Cherokee Nation argues its case for taking opioid battle to court
TULSA — More than 100 pills were sold for every adult in the Cherokee Nation’s tribal lands in 2015, prosecutors for the country’s second-largest tribe wrote in an affidavit filed Friday in U.S. District Court.
In April, the Cherokee Nation became the first tribe ever to sue pharmaceutical providers for their alleged role in the country’s opioid epidemic.
The lawsuit, filed in Cherokee Nation court in Tahlequah, takes on some of the nation’s largest drug distributors and pharmacies, including Walmart and Walgreens. The six companies named in the lawsuit contract with the tribe’s health care system.
In a motion for a preliminary injunction filed in June, attorneys for the drug distributors asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma to remove the lawsuit from tribal court, arguing the Nation lacks the jurisdiction to litigate the case in its court system.
Several affidavits filed Friday by prosecutors from Cherokee Nation Attorney General Todd Hembree’s office lay out the tribe’s argument that an opioid epidemic of unprecedented proportions has swept through the tribe’s lands for the last several years.
In two counties, Sequoyah and Mayes, the Nation wrote, 144 pills per adult were sold in 2015, according to data from the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
Assuming a “dose” is one pill, the Nation wrote that a total of 97,068,513 pills were shipped by wholesale distributors and dispensed that year by pharmacies in the tribe’s 14-county district in northeastern Oklahoma.
The Cherokee Nation spent $2.1 million in 2016 on contracted inpatient treatment facilities, $1.5 million of which was for substance abuse treatment, Mark L. Taylor, director of behavioral health for the Cherokee Nation, wrote in one affidavit.
The Cherokee Nation Behavioral Health Department in Tahlequah sees about 11,000 people per year, Taylor said, and about a quarter of those visits involve opioid painkiller abuse.
Increased crime
The cost of the epidemic manifests outside of the Nation’s medical network, wrote Shawnna Roach, an investigator with the Cherokee Nation Marshal Service.
“Prescription opioid drug abuse has caused a substantial increase in the amount of thefts, burglaries, assaults, batteries, child abuse/ neglect, DWIs, public blight, vagrancy and homelessness, among others,” she wrote.
The Nation’s marshal service is the primary law enforcement for tribal communities in the area.
Impact on children
The tribe has seen a 40 percent increase in the number of cases involving deprived children because of opioid abuse, said Nikki BakerLimore, executive director of Indian Child Welfare for the Cherokee Nation.
The Nation does not have a sufficient number of foster and adoptive homes to place all of the children displaced by neglect or abuse, BakerLimore wrote.
As a result, more than two-thirds of the approximately 1,000 Cherokee children who require foster or adoptive care each year must be placed with non-Cherokee families. Often, siblings must be separated.
“The placement of the next generation of Cherokee children in non-Cherokee homes is one of the single greatest threats to the Cherokee Nation,” Baker-Limore wrote. “These Children are raised without learning how to speak the Cherokee language, and without learning the traditions, history, and customs of the Cherokee people, which they cannot pass down to their own children someday.”
‘Complicated and tragic’
In a statement provided to The Oklahoman earlier this month, one of the companies named in the lawsuit, McKesson Corp., called the national opioid epidemic “a complicated and tragic problem.”
“While McKesson doesn’t manufacture, prescribe, or dispense opioids, we have taken steps to play a leadership role in combating this epidemic in close partnership with doctors, pharmacists, the DEA and other organizations across the supply chain,” the company wrote.
A spokeswoman for McKesson, which, according to its website is the oldest and largest health care company in the U.S., delivering one third of the country’s medications, declined further comment citing the ongoing litigation.