A corner of West Virginia wrenched by opioid addiction is getting the chance to argue in a courtroom that some of the corporate giants it blames for a public health crisis that left hundreds of people dead deserve to be held accountable.
The city of
The trial in
Yet as the sprawling litigation over the addiction epidemic progresses around the country, its trajectory is unlikely to mirror the one of the lawsuits that states brought against the tobacco industry during the 1990s. The landmark litigation over what cigarette companies knew about the health risks of smoking resulted in a few sweeping settlements that distributed money to nearly every state, while the opioid cases involve a variety of plaintiffs suing companies up and down the pharmaceutical chain in state and federal courts.
As a result, the lawsuits arising from the use of powerful prescription painkillers could evolve more like the litigation over the cancer risk linked to asbestos, which also involved many corporate players and ended up stretching on for decades. In addition to state and local governments, Native American tribes, hospitals and labor unions also filed opioid lawsuits.
The
“A win really helps the plaintiffs and creates momentum,” Burch said.
State attorneys general, local governments and other entities have filed thousands of lawsuits over the last five years aimed at making segments of the drug industry pay for the lives lost or derailed by addiction. Before April, only one opioid case brought by a government had reached trial; in 2019, on
Other cases were settled before reaching trial, but most of those deals were with individual governments and therefore did not provide broad compensation or have much of a domino effect.
And for activists, settlements do not equal accountability. They want payments for victims or their families and a detailed accounting of what companies did to spark the crisis. Some also want to see individual company officials charged with crimes.
“You can murder one person and go to jail for life. You murder hundreds of thousands? “You just put up some money and you don’t go to jail," said
Most of the pending civil lawsuits focused on drugmakers and distribution companies, but some also target pharmacy chains and more peripheral players.
This year, the consulting firm
Two major opioid manufacturers — Purdue Pharma and the generic drugmaker Mallinckrodt — are using bankruptcy court to pursue universal settlements. In the Purdue case, state attorneys general are split over whether the proposed deal is sufficient to hold responsible members of the wealthy Sackler family who own the company.
Under the deal, Sackler family members would give up ownership of Purdue, and profits from a successor company would be used to fund opioid abatement; family members would also pay nearly
Close to 3,000 lawsuits filed in federal courts have been consolidated under the supervision of
The
An expert witness for the county and
In response, the companies say the shipments increased along with quotas set by the
In
“They’ve lost everything, They’ve lost homes, they’ve lost their children. Children have lost parents,” she said.
Earlier in the opioid epidemic, overdoses largely involved prescription painkillers. In recent years, it has been heroin and synthetic drugs such as fentanyl.
“The distributors and manufacturers have known for some time that they can’t be going from pillar to post, from one trial to the next,” said Simon, who also helps lead a committee of lawyers suing in state court in
Some of the companies have indicated they see settling as in their best interests. The three national drug distribution companies involved in the
Lawyers for some governments are eager to accept, but significant details remain to be worked out, including how governments that don't agree to the settlement would be handled.
Having a series of individual judgements rather than big settlements also could be bad for the public, because the money to address the addiction crisis would end up flowing mostly to the first places to get their cases to trial, with little left over for the remaining plaintiffs. .
“Protracted litigation in thousands of cases will never lead to a fair resolution for millions of people in our country who are suffering,”
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