Huerfano County is suing the nation’s top pharmaceutical companies and distributors, joining a growing national legal campaign that claims the companies are responsible for an epidemic of overdoses and deaths due to opioids.
The lawsuit is the first of its kind filed by a local government in Colorado. It claims that Huerfano residents were falsely induced to take highly addictive opioids for pain management. The lawsuit claims the opioid epidemic was caused by drug manufacturers engaging in fraudulent and deceptive marketing and by distributors who brought large amounts of opioids into the marketplace.
Although Huerfano is the first local government in Colorado to bring such a suit, the county isn’t alone nationally. It has become part of legal movement that is picking up steam. Philadelphia and Delaware filed lawsuits this month. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday also announced that New York City is suing drug companies to hold them responsible for the deadly opioid epidemic. And more than a dozen counties in New York filed similar lawsuits last year. Another case filed by the city of Chicago in 2014 remains active.
Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman has joined a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general across the country that is investigating whether, and possibly how, drug manufacturers broke any laws in marketing opioids.
“Our county is one of the hardest hit counties in Colorado,” Huerfano County administrator John Galusha said in a statement. “We need to stop this opioid epidemic before it becomes worse.”
He said in an interview that Stephen Ochs, a retired doctor and Colorado Springs lawyer who is one of several attorneys handling the lawsuit for the county, approached the county first and told officials that they would not have to pay if it lost the case.
“The compelling argument that Mr. Ochs had is that if the state is successful, the money will go to the state and not to the counties,” Galusha said. “This will hopefully help us mitigate direct impacts to the counties.”
Ochs has approached other local governments in Colorado. He appeared before the Alamosa County commissioners in December and the Las Animas County commissioners this month, urging them to join in multidistrict litigation against pharmaceutical manufacturers. Adams County officials also are considering suing.
The Huerfano County lawsuit seeks class-action status in U.S. District Court in Denver against pharmaceutical companies and distributors including McKesson Corp., Johnson & Johnson, Purdue Pharma, Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., Teva Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. and numerous subsidiaries.
The claim was filed Sunday for Huerfano County, one of Colorado’s most impoverished counties, by Ochs and Colorado Springs lawyer Patrick Mika, and Steven Skikos and Mark Crawford of San Francisco.
The southern Colorado county sued on behalf of its 6,400 residents to “protect the public” from businesses engaging in false advertising, the lawsuit says. The claim seeks at least $750,000 in economic damages and $1.5 million in future damages.
According to a recent joint investigation by The Washington Post and CBS’s “60 Minutes,” federal Drug Enforcement Administration investigators discovered McKesson was shipping the same quantities of opioid pills to small-town pharmacies in the San Luis Valley as it would typically ship to large drugstores next to big-city medical centers.
“McKesson [was] supplying enough pills to that community to give every man, woman and child a monthly dose of 30 to 60 tablets,” Helen Haupang, who retired from the DEA after 29 years on the job, told the news organizations.
The probe also discovered that Platte Valley Pharmacy in Brighton, population 38,000, was selling as many as 2,000 pain pills per day.
But John Parker, senior vice president for the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, a trade group, said that the misuse and abuse of prescription opioids is a complex public-health challenge that requires a collaborative and systemic response that engages all stakeholders.
“Given our role, the idea that distributors are responsible for the number of opioid prescriptions written defies common sense and lacks understanding of how the pharmaceutical supply chain actually works and is regulated,” Parker said. “Those bringing lawsuits would be better served addressing the root causes, rather than trying to redirect blame through litigation.”
Only the DEA knows the quantity of drugs delivered to pharmacies in Huerfano County, he said. Companies like McKesson only know how much they deliver, not how much other pharmaceutical distributors send to specific stores.
The county is asking for a court order declaring that the pharmaceutical companies violated the federal False Advertising Law. It is also asking that the court enjoin the companies from continuing to make false statements.
Opioids once were considered so addictive that they were administered only in hospital settings under the direct supervision of doctors. “Before defendants’ calculated quest for profits, the use of opioids for medical treatment was extraordinary, exceptional or unusual,” the lawsuit says.
But in the late 1990s, the pharmaceutical companies implemented a scheme to create additional demand for opioid products including OxyContin, Percocet and hydrocodone, despite the “high likelihood of addiction,” the lawsuit says. The pharmaceutical companies manipulated training materials and scientific literature to make it appear the opioids were safe, the lawsuit says.
“The full specter of that harm is clearly evidenced by the opioid epidemic currently ravaging communities across the United States — including Huerfano County,” the lawsuit says.
Some estimates say 60 percent of the opioids that are abused originate through doctors’ prescriptions. Almost 80 percent of people who used heroin in 2016 in Colorado previously abused prescription drugs, the lawsuit says.
The pharmaceutical companies should have known that their “reckless” promotion and sale of millions of opioids for widespread use in Huerfano County for chronic pain management would lead to opioid poisoning, the lawsuit says.
For example, McKesson, one of the largest opioid producers in the U.S. with warehouses in Colorado, in May 2008 entered an agreement with the DEA to pay a $13.25 million civil fine after failing to maintain effective controls on controlled substances.
But the problem continued and in 2017, McKesson agreed to pay $150 million to the government for failing to report suspicious orders of the drugs, the lawsuit says.
McKesson representatives could not immediately be reached for comment.
Purdue Pharma actually knew the prescribing practices of thousands of Colorado doctors and had the ability to red flag doctors whose waiting rooms were overcrowded with the young, healthy or homeless, the lawsuit says. It maintained a database in 2002 of doctors suspected of inappropriately prescribing drugs. But it failed to report the doctors, the lawsuit says.
In 2014 alone, opioids generated $11 billion in revenue for drug companies including those cited in the lawsuit. The number of opioid deaths nationally rose from 16,917 in 2011 to 22,598 in 2015, the lawsuit says.
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https://www.denverpost.com/2018/01/29/tiny-colorado-county-sues-giant-opioid-makers-millions/
