County brings stinging case to court on opioid crisis
“This case is about one thing: corporate greed.” So begins the lawsuit filed by the government of Palm Beach County against the pharmaceutical manufacturers, distributors and sellers behind the opioid crisis that has cost this region so much in lives and money.
The 266-page complaint lays out a compelling case that it wasn’t a public health crisis or a medical breakthrough or some widespread moral failing that has caused thousands of Americans to grow addicted to painkillers such as OxyContin and fentanyl, so captive that many moved on to heroin. It was a business strategy, gone amok. Drugmakers saw the chance to develop a market and did so, heedless of the lethal consequences. Or even basic ethics.
“Defendants,” the lawsuit continues, “put their desire for profits above the health and well-being of Palm Beach County consumers.”
The 29 defendants include the nation’s largest makers of opioids — such as Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, which has already paid $635 million in criminal and civil penalties for misbranding its showcase product — and such household names as Walgreen’s, CVS and Walmart. They deny any role in creating or worsening the opioid epidemic.
The sweeping lawsuit, filed Thursday in Palm
Beach County Circuit Court, is an attempt to recover millions of dollars that the county has spent to cope with the epidemic’s ramifications — from emergency responses to overdoses, to an overwhelmed medical examiners’ office, to spikes in homelessness and foster care. And, in 2017, 600 opioid deaths.
Wisely, county commissioners forged ahead with the lawsuit despite reservations about one of the law firms spearheading the effort; those problems can be worked out later. The county has thus joined Delray Beach and Broward County as local entities taking aggressive legal action against businesses that have profited off the communities’ misery.
On Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that Florida, too, would file suit against the drug industry for its “bad behavior.” For the Republican leadership of the state to join Democratic-leaning South Florida would be a strong statement. And a fitting one. Statewide, the epidemic is showing no sign of abating. Last year, opioids were identified as either the cause of death or were present in the decedent’s system in 5,725 cases — a 35 percent increase over 2016.
Bondi could well use the Palm Beach County lawsuit as a template. In broad strokes and closely documented detail, it draws a portrait of a massive con job, cloaked in the trustworthy garb of a doctor’s white jacket.
For decades, the lawsuit argues, opioid painkillers were rightly feared for their potential for addiction. But starting in the 1990s, Purdue and the other drugmakers began spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince doctors that opioids were safe: advertising in medical journals, planting fake medical literature, having supposedly unbiased speakers appear at physicians’ conferences who were actually paid by the drug companies.
“Like cigarette manufacturers, which engaged in an industry-wide effort to misrepresent the safety and risks of smoking,” the lawsuit states, drug makers carried out “a common scheme to deceptively present the risks, benefits, and superiority of opioids to treat chronic pain.”
The results were wildly successful. “The United States is now awash in opioids. In 2012, health care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers — enough to medicate every adult in America around the clock for a month. Twenty percent of all doctors’ visits in 2010 resulted in the prescription of an opioid, nearly double the rate in 2000.”
And this meant incredible profits. “Together, opioids generated $8 billion in revenue for drug companies in 2012. Of that amount, $3.1 billion went to Purdue for its OxyContin sales. By 2015, sales of opioids grew further to approximately $9.6 billion.”
Among the defendants is Insys Therapeutics, which prosecutors have called “a criminal enterprise masquerading as a pharmaceutical company.” The Post’s John Pacenti and Holly Baltz have documented the seamy ways this firm peddled fentanyl, a synthetic painkiller 50 times more powerful than heroin.
The question in this case is simple. Can businesses that got wildly rich by deceptively expanding the use of opioid painkillers, or looking the other way while it was happening, be held accountable for the enormous harm they’ve done?
The answer is yes, a thousand times yes.
A portrait of a massive con job, cloaked in the trustworthy garb of a doctor’s white jacket.