As the number of opioid lawsuits against Purdue and other drug manufacturers reaches 1,500 and counting, the companies are pushing their adversaries to offer specific details to back up their claims.
The counties suing them say pointing to exact overdose deaths or excessive prescriptions isn’t necessary to prove their case that the drugmakers created an oversupply of opioids that resulted in a costly public-health crisis.
The dispute has come to a head in the wake of a Tuesday court order that four Ohio cities and counties must identify 500 medically unnecessary prescriptions and 300 residents who became addicted or were harmed from opioid prescriptions.
U.S. District Judge Dan Polster in Cleveland, who is overseeing all of the opioid cases in federal court, offered up one caveat in his order. The counties, he said, don’t have to produce those details if they promise not to argue in court that specific prescriptions were to blame for alleged deaths and other harms. Instead, he said, they will have to rely solely on broad arguments that look at the entire scope of the opioid crisis in their regions.
More than 30 states and hundreds of local governments are pressing claims against drugmakers including Purdue, Endo International PLC, Johnson & Johnson and Allergan PLC, alleging their misleading marketing played down the addictive risks of opioids and helped fuel the drug epidemic. Many of the municipalities are also suing drug distributors and pharmacies, saying they didn’t do enough to stop suspicious orders flooding into their communities.
Purdue and the other drug companies counter that they didn’t cause the opioid crisis and are committed to being part of a solution.
Judge Polster selected four test cases in Ohio—in Summit and Cuyahoga counties and the cities of Akron and Cleveland—to go to trial first. The fights playing out there are likely to influence the rest of the litigation. Even as both sides gird for a fall 2019 trial, the court is also pushing the parties on settlement talks.
The drugmakers have turned over 68 million pages of documents so far in the case, they said in a recent court filing. Despite that voluminous effort on their part, they argue, the local governments have failed to respond to questions about which opioid prescriptions they claim shouldn’t have been written, what caused them to be written and how they caused harm.
The municipalities argue that they don’t have detailed prescription information. They say their claims “do not turn on proof that a specific drug caused harm to a specific individual.”
Linda Singer, an attorney for the cities and counties, argued at a recent court proceeding that when the drugmakers set out to market opioids, they knew a percentage of people who took them would become addicted.
“They’re going to become addicted, they’re going to overdose, and they’re going to die, and that’s just what happens,” she said, according to a transcript. “And this building and parsing of this case prescription by prescription is not how it works in the real world.”
The cities and counties have until Monday to tell the judge whether they plan to build their case broadly or turn over the requested names and prescriptions.
Mike Moore, the former Mississippi attorney general and architect of the tobacco litigation who has been involved in the opioid suits, explained what the broad argument route would look like.
The municipalities, he said, will analyze federal data on pill volumes sent into communities, paired with the number of overdose deaths, opioid-addicted babies, emergency-room visits and other health effects. Experts and doctors can also testify on the effect of the companies’ marketing.