There are currently hundreds of lawsuits against manufacturers and distributors of opioid prescription drugs ongoing in the United States. Opioids were involved in more than 42,000 overdose deaths in 2016, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Starting in the mid-1990s, opioid manufacturers began a misleading marketing campaign that downplayed the risks of opioid painkillers and exaggerated the drugs’ benefits. The lawsuits allege that this amounts to false advertising and also indirectly led to deadly results, by encouraging doctors to overprescribe the pills and making patients think the pills were safe and effective.
Meanwhile, opioid distributors were responsible for supplying these drugs to the public, even though they presumably knew that the pills could end up in the hands of individuals who would misuse them. In some states, there were more prescribed bottles of painkillers than there were people. There are federal and state laws requiring distributors to keep track of the supply chain and make sure their products end up in the correct hands. The lawsuits argue that the distributors – whether knowingly or unknowingly – dropped the ball and allowed a flood of opioid drugs into the market. The overarching argument in these lawsuits is that these companies knew (or at least should have known) that these drugs were unsafe, ineffective, and overprescribed, and yet they continued to promote them as miracle painkillers.
The website PainKnowledge.com, which is sponsored by Endo, the pharmaceutical company that makes the opioid painkiller Opana, stated that people who take opioids as prescribed usually do not become addicted. They distributed a patient education guide in 2009 which claimed that studies show that opioids are rarely addictive when used properly for the management of chronic pain. Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, sponsored a publication from the American Pain Foundation, which was heavily funded by opioid companies, claiming that the risk of addiction is less than one percent among children prescribed opioids. They claimed that pain was actually being undertreated and opioids were perfectly safe. However, studies have revealed that OxyContin does not actually last for 12 hours as it claims, which means people are taking more doses in order to achieve pain relief. This greatly increases the chances of addiction and overdose.
On a related note, doctors shoulder a certain amount of the blame for the opioid crisis, even if they aren’t named in the lawsuits. Beginning in the 1990s, doctors faced increasing pressure to both find more effective ways of managing pain and to move patients in and out of their offices more quickly. Opioids were seemingly an easy answer, particularly as the information being provided to them by pharmaceutical companies was misleading. Unfortunately, doctors were overprescribing the drugs, often giving a month’s supply to a patient whose pain was only likely to last a week (such as after dental surgery.)
The goal of these lawsuits is to make the pharmaceutical companies pay millions of dollars in settlements. Ideally, this money would go toward compensating some of the patients who have suffered, as well as furthering education on opioid use.
If you or a loved one need help to quit drugs or alcohol, call Asana Recovery at (949) 438-4504 to learn about our medical detox and residential and outpatient therapy programs.
