The strategy of suing opioid companies by accusing them of having created a public nuisance has had a mixed track record.
According to the Nolo Dictionary, a “public nuisance” is an activity or thing that affects the health, safety or morals of a community. In comparison, a private nuisance harms only a neighbor or a few individuals.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly half a million people died from opiate overdoses between 1999 and 2019. Oklahoma lawyers said that approximately 6,000 people in this state died from opioid overdoses between 2000 and 2019.
Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva was accused of creating a public nuisance in Oklahoma through its production and marketing of opioids; Teva agreed to an out-of-court settlement for $85 million in May 2019.
Two months earlier, Purdue Pharma paid $270 million to settle a lawsuit in which Oklahoma accused the company of adding fuel to the opioid epidemic in this state through deceptive marketing practices.
A Cleveland County district court judge levied a $465 million judgment against Johnson & Johnson in 2019, declaring the drugmaker’s actions constituted a public nuisance, but the Oklahoma Supreme Court overturned that verdict in 2021.
In November 2021, a federal jury in Cleveland found that three of the biggest pharmacies in the U.S. – CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart – contributed to a “public nuisance” by ignoring clear warning signs related to opioid prescriptions and failing to implement proper oversight protocols that might have stemmed the tide of opioid addiction, overdose and death in two Ohio counties.”
The New York Times noted that the “public nuisance” argument was adopted by the Ohio jury, even though judges in Oklahoma and California rejected that line of reasoning in opioid-related lawsuits just a few weeks earlier.
An Orange County, California, Superior Court judge ruled in November 2021 in favor of four pharmaceuticals (including Endo and Teva) after a bench trial in a lawsuit brought by the counties of Santa Clara, Los Angeles and Orange, plus the city of Oakland.
A federal judge ruled in early July 2022 in favor of three major U.S. drug distributors in a landmark lawsuit that accused them of causing a health crisis by distributing 81 million pills over eight years in one West Virginia county ravaged by opioid addiction. The verdict came nearly a year after closing arguments in a bench trial in the lawsuit filed by Cabell County and the city of Huntington against AmerisourceBergen Drug Co., Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp.
In August 2022, a federal judge decided that pharmacy chain Walgreens played a big part in San Francisco’s opioid crisis by failing to exercise proper oversight over the prescriptions it was filling and ignoring obviously suspicious orders rather than reporting them to proper authorities. The ruling was another successful application of the “public nuisance” argument.
“The Court’s … ruling holds only that Walgreens is liable for substantially contributing to the public nuisance in San Francisco,” the judge wrote. “A subsequent trial will determine the extent to which Walgreens must abate the public nuisance that it helped to create.”
Thousands of states, cities and counties have sued pharmaceutical companies over their role in the opioid epidemic, which is believed to have been caused by the marketing and over-prescription of prescription drugs like Oxycontin. Many patients who were prescribed an opiate later switched over to using illegal narcotics, such as heroin.
The biggest culprit was Purdue Pharma, which manufactured and marketed Oxycontin and entered bankruptcy in 2020. That proceeding hit the pause button on all lawsuits against Purdue and eventually led to a massive settlement, in which cities and states will effectively take over ownership of Purdue.
The former owners of the company, the Sackler family, contributed $6 billion to the settlement, a good deal of which went to the governmental entities, in exchange for immunity from future lawsuits.