Columbus judge could decide painkiller cases
Columbus COLUMBUS — could be ground zero for the civil litigation against more than a dozen pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors blamed by some for the nation’s opioid crisis.
Plaintiffs in 66 lawsuits nationwide against the drug companies have asked that they be consolidated and heard by Chief U.S. District Judge Edmund A. Sargus Jr. at the federal courthouse Downtown. Thesuits include 13 filed in the court’s Southern District of Ohio.
Also, onWednesday, Sargus ordered the U.S. Drug EnforcementAdministration not to destroy information from its database used to track and report the transfer of certain drugs such as OxyContin, Percocet and Dilaudid. Those records are subject to a regular destruction policy.
“We’re trying to preserve thedatabase that records certainopioidtransactions,” said attorney David Butler, who represents the city of Cincinnati and most of the 13 Ohio counties. “Oneof the reasons we want that information is to show there were anomalies in opioid orders that should have been flagged.”
In their lawsuit, for example, Vinton County officials said that enough opioids were dispensed in 2015 in the rural county of 13,000 for every man, woman and child to have received 105 doses.
Ohio has been hit hard by the opioid epidemic for years, the plaintiffs argued.
They said the death rate due to unintentional drug poisonings increased 642 percent from 2000 to 2015, citing Ohio Department of Health statistics. In 2015, there were 3,050 Ohio overdose deaths. Last year, there were 4,050.
Opioids have been a main driver behind those statistics, and the defendants are to blame for not reacting, plaintiffs said. The manufacturers and distributors, they said, should have recognized when an inordinate amount of drugswere being ordered by doctors in a community.
The cases would be consolidated under the federal court’s “multidistrict litigation” program, called MDL for short, because they have common questions of fact and law. The idea is after a few test cases are resolved, theremainingplaintiffsmight decide to settle, withdraw their cases or continue to trial.