Los Angeles Joins the Battle Against Opioid Epidemic

Los Angeles Joins the Battle Against Opioid Epidemic

Introduction

Los Angeles has now joined several others to fight the Opioid epidemic battle. Recently, a Los Angeles city attorney filed a lawsuit in the California district court against a group of pharmaceutical companies alleging their contribution to the rising addiction and adopting “deceptive marketing and sale” methods.

On December 5, 2017, Opioid MDL: 2804 was established by the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) in the Northern District of Ohio. The main defendants are opioid manufacturers Purdue Pharma LP, Johnson & Johnson, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., and Endo International Plc, and drug distributors AmerisourceBergen Corp, Cardinal Health Inc., and McKesson Corp.

Plaintiffs represent a growing list of cities, counties, and states alleging that the manufacturers of prescription opioid medications overstated the benefits and downplayed the risks of the use of their opioid products and aggressively marketed (directly and through key opinion leaders) these to physicians; and the distributors failed to monitor, detect, investigate, refuse, and report suspicious orders of prescription opiates.

Recently, McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health Inc., and AmerisourceBergen Drug Corp, Pharmaceutical distributors, appealed before the Texas JPML to consolidate a group of cases against them and other drug manufacturers, liable to Texas counties for the problematic marketing and sales of opioid medications.