The place owes nothing to chance. West Virginia, where the first federal lawsuit against opioid distributors opened on Monday, May 3, is one of the American states most severely affected by the health crisis caused by addiction to painkillers in recent years. This scourge, which caused the death of 250,000 people between 1999 and 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has worsened further since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Health authorities estimate that 90,000 people died of a drug overdose in 2020, up from 70,000 the previous year. Of these deaths, three-quarters are linked to overuse of legal or illegal opiates.
After several aborted trials due to financial agreements signed between the plaintiffs and the producers or distributors of these highly addictive drugs, the legal battle launched by the city of Huntington and the county of Cabell is a test for the thousands of complaints, still pending, filed across the country. And its outcome will be closely scrutinized by the states, cities, counties and tribes at the origin of the proceedings.
The West Virginia plaintiffs hope to obtain $ 1 billion in damages from the three distributors, AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson for their involvement in the “Public nuisance” due to the millions of doses of opioids on the market during the 2000s.
Heroin and Fentanyl addiction
These giants of the pharmaceutical industry accuse the manufacturers of drugs and doctors, prescribers, of being really responsible for the overconsumption of opiates and the addiction of millions of Americans to these products. The companies also point out that overdoses are now partly linked to synthetic (illegal) drugs, trafficked with China and Mexico.
The complainants, for their part, accuse them of not having reported clearly unjustified orders. In some towns with a population of a few thousand millions of pills were delivered to local pharmacies. Between 2006 and 2014, the three distributors delivered 57 million doses of hydrocodone and oxycodone to a territory of 100,000 people.
Finally, the local authorities point out that it is indeed the initial addiction to painkillers, – the prescriptions of which were more regulated from 2015 -, which led, for millions of Americans, to an addiction to the drug. heroin and, more recently, Fentanyl, a synthetic drug a hundred times more potent and devastating.
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