Outside lawyers hired for opioid lawsuit

In hiring outside lawyers Tuesday to represent it in a national lawsuit, Franklin County wants opioid manufacturers and distributors to pay for treatment and other services the epidemic will cost in the future.

“We thought this was the most sensible approach,” Franklin County Commissioner John O’Grady said on Tuesday, moments before the county hired Taft, Stettinius & Hollister in Columbus and the West Virginia law firm of Greene, Ketchum, Farrell, Bailey & Tweel, which now represents more than 150 governments suing opioid manufacturers and distributors.

The commissioners, and the federal judge in Cleveland presiding over the massive, combined civil lawsuit, agree that the first goal is to stop the flood of opioids and ensure they are accessible only to those who need them for true medical issues.

“This is more about the abatement,” O’Grady said. “How do we address this going forward? How do we address what the cost is going to be … of fixing this problem going forward? How do we address the families (of those addicted or who died of an overdose) and the need of those families?”

Franklin County joins about 200 other governments in suing opioid manufacturers and distributors, including Dublin-based Cardinal Health, accusing them of being a public nuisance and helping to create a public-health crisis caused, at least in part, by prescription painkillers. Those opioid manufacturers and distributors insist that they have done nothing wrong and are unfairly being blamed.

Last year, Franklin County adopted an Opiate Action Plan. It calls for the county Alcohol, Drug and Mental Health Board to spend $20 million this year battling the opioid epidemic. Commissioners also added $6 million from the county’s budget for that fight. That money helped fund a 55-bed treatment facility that opened last week in Merion Village. A big complaint from emergency workers was the lack of treatment beds in Franklin County, so overdose cases often walked out of the hospital emergency room before the ambulance that brought them in had left.

The money is needed because there were 4,329 drug overdose deaths in Ohio in 2016, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The state had the second-highest death rate in the U.S., which had 64,070 drug overdose deaths that year.