Johnson & Johnson, one of the world’s largest drug manufacturers, has gone on trial in a multi-billion dollar lawsuit by the US state of Oklahoma. Johnson & Johnson the pharmaceutical giant best known for baby powder and Band-Aid profited further as demand for opioids pitched by buying poppy growing companies in Australia to supply the raw narcotic for its own medicines and other American drug makers.
As the province of Oklahoma’s multibillion-dollar claim against Johnson and Johnson has unfurled over the previous month, the organization has attempted to clarify showcasing systems its informers state perilously distorted the danger of narcotic dependence on specialists, controlled medicinal research, and helped drive a pandemic that has asserted 400,000 lives in the course of recent decades.
Dr Andrew Kolodny, One expert witness at the forefront of combatting the epidemic, told the court he had little idea about Johnson & Johnson’s role until he saw the evidence in the case. Mike Hunter, Oklahoma’s attorney general is suing Johnson & Johnson for billions of dollars for its alleged part in driving addiction and overdoses in his state in the first full trial of a drug maker over the opioid epidemic. The case is being closely watched by a host of opioid makers, drug distributors and pharmacy chains facing more than 2,000 other lawsuits by communities across the country to see if a court is prepared to hold a pharmaceutical firm responsible for the worst drug epidemic in American history.
Johnson & Johnson hired the consultants McKinsey & Company to identify opportunities to sell more. McKinsey recommended sales reps focus on doctors already prescribing large amounts of OxyContin. McKinsey also proposed a strategy to keep patients on Duragesic even if they had an “adverse event”. The broader push was to get as many patients as possible off of lower strength opioids and on to Johnson & Johnson’s more powerful drugs. Johnson & Johnson, which is already facing reimbursement payments of several billion dollars after asbestos in its baby powder caused cancer, strongly denies that it bears responsibility for the opioid epidemic. At the core of its defence is the claim that the company was distributing drugs approved by federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration, and that it sold a relatively small amount of opioids in Oklahoma that cannot be tied to any specific overdoses.
The Oklahoma case is closely watched by other drug firms being sued by towns, cities and counties in nearly 2,000 lawsuits combined in a single action in federal court in Ohio, known as the Multi-District Litigation (MDL). Last week, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the MDL proposed that any compensation resolution cover every municipality and county in the US in order to deal with all potential lawsuits at once. The lawyers believe this will be an encouragement for the drug firms to settle because an agreement will shield them from further claims, although it would not deal with actions by state attorney generals such as the one underway in Oklahoma.
>Alma Siddiqua
