; Greene Ketchum Bailey Farrell & Tweed; Hill Peterson, Carper, Bee & Deitzler; and McHugh Fuller Law Group.
Lawyers Archie Lamb and Jim Magazine, who were introduced by Mancuso as co-counsels for the Rhode Island group, said that for the sake of expediency, all of the claims will be consolidated with those originating from other states. After the initial paperwork is filed in the U.S. District Court in Providence, the claims will be promptly transferred to the U.S. District Court for Northern Ohio for consideration.
If they can’t be settled in Northern Ohio district, said Lamb, Rhode Island’s claims would be sent back to U.S. District Court in Providence for further litigation. The lawyers are financing the cost of the litigation, though they would seek fees as part of any settlement.
One of the most-oft heard tropes of the addiction crisis is that everyone either knows someone affected or knows someone else who does – and some of them were the participants in the press briefing.
Magazine told the story of how his 18-year-old daughter became an addict after a first-encounter with Oxycontin when she had her wisdom teeth pulled. The tragic journey turned her into “a felon” who gave birth to an addicted daughter – a granddaughter to Magazine “who is now my daughter.” His biological daughter survived, he said, but Magazine blames the pharmaceutical companies for her plight and that of countless others like her.
“They had a duty to stop and they didn’t because they were making so much money,” he said.
Another participant, Johnston Mayor Joseph Polisena, a career firefighter, recalled the time he was dispatched to his own home – for his brother’s overdose. “He was lucky,” Polisena said. “He survived,” but not without lasting damage.
As of yesterday, the communi- ties that have already signed on as plaintiffs to the action were Barrington, Bristol, Burrillville, Central Falls, Coventry, Cumberland, East Providence, Johnston, North Providence, Pawtucket, Richmond, Warwick, West Greenwich.
Grebien said there were 138 incidents involving fatal and non-fatal emergency response by police and EMS in Pawtucket in 2017, a staggering figure for a community its size, with about 80,000 residents.
“About 10 percent of our rescue runs are opioid-related incidents,” he said. “And that’s just here in Pawtucket.”
Police Chief Thomas F. Oates of Woonsocket, who was also on hand, said Mayor Lisa Badelli-Hunt hasn’t yet signed the city on as a plaintiff, but she may do so in the coming days.
The lawyers in the case said they intend to file papers in U.S. District Court in about two weeks, after further talks with municipal leaders. Lamb said he expects about two thirds of 39 cities and towns to join the suit.
“Ending this crisis is going to take a major collective effort that involves municipal, state and federal leaders, lawmakers, doctors, law enforcement and health officials coming together to find workable solutions,” McKee said. “But until we address the source of this epidemic and force drug makers and distributors to follow the law, our cities and towns will continue to face an uphill battle.”