Suit over shipyard homes settled
A federal judge has tentatively approved a $6.3 million settlement for current and former homeowners at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard who said they were misled about the extent of radioactive contamination at the site and problems with the cleanup.
The March 17 court order paves the way for developers Lennar Corp. and FivePoint Holdings to resolve one thread of a tangled web of litigation around the former shipyard, which was polluted in parts with radioactive substances during the Cold War. The homes are built on a hilltop parcel historically used for Navy housing. Though the hilltop has been declared clean by regulators since 2004, surrounding areas are part of a Superfund site and are still being probed for contamination.
More than 650 people who owned about 370 housing units are members of the classaction lawsuit against the developers. There are 126 people named as plaintiffs; that group is still suing the environmental cleanup firm Tetra Tech Inc. and its subsidiary, Tetra Tech EC.
The homeowners claimed their property values plunged by a collective $46 million following a scandal over faked radiation tests in other parts of the exshipyard and wider questions about the accuracy of Tetra Tech’s work.
BayviewHunters Point, in the city’s south
UCSF and John Hopkins University released a trove of documents Wednesday culled from legal rulings, settlements and ongoing lawsuits related to the nation’s opioid crisis, which to date has claimed the lives of nearly 500,000 Americans since 1999.
The Opioid Industry Documents Archive contains papers from government lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies, opioid manufacturers and distributors. The collection will provide free public access to anyone interested in investigating the epidemic, according to a statement from UCSF.
The project, modeled after UCSF’s Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive, is expected to help shape legal and health policy related to opioids in the U.S. and around the world to prevent another crisis from happening, said Dr. Michael Steinman, a professor of medicine at UCSF.
“We need to understand how these medications have been marketed and what led to their high rates of use so that we can safeguard patients’ wellbeing by ensuring that doctors aren’t being unduly influenced to prescribe medications that are not in the best interest of their patients. Having these documents provides a tremendous window for doing just that,” Steinman said.
The archive’s collection of documents includes emails, presentations, sales and audit reports, budgets, Drug Enforcement Administration briefings, expert witness reports, and depositions of drug company executives related to the opioid epidemic. New documents will be added to the archive as they become available through legal action against companies that contributed to the crisis. The archive contains about 131,000 pages of documents.
“The general public never gets the benefit of learning from litigation that takes place behind closed doors. The effort here is to shine the bright light of day on thousands of pages of documents that helped to explain in part how the epidemic arose and develop a platform that maximizes the availability and accessibility of these materials,” said Dr. G. Caleb Alexander, founding director of John Hopkins’ Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness.
Overdose deaths from prescription opioids have rapidly increased in the U.S. since 1999 as more doctors began issuing prescriptions in the 1990s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In San Francisco, fatal overdoses this year were on track to surpass 2020 as the deadliest year in the city’s drug epidemic. There were a total of 135 deaths in the first two months of the year, and 700 for all of 2020. About 71% of people who died of an overdose this year had fentanyl in their system.
Marketing practices by the pharmaceutical industry have long promoted the use of opioid medications in ways that are often inappropriate for patients, Steinman said. Investigations have shown that some doctors received monetary compensation for prescribing the drug and pharmacy distributors were rewarded for moving high amounts of the product.
In response to the crisis, thousands of cities and municipalities across the U.S. have filed lawsuits against opioid manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies, exposing the drug industry’s various deceptive and harmful strategies to increase sale of the addictive products, according to UCSF officials.