Opioid Addictions and Deaths: How to Punish Wealthy Pharmaceutical Companies
“In 2012 prescriptions reached a peak, 793 opioid doses, according to state statistics—enough to medicate every resident with 68 pills apiece. Half of the state’s foster-care population is made up of children with opioid-addicted parents, and the rate of babies born addicted to opioids grew almost eightfold from 2006 to 2015. In 2014, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, a Republican, began considering litigation.”
“Filed in May in state court, Ohio’s suit accuses drugmakers of ‘borrowing a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook’ by concealing addiction risks. According to the state, Purdue, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Janssen, Endo, and Allergan invested millions to change attitudes about opioid prescribing. Janssen distributed a patient education guide calling opioid addiction a ‘myth,’ for example, while Endo advertised that an abuse-deterrent reformulation of one of its most popular opioids, Opana ER, made it crush resistant, despite its own studies disproving the claim. From 2001 through 2015, Purdue hosted the website inthefaceofpain.com which promoted ‘the notion that if a patient’s doctor does not prescribe what, in a patient’s view, is a sufficient dosage of opioids, he or she should find another doctor who will’.”
“Ohio accuses the companies of creating a public nuisance, violating state laws against unfair sales practices, and committing Medicare fraud by spurring unnecessary prescriptions that the state reimbursed. The conduct dates to at least 1996 and continues through the present, says Jonathan Blanton, who heads the AG’s consumer protection unit. The companies, DeWine says, have reaped unjust profits while devastating communities and fueling a heroin resurgence.”
“In 1994, using an untested and widely derided legal strategy, he became the first state AG to sue tobacco companies for lying about nicotine addiction and hold them accountable for sick smokers’ health-care costs. A Democrat, he marshaled AGs from around the country along with private plaintiff’s lawyers who stood to reap massive fees. He went on to negotiate the largest corporate legal settlement in U.S. history: a 50-state, $246 billion agreement that funds smoking cessation and prevention programs to this day.”
“On June 20, 1997, a coalition of state AGs stood behind a podium in the grand ballroom of the ANA Hotel in Washington to announce the culmination of a four-year effort. They’d filed so many individual, expensive lawsuits that tobacco companies were cornered into negotiating a collective settlement instead of fighting each one separately. The agreement punished the industry for past misconduct, created a fund to pay for tobacco-related medical costs, and banned using Joe Camel in advertisements. ‘We wanted this industry to have to change the way they do business—and we have done that,’ a youthful Moore said to a roomful of journalists and cameras.”
“Aided by the lawyers in the room (and others, including high-profile and high-profiting alumni of the tobacco wars, such as Joe Rice and Steve Berman), 10 states and dozens of cities and counties have sued companies including Purdue Pharma, Endo, and Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals—beginning in 2014 but mostly in the past few months. (Forty state AGs have launched preliminary investigations as a way to gauge the viability of litigation.) The suits allege that the companies triggered the opioid epidemic by minimizing the addiction and overdose risk of painkillers such as Oxycontin, Percocet, and Duragesic. Opioids don’t just cause problems when they’re misused, the suits argue: They do so when used as directed, too.”
“The opioid epidemic cost the U.S. economy $78.5 billion in 2013, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a quarter of which was paid by taxpayers through increased public costs for health care, criminal justice, and treatment. The industry, the suits contend, should bear the financial burden of this wreckage.”
“Moore is confident that the opioid industry will be driven to negotiate by the same reasons tobacco companies were: to end the demonization and obtain financial predictability. ‘The vilification of this industry has not even begun yet,’ he says. ‘In other words: This litigation will vilify them. It won’t make the companies look like they are legitimate businesspeople. It’ll make them look like they took advantage and made billions of dollars on lots of people who died from their products’.”
You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.
Source: http://letstalkbooksandpolitics.blogspot.com/2018/01/opioid-addictions-and-deaths-how-to_96.html
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