In a major landmark case, a judge has reportedly ruled that Johnson & Johnson can be held responsible for fueling the state of Oklahoma’s opioid crisis. According to The Washington Post, Cleveland County District Judge Thad Balkman issued the ruling on Monday, saying in part, “The opioid crisis has ravaged the state of Oklahoma and must be abated immediately.” The outlet notes that the health care company will be required to pay out $572.1 million in help make up for the years of devastation that the state has suffered. “As a matter of law, I find that defendants’ actions caused harm, and those harms are the kinds recognized by [state law] because those actions annoyed, injured or endangered the comfort, repose, health or safety of Oklahomans,” Balkman added.
The case against Johnson & Johnson stems from opioid drug manufacturing that the company has been responsible, which lawmakers say contributed to an astronomically high number of painkiller related accidental overdose deaths.
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Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter filed the suit in 2017, claiming that Johnson & Johnson — as well as Purdue Pharma and Teva Pharmaceuticals — created a “public nuisance” by flooding the state with opioid drugs while also not seriously explaining the dangers of the medication.
“At the root of this crisis was Johnson & Johnson, a company that literally created the poppy that became the source of the opioid crisis,” the state said in their charges against the company.
Johnson & Johnson’s “marketing scheme was driven by a desire to make billions for their pain franchise,” Hunter wrote in legal documents. “To do this, they developed and carried out a plan to directly influence and convince doctors to prescribe more and more opioids, despite the fact that defendants knew increasing the supply of opioids would lead to abuse, addiction, misuse, death and crime.”
Purdue Pharma and Teva Pharmaceuticals ultimately settled out of court with the state, but Johnson & Johnson opted to fight the case, denying their culpability in the matter.
Johnson & Johnson has vigorously defended themselves. arguing that is was their subsidiary Janssen who was responsible for the actions that were harmful to the public.
“At the heart of the state’s case is the premise that stray promotional statements by Janssen over the course of two decades somehow caused Oklahoma’s opioid abuse crisis,” Johnson & Johnson lawyers wrote. “Never once, however, did the state identify a single Oklahoma doctor who was misled by a single statement Janssen made.”
There are many other drug company lawsuits related to similar situations across the nation that have yet to be finalized, and the decision on Judge Balkman, in this case, may have an impact on those.
