Opioid crisis in court

As the state of Oklahoma’s multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson has unfolded over the past month, the company has struggled to explain marketing strategies its accusers say dangerously misrepresented the risk of opioid addiction to doctors, manipulated medical research, and helped drive an epidemic that has claimed 400,000 lives over the past two decades.

Johnson & Johnson profited further as demand for opioids surged by buying poppy growing companies in Australia to supply the raw narcotic for its own medicines and other American drug makers.

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Oklahoma’s attorney general, Mike Hunter, 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. But Hunter’s lawsuit has put the wider industry in the dock, too, by laying out how opioid manufacturers worked together to drive up sales by using their huge resources to influence medical policy and doctor prescribing.

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Purdue Pharma kickstarted the epidemic with its high-strength, long-lasting opioid, OxyContin, in the mid-1990s. The court heard how Johnson & Johnson quickly realized the potential and set about competing.

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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.

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Johnson & Johnson, which is already facing compensation 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 defense 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.

  Guardian

And that could be their ticket out of this case. We shall see.

Some of the most damning testimony has come from Dr Russell Portenoy, a pain specialist and influential early cheerleader for the wide prescribing of opioids who was a paid adviser to Johnson & Johnson, Purdue and other drug makers.

Portenoy told the court that painkiller manufacturers “understated the risks of opioids, particularly the risk of abuse, addiction and overdose” to boost sales. He accused the drug makers of distorting his research and that of other specialists by selectively quoting the results, including omitting information about the dangers of narcotics.

“Those messages about risk were neglected and de-emphasised,” he said in recorded video testimony shown in court. “I think the purpose of doing that was to improve the sales of their products. ”

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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).