HUNTINGTON – As towns and states across the country grapple with the opioid epidemic and point the finger at the drug manufacturing and distribution industries, Purdue Pharma says financial ruin is an “option,” The Washington Post reports. The metropolis of Huntington and Cabell County has filed two of more than 1, six hundred lawsuits filed against opioid tablet manufacturers and distributors, alleging the companies breached their duty to reveal, come across, investigate, refuse and file suspicious orders of prescription opiates coming into the area during the last several years – a responsibility the complaints claim corporations had underneath the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
The failure fueled the dependancy crisis, causing death and destruction in its wake, they declare. One of the corporations targeted in the proceedings has been Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, a emblem-name narcotic painkiller that reportedly has made the company more than $35 billion since it hit the market in 1996. The company, which has come under fire for its competitive marketing of the drug over the years, is now considering whether or not to record a financial disaster.
“It is an alternative,” CEO Craig Landau advised The Washington Post. “We are thinking about it, but we’ve made no decisions on what direction of movement to pursue. A lot depends on what unfolds within the weeks and months in advance.” The Huntington and Cabell court cases have been decided to be some of the primary court cases to be heard. The suits allege the companies sold more than 86 million doses of opioid pain medication in Cabell County between 2006 and 2014, even as the county’s population was about ninety-six 000.
Huntington’s lawsuit was filed in 2017 against the “Big Three” drug vendors – AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson – and former Dr. Gregory Donald Chaney. Cabell County’s case was initially filed in 2017 against tagainstthe “Big Three” and H.D. Smith Wholesale Drug Co., CVS, Rite Aid, Walmart, Kroger, and Walgreens; however, an amended complaint was filed in April 2018, while U.S. District Judge Dan A. Polster ordered the county to accept drug distribution information from the federal government.
The information launched using the Drug Enforcement Administration included 27 gigabytes of raw records, which allowed lawyers to see the transactions among producers and wholesalers in Cabell County from 2006 to 2014. The Herald-Dispatch and Charleston Gazette-Mail had filed motions collectively seeking the release of that information, which Polster denied in July. The amended criticism brought seven producers and groups associated with them, including Purdue Pharma, Actavis, Cephalon, Janssen, Endo, Insys Therapeutics, and Mallinckrodt, to their alleged fallacious marketing of the opioids they synthesized.
