A federal judge ruled that massive lawsuits blaming drug factories, distributors and pharmacies for opioid epidemics in the United States would continue to court.
"It is true to describe the opioid epidemic as a human-made epidemic, twenty years in development. The pain, death and sadness it causes cannot be overstated," District Judge Dan Polster from Northern Ohio District criticized his decision last month.
This federal court will take place in September.
The class action lawsuit combines no fewer than 600 claims from local and state governments on the opioid industry. While the most cynical of us might think that this is nothing more than giving cash to our nation's prosecutors, the facts show that this is the most we can do to hold these corporate criminals accountable.
Take Purdue Pharma, the first OxyContin producer and the most prominent defendant in this case. The company has reportedly gotten $ 35 billion from selling OxyContin since its introduction in 1995, thanks mainly to an initial marketing campaign that sold painkillers as "initial and fixed" pills that were "almost not addictive". "Addiction, Purdue said, occurs in less than 1 percent of patients. Clinical trials have since contradicted the bold claim, but that hasn't stopped Purdue or other producers from pushing this lie over the past two decades. Meanwhile, around 200,000 people have died because of OxyContin overdose or other prescription painkillers since 1999.
This fraud campaign is not limited to Purdue. A report by the Center for Public Integrity and The Associated Press found that, from 2012 to 2017, the top five opioid producers gave more than $ 10 million to several seemingly independent and non-profit advocacy groups, which in turn promoted analgesics.
That did not even include the $ 14 million collectively spent by opioid producers to advertise in medical journals in 2011. That also excludes thousands of doctors who received favorable payments from opioid producers for conference commitments and consultations.
It's no coincidence, research by researchers at CNN and Harvard shows a correlation between the money paid by pharmaceutical companies to doctors and the amount of opioids they give to their patients. In some cases, doctors receive six-digit compensation from pharmaceutical companies.
Therefore, the current federal effort has a series of parallels with past lawsuits against tobacco companies. But the blatant promotion of opioids represented a new level of depravity. Back in the 1930s, tobacco companies hired doctors to make false claims about smoking in advertisements. However, they never recruited mercenary doctors to prescribe their cigarettes.
After the introduction of OxyContin in 1995, DEA officials began to pay attention to Purdue's aggressive tactics, which were unprecedented for Schedule II drugs, including branded promotional gifts to professionals in the field of drug abuse. health Unfortunately, Rudy Giuliani and his consulting firm have proven to be ironic but very effective lawyers for his company. During his well-paid stay in 2002, Giuliani met with DEA officials on several occasions and convinced them to reduce some of the planned restrictions at OxyContin.
Two years later, Eric Holder, a former attorney general, while working for Covington & Burling, helped negotiate a very small $ 10 million deal with West Virginia state at OxyContin. It is important to note that this agreement allows Purdue to keep documents and testimonies related to marketing practices.
Similarly, with Mary Jo White, former US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Purdue Pharma executives avoided prison sentences in 2007. The company and three executives were fined $ 630 million and sentenced to three years probation and 400 hours of community service for marketing their drugs aggressive and deceptive.
This relatively mild sentence clearly does not hinder the company's aggressive practices. In 2016, Purdue Pharma increased its sales force to 700 representatives, compared to 300 in 2007. OxyContin sales peaked in 2010 with revenues of more than $ 3 billion.
So Purdue Pharma has made sales of OxyContin in the range of more than $ 35 billion over the past 24 years. In comparison, the most famous drug smuggler in the world, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, produced wealth estimated at $ 16 billion, with only a portion of the kingdom of medicine being derived from heroin profits.
There is a legitimate place for opioids prescribed in the health care industry. The problem is that companies like Purdue have constantly struggled against the law to block transparency. That includes quotes relating to your marketing campaign and doctors with very high prescription levels.
Over the years, many drug factory operators and doctors suspected of being sent to prison for violations related to prescription opioids. However, a great opportunity at the top of the company hierarchy had not seen a part in the prison cell.
Of course, the mistake is not exclusive to the manufacturer. Major pharmaceutical chains, such as Walgreens and CVS, have not been able to adequately monitor or report suspicious activity. For example, a lawsuit filed by the state of Florida revealed that 2.2 million opioid pills were distributed at a Walgreens store in Hudson, a city of 12,000.
Drug distribution companies in our country also ignore warning signs. Last year, the Energy and Trade Committee of the US House of Representatives Act He found that 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills were sent to the state of West Virginia between 2007 and 2012. There were 433 pills per person!
The set in these statistics is even more outrageous. Case in point: Over a nine-year period, McKesson and Cardinal Health sent 12.3 million opioid pills at a pharmacy at Mount Gay-Shamrock. Of course, it is a city with fewer than 2,000 residents. Many other states can show similar examples.
Although accurate evidence of extreme corporate negligence was presented, none of the executives from the three main distributors (McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health) claimed to contribute to the opioid epidemic during their testimony before Congress last May.
Instead, the head of a much smaller private drug distributor board, Miami-Luken, acknowledged the involvement of his company. The role of the company is not too embarrassing. Miami-Luken sent 20 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone to pharmacies in West Virginia between 2007 and 2012, while McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health were responsible for 423 million.
The three companies, each of which ranked sixth, twelfth, and fourteenth in the Fortune 500, can operate in this impudent manner for several obvious reasons. They can easily withstand relatively small fines assessed by various government institutions. Benefits are more than offset costs.
In addition, they have the resources of funding and lobbying campaigns to eliminate all kinds of credible threats to the benefits of their opiates. For example, what happened to the Attorney General of West Virginia, Patrick Morrisey.
Morrisey said he would withdraw from the Cardinal Health investigation because of a conflict of interest, such as $ 8,000 in campaign donations and $ 250,000 in lobbying work for a business group representing Cardinal Health. Not to mention his wife, Denise Henry, is a partner at the Capitol of California law firm, which represented Cardinal Health from 1999 to 2016.
Nevertheless, Patrick Morrisey met with a representative from Cardinal Health during the investigation which resulted in a $ 20 million agreement in 2016. Furthermore, a judge ordered Patrick Morrisey to disclose his communication with the company, but he did not comply.
It is quite clear how campaign finance and lobbying can influence legislators. However, government institutions, such as the DEA, must theoretically be immune from this influence. That hasn't happened yet.
There has been a turnstile to former DEA agents who continue to help the pharmaceutical industry limit the power of agency regulation. In fact, 42 former DEA officials work in pharmaceutical companies or law firms that represent them, according to The Washington Post.
Such influence certainly plays a role in the DEA's decision to allow the share of industrial production for oxycodone to increase by 1,300 percent over a 20-year period. And the results are very bad. According to the CDC, there are nearly 218,000 deaths in the United States. The law for opioids was prescribed from 1999 to 2017. The death rate was five times higher in 2017 compared to 1999.
The bill passed in 2016, known as "Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Compliance Law," may be an industrial coup. Now, the DEA's ability to prevent drug companies from carrying out suspicious transactions related to substances that are controlled basically is canceled. And in the end, special interest groups can co-opt Congress for a low investment of $ 1.5 million. The price is a contribution accumulated by the political action committee to the sponsors and co-sponsors of the bill.
So wait for some very powerful public relations campaigns by the pharmaceutical industry before the September session. But don't get carried away. Such efforts are two decades late and a few billion dollars short. They cannot rub the fact that these companies are accomplices of the deaths of thousands of Americans
Loading...
Loading...
