Opioid Crisis: School Sues Manufacturers & Distributors

Opioid Crisis: School Sues Manufacturers & Distributors

Introduction

The Miami-Dade County School Board, the nation's fourth-largest school district, filed a federal lawsuit against major manufacturers and distributors claiming that they should be compensated for the money spent to keep opioids out of school.

According to the 300-page lawsuit, the school claimed that it spent money on training nurses and school resource officers to treat overdoses and provided in-school nursing and mental health care to students and employees suffering from opioid addiction.

It seems to be the first school district in the country to file a lawsuit against opioid makers. Drug companies are already facing thousands of lawsuits from the states and have offered a settlement in millions and billions, so far.

Florida is second to California in terms of the number of opioids that moved in, totaling 42 pills per Floridian per year from 2006 through 2012. The lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of Florida and will be transferred to the Northern District of Ohio.

Companies manufacturing opioids convinced the medical community that these medications were not addictive and were purely beneficial. This belief raised the number of prescriptions and sales unwarrantedly, resulting in a mass misuse of these drugs, to the extent that this was identified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a public issue and named it an opioid crisis.