Ohio lawsuit claims drugmakers aided epidemic,
The state of Ohio filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the pharmaceutical industry over the opioid epidemic, accusing several drug companies of conducting marketing campaigns that misled doctors and patients about the danger of addiction and overdose.
Ohio’s attorney general, Mike DeWine, sued the drugmakers in a case similar to one that was filed by Mississippi in 2015 and is still pending. In another case, West Virginia went after major drug distributors and has reached settlements that will pay the state tens of millions of dollars. The city of Chicago, and counties in New York, California and West Virginia, have all started litigation.
Complaints like these are being closely watched by state and local governments around the country that are trying to decide how to proceed — decisions that are complicated by differences in state laws.
“We are in ongoing discussions with attorneys general about what can only be described as a national epidemic,” said Michael P. Canty, a lawyer in New York whose firm, Labaton Sucharow, is advising states on possible opioid litigation.
In 2015, more than 25,000 people in the United States died from overdosing on opioids such as fentanyl, oxycodone and hydrocodone, more than twice as many as a decade earlier, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The drugs, either derived from opium or synthetic analogues of those narcotics, now kill more Americans than homicide, and are approaching traffic accidents as a cause of death.
Middle-aged white men suffer disproportionately from opioid abuse, and the states with the highest overdose tolls are Ohio, Kentucky, New Hampshire and West Virginia.
Defendants in the case include Purdue Pharma, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Johnson & Johnson, Endo Pharmaceuticals and Allergan.
Purdue, the maker of OxyContin, a time-release opioid, released a statement saying, “We share the attorney general’s concerns about the opioid crisis and we are committed to working collaboratively to find solutions,” and calling the company “an industry leader in the development of abuse-deterrent technology.”