Big Pharma Finally Being Called To Account For Creating Opioid Epidemic

I have written on a number of occasions about the fact that corporate greed was in large part a major driver of the opioid epidemic, one of the biggest public health issues currently facing this country. From falsifying the effectiveness of the drugs they produced, thereby encouraging addiction, to knowingly flooding places like West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Ohio with unimaginable quantities of opioids, the big pharmaceutical companies have made a fortune essentially promoting drug addiction.

Finally, it appears that Attorneys General around the country are finally trying to make sure these pharmaceutical companies are held accountable for their actions. Today, Mike DeWine, the Attorney General for the state of Ohio, has sued Purdue Pharma, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Johnson & Johnson, Endo Pharmaceuticals, Allergan and other big name opioid producers, accusing them of misleading both doctors and patients about the dangers of addiction to their opioid products. According to DeWine, these companies spent “millions of dollars on promotional activities and materials that falsely deny or trivialize the risks of opioids while overstating the benefits of using them for chronic pain.”

This Ohio suit adds to others similar cases filed by Mississippi, Chicago, and individual counties in New York, California, and West Virginia. These suits are on top of a prior case filed in By West Virginia that resulted in a multi-million dollar settlement and a far earlier Justice Department case against Purdue Pharma accusing the company of downplaying the addiction risk of its OxyContin product that resulted in a $650 million settlement.

According to a lawyer at the New York firm of Labaton Sucharow who is advising states on possible opioid cases, “We are in ongoing discussions with attorneys general about what can only be described as a national epidemic.” This certainly is starting to look quite similar to a strategy that states took in dealing with tobacco companies. That approach ended up with the industry paying states more than $200 billion. That precedence should certainly be a frightening prospect for the pharmaceutical industry.