By Sara Randazzo
In the Ohio River city of Huntington, W.Va., people like Amanda
Coleman have fought the opioid epidemic for years in a battle that
seems never-ending. She traces many local problems -- homelessness,
mental illness, an HIV outbreak -- back to opioids.
"It's implicated in everything that we do," said Ms. Coleman,
the executive director of a homeless-services organization in
Huntington, a city of 45,000 near the intersecting borders of West
Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky.
Now, lawyers for Huntington and the surrounding Cabell County
will begin arguing Monday in a federal courthouse that the nation's
three largest drug distributors -- McKesson Corp.,
AmerisourceBergen Corp. and Cardinal Health Inc. -- should help
bear their community's costs of addressing widespread opioid
addiction. The trial will be the first courtroom test of a legal
theory put forward in more than 3,000 other lawsuits: That the
wholesalers created a "public nuisance" by letting prescription
drugs flow into the community unchecked, and that now they need to
pay to abate the problems it created.
Huntington and Cabell have pressed for a trial, even after the
state's attorney general settled with McKesson, AmerisourceBergen
and Cardinal for $73 million between 2017 and 2019. And the trial
is moving ahead despite the three companies, and drugmaker Johnson
& Johnson, offering $26 billion to settle all of the opioid
litigation across the country.
The reason for the gamble: Only about 1% of that money would go
to West Virginia, and that isn't nearly enough, plaintiffs' lawyers
say. If victorious in a bench trial in Charleston, W.Va., before
U.S. District Judge David Faber, Huntington and Cabell are seeking
more than $1 billion, to be used locally to bolster efforts like
Ms. Coleman's.
The trial will aim to "hold these companies accountable, and
help restore these communities," co-lead plaintiffs' lawyers Paul
Farrell and Anne McGinness Kearse said.
Huntington has been a hard-hit city in a state that has suffered
some of the harshest effects in the nation from the opioid
epidemic. West Virginia's per-capita death rate from opioid
overdoses was the highest in the country in 2018, according to
federal data. Around 5% of West Virginia babies are born to mothers
using opioids, the cause of lifelong health problems, compared with
less than 1% nationally.
"Painkillers became so easy to get, it almost became cultural,"
said Tim Craft, the head of a ministry in West Virginia that helps
people overcome addiction. Mr. Craft, himself a recovering addict
who lost a sister to an overdose, began taking prescription opioids
as a teenager to deal with migraines and later switched to
heroin.
McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health aren't household
names, but they are among the highest-grossing companies in America
and control the flow of healthcare products ranging from surgical
gloves to Covid-19 vaccines.
In Huntington's lawsuit and hundreds of others, states and
municipalities allege the distributors allowed pills to flood into
pharmacies largely unchecked, and that the companies should have
taken greater steps to ensure prescription drugs weren't being
diverted for improper uses.
The companies counter that there are far too many steps between
them and the actual use of opioids to be held accountable for what
they acknowledge is a public-health crisis. In court papers, the
companies said a doctor first had to prescribe a drug, dispensed by
a pharmacy to someone legally entitled to it, which was then given
to someone to abuse -- a chain of events the distributors say
doesn't involve them.
AmerisourceBergen said it followed the quotas set by the Drug
Enforcement Administration for opioid painkillers, reported all
controlled-substance sales and suspicious orders to the DEA and
verified all pharmacy licenses. McKesson and Cardinal declined to
comment ahead of the trial.
The companies also plan to argue West Virginia has been heavily
affected by illegal opioids, like heroin and synthetic fentanyl,
that have nothing to do with their business.
The thousands of opioid lawsuits filed nationwide argue that
illegal opioid use often starts with addiction to pain pills, which
pharmaceutical companies fostered through aggressive marketing of
their drugs to doctors.
The lawsuits drove the biggest target of the claims, OxyContin
maker Purdue Pharma LP, into bankruptcy in 2019. The company is now
negotiating a multibillion-dollar deal with states and other
creditors.
Deal talks over the $26 billion offer by McKesson, Cardinal,
Amerisource and Johnson & Johnson have dragged on, however,
since late 2019, as states fight among themselves over their share
of the settlement and the companies try to get assurances that the
money will actually resolve the majority of the claims. Another
opioid trial is under way in California, being held virtually and
in a case involving four drugmakers, not distributors.
West Virginia resident Sandra Blankenship is hoping to get a
payout in Purdue Pharma's bankruptcy. She adopted a baby girl in
2012 who had neonatal abstinence syndrome because of a mother using
opioids.
An intensive-care-unit nurse at the time, Ms. Blankenship said
she thought she could handle any challenges the condition
brought.
Looking back, she said, "nothing could have prepared me for
this." For three years, her daughter barely slept and struggled to
swallow food. She now has trouble focusing and learning basic math
concepts.
Ms. Blankenship said most of her friends in southern West
Virginia are raising their grandchildren because their children
can't care for them.
"It's drugs," she said. "It's all drugs."
Write to Sara Randazzo at sara.randazzo@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 02, 2021 09:14 ET (13:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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