The Two Ohio Counties That Will Be Face Of Massive Consolidated Opioid Trial Were Flooded With Millions Of Pills
Barring a settlement, the two counties are scheduled to go to trial in October as the first case among the consolidated lawsuits brought by about 2,000 cities, counties, Native American tribes and other plaintiffs. Recently released data shows just how hard-hit those counties -- and the rest of the country -- were by the opioid crisis. Media outlets dive into the new data to get a better sense of the roots of the epidemic.
The Washington Post:
Ohio’s Cuyahoga, Summit Counties Central To Legal Test On Opioids And Drug Company Responsibility
At Knuckleheads Bar & Grill, the subject on a sweltering Saturday afternoon was the drug crisis. More specifically, the recent disclosure that the CVS across the street received more pain pills — 6.4 million — over a seven-year period than any other drugstore in Cuyahoga County. “Location, location, location,” said Mike Gorman, 37, who was drinking and hanging out with friends. “It’s right near the highway, which makes it easy to access” from Cleveland. And there was the homeless encampment just beyond the CVS, over by the train tracks, behind the strip mall. It’s popular with heroin users, the regulars at the sports bar said. (Heller and Bernstein, 7/21)
The Wall Street Journal:
Drug Makers, Distributors Failed To Stop Suspect Opioid Shipments, Court Filing Alleges
Many of the nation’s largest drug manufacturers and distributors failed to implement even the most basic systems to halt suspicious drug orders as the opioid epidemic came into sharp focus, plaintiffs lawyers allege in a new court filing. The motion filed Friday by lawyers for two Ohio counties alleges companies failed to analyze potentially suspicious orders until after they had shipped, applied rudimentary controls on excessive sales that were easy for bad actors to game, and handed the job of halting shady orders to sales departments incentivized to keep pills moving. (Randazzo, 7/20)
The Baltimore Sun:
Talk Of Massive Settlement Begins As Lawsuits Against Opioid Industry Mount In Maryland And Elsewhere
The city of Laurel and Wicomico County filed suits on July 9. Calvert County did it a couple of weeks before. In the past two years, more than two dozen cities and counties in Maryland, as well as the state, sued opioid makers, distributors and others. They join Baltimore City and the area’s counties and more than 2,000 other governments in filing suit in state and federal courts around the country that allege the pharmaceutical companies had a role in the addiction and overdose crisis that has overwhelmed public resources. (Cohn, 7/22)
The New York Times:
3,271 Pill Bottles, A Town Of 2,831: Court Filings Say Corporations Fed Opioid Epidemic
The Walgreens employee was bewildered by the quantity of opioids the company was shipping to just one store. Its pharmacy in Port Richey, Fla. (population 2,831) was ordering 3,271 bottles of oxycodone a month. “I don’t know how they can even house this many bottles to be honest,” Barbara Martin, whose job was to review suspicious drug orders, wrote to a colleague in a January 2011 email. The next month, the company shipped another outsized order to the same store. (Hoffman, Thomas and Hakim, 7/19)
The Associated Press:
Florida ‘Pill Mills’ Were ‘Gas On The Fire’ Of Opioid Crisis
Florida survives on tourism, but a decade ago thousands of visitors made frequent trips to the state not to visit its theme parks or beaches. Instead, they came for cheap and easy prescription painkillers sold at unscrupulous walk-in clinics. For a while, few in authority did much about it even though it was all done in the open with little oversight. The clinics started in the 1990s and began proliferating in about 2003, their parking lots filled with vehicles sporting license plates from Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and elsewhere. (Spencer, 7/20)
The Washington Post:
Drug Company Executives Said They Didn’t Contribute To The Opioid Epidemic. Nearly 2,000 Communities Say Otherwise.
On May 8, 2018, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee summoned five executives of the nation’s largest drug distribution companies to testify about the massive quantity of pain pills they had shipped into West Virginia, which has the highest opioid overdose rate in the country. The executives stood in the packed hearing room and raised their right hands as they were sworn in before testifying in front of the lawmakers. (O'Harrow and Higham, 7/20)
The Washington Post:
New Opioid Data Spurs Widespread Condemnation, Calls For Action
This week, The Washington Post published a massive database that tracks the distribution of opioids in the United States from 2006 to 2012, specifically where — and how many — drugs materialized. During that period, 76 billion prescription pain pills were manufactured and shipped to pharmacies all over the country, fueling a public health epidemic that killed 100,000 Americans in those seven years. Policymakers, media outlets and others are using this data to understand the sheer scope of the crisis, and many are demanding accountability. (Itkowitz and Zezima, 7/21)
The Associated Press:
Q&A: Newly Public Data Maps Opioid Crisis Across US
The release of a massive trove of data from lawsuits over the nation's opioid crisis provides the most detailed accounting to date of the role played by the major pharmaceutical companies and distributors. In legal cases across the country, they have defended themselves as being little more than bystanders — dispensing government-approved drugs at the behest of prescribing doctors. (7/19)
The Washington Post:
‘We Were Addicted To Their Pill, But They Were Addicted To The Money’
America’s largest drug companies flooded the country with pain pills from 2006 through 2012, even when it became apparent that they were fueling addiction and overdoses. The Post shared its findings with a group of recovering addicts in southwest Virginia and asked them to respond. (7/21)
