Lawsuits filed by Columbia and Marion County against opioid drug companies will be heard in federal court in Ohio rather than Mississippi.
U.S. District Judge Dan Aaron Polster of Ohio currently has more than 1,317 similar cases before him.
They’ve been consolidated to one judge because of the high number of municipalities throughout the country seeking to hold drug manufacturers and distributors responsible for their role in the addiction crisis. The New York Times, in a story this year, called it “one of the most complicated and gargantuan legal battles in American history.”
Both the Columbia Board of Aldermen and Marion County Board of Supervisors joined in last year when they authorized the McHugh Fuller Law Group in Hattiesburg to sue on their behalf. Marion County’s contract agreed to pay the attorneys 30 percent of any settlement received but allowed no fees if there’s no settlement, which is a typical arrangement in such matters.
The lawsuits were filed in December for the county and January for the city in federal court in Mississippi but were quickly moved to Ohio with most of the rest of the nation’s cases. A trial is scheduled for Oct. 21 involving four cities and counties from Ohio that is seen as a test case where the jury’s verdict would influence the settlement negotiations between drug makers and other municipalities, the New York Times reported.
The Columbia and Marion County lawsuits are more than 100 pages long and detail the history of opioid painkillers dating to the 1990s and what they allege are sales practices that sought increased profits by knowingly fueling addictions.
The lawsuits are against several of the largest makers and wholesale distributors of prescription painkillers:
• Purdue Pharma and subsidiaries
• Teva Pharmaceutical and subsidiaries
• Johnson & Johnson and subsidiaries
• Endo International
• Allergen PLC and subsidiaries
• Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals and subsidiaries
• McKesson Corp.
• Cardinal Health
• AmerisourceBergen Drug Corporation
“The manufacturers aggressively pushed highly addictive, dangerous opioids, falsely representing to doctors that patients would only rarely succumb to drug addiction,” the city’s lawsuit states. “These pharmaceutical companies aggressively advertised to and persuaded doctors to prescribe highly addictive, dangerous opioids, turned patients into drug addicts for their own corporate profit. Such actions were intentional and/or unlawful.”
An amended version of the county lawsuit added places where prescriptions were filled, including Walgreens, Walmart and Winn-Dixie.
The lawsuits say that the damages suffered by the municipalities include costs for providing medical care and rehabilitation services for drug addicts; caring for infants born with opioid-related medical conditions and children whose parents are addicts; and increased law enforcement costs relating to the opioid epidemic.
The lawsuits request an award of actual and punitive damages as well as requiring the drug companies to create an “abatement fund” to counteract the continuing costs the communities face from opioid abuse.
The city and county lawsuits are very similar but not identical. The biggest difference is that the county lawsuit, but not the city, alleges violations of the Racketeer and Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). It alleges that the drug companies sought to avoid federal controls over how prescription opioids are distributed and “allowed hundreds of millions of pills to enter the illicit market which allowed them to generate obscene profits.”
The drug companies have not filed their court response to the Columbia and Marion County lawsuits yet.
