Ohio opioid plight key in court choice
COLUMBUS, OHIO >> The role that drugmakers and drug distributors played in contributing to the nation’s deadly opioid epidemic is now front and center in a federal courtroom in Cleveland.
Judge Dan Polster is overseeing more than 200 lawsuits against drug companies brought by local communities across the country, including those in California, Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia. The lawsuits have been consolidated into what is known as “multidistrict litigation,” an approach taken when lawsuits of a similar nature are filed around the country.
The consolidation comes in the midst of the most widespread and deadly drug crisis in the nation’s history. The government tallied 63,600 overdose drug deaths in 2016, another record. Most of the deaths involved prescription opioids such as OxyContin or Vicodin or related illicit drugs such as heroin and fentanyl.
A look at the lawsuits and the consolidation process:
Congress created the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation 50 years ago this year. The panel’s responsibilities are determining whether civil lawsuits pending around the country are similar enough to be combined, and to select a judge or judges to oversee them. Consolidated cases can involve airplane crashes, train wrecks or hotel fires, or lawsuits over defective products, such as lawsuits consolidated in Miami recently against Japanese auto-parts supplier Takata over its air bag inflators.
The panel cited three reasons in its decision last month to center the cases in Cleveland. First is Ohio’s own experience with overdose deaths and attempts to slow the epidemic. In 2016, a record 4,050 Ohioans died of overdoses, a number expected to rise again for 2017. Next is Cleveland’s proximity to various drugmakers’ headquarters in Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, which is home to drug distributor Cardinal Health. Finally, the panel cited Polster’s experience on a previous consolidated case involving damage claims related to dyes used in magnetic resonance imaging procedures. That case, which involved several hundred cases, “has provided him valuable insight into the management of complex, multidistrict litigation,” the panel ruled. Polster was nominated in 1997 by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and confirmed and sworn in as judge in 1998.