Little Rock signs on to state’s opioid suit

Arkansas’ largest city has officially joined a forthcoming effort organized by the state’s Municipal League for all of the state’s cities and towns to jointly sue manufacturers and distributors of opioid drugs.

With Little Rock’s Board of Directors vote Tuesday, almost 60 cities have signed on, according to Mark Hayes, general counsel for the Arkansas Municipal League.

“I expect the number to grow substantially over the next several weeks. There will be many city council/ board meetings in early January, and our winter conference will have city officials in attendance from all over the state,” Hayes said.

The Municipal League’s Legal Defense Program represents about 440 of the state’s 503 municipalities. The Municipal League is working with the Arkansas Association of Counties and a shared team of lawyers to represent all of the state’s local governments in lawsuits about damages localities have experienced due to the harmful effects of painkillers.

Roughly 100 such lawsuits against about 70 top-tier opioid companies have been filed nationally by either cities, counties or states. There’s a meeting next week in Cleveland in a multidistrict litigation court about grouping all the lawsuits together.

Ernie Cory, an Alabama attorney with expertise in multidistrict litigation who is representing the Arkansas associations, said a joint litigation team representing most of Arkansas’ cities and counties will position them well on the national level. He will be at next week’s meeting in Cleveland on behalf of the League and Association of Counties.

The joint effort makes the litigation team stand out and makes way for it to be a leader in the multidistrict litigation discussions nationally, Cory has said.

The pending cases against opioid companies have been compared to the 1990s-era lawsuits against tobacco companies.

The claims are that manufacturers and distributors have failed to report suspiciously large orders of prescription pain pills and that they use a marketing scheme to convince doctors and patients that opioids can cure chronic pain, but don’t disclose that many of those patients are likely to become addicted to the drugs and suffer from long-term effects.

The lawsuits allege that the manufacturers and distributors minimize the risks and overstate the benefits of the drugs. That, the lawsuits claim, has led to widespread overprescription and what government officials are calling the worst drug epidemic in U.S. history.

The Healthcare Distribution Alliance, an organization that represents some of the pharmaceutical companies, has said that opioids are a small percentage of what its members deliver to health care providers and that the distributors respond to demand in the market, they don’t create it.

The organization also put some of the blame of the increased access to opioids on the Drug Enforcement Administration, which approves the flow of the drugs annually.

There were 235.9 million opioid pills sold in Arkansas in 2016, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Data show that the state had the highest rate of teen prescription drug abuse in 2013, and 1,067 people have died from drug overdoses in the state since that year.

Hayes said the Arkansas lawsuit will be filed in coming weeks. He didn’t have an exact timeline. The team is still working to decide how it will file the suits — individually or with every city and county listed as a plaintiff in one suit.

“We are still researching singular suits vs. group. Regardless, cities and counties are working hand in hand in this endeavor,” Hayes said.

In a similar but separate matter, both the Arkansas Municipal League and the Association of Arkansas Counties have sued a number of opioid manufacturers and distributors on behalf of their health insurance funds and workers’ compensation trusts.

Those lawsuits said the funds “have unnecessarily spent money on opioid prescriptions for chronic pain” and “spent tens of millions more on costs directly attributable to the flood of opioids defendants unleashed on the state, including costs for addiction treatment and the treatment of babies born addicted to opioids.”

The same lawyer team represented the agencies in those lawsuits.

Arkansas has the second-highest opioid prescribing rate in the U.S., at more than 114 prescriptions for every 100 people, behind only Alabama, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Local governments have spent money responding to the increased hospital visits, 911 calls, crimes and jailing.

Defendants named in the lawsuits on behalf of the health insurance funds are Purdue Pharma Inc., The Purdue Frederick Company, Cephalon Inc., Pharmaceuticals USA Inc., Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., Johnson & Johnson, Endo Health Solutions Inc., Watson Laboratories Inc., Actavis Pharma Inc., Actavis LLC, Amerisourcebergen Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp.