Last month, three generations of families testified in a southeast Georgia courtroom how their lives have been impacted by prescription opioid addiction: A young man said he huddled in a locked room with his brothers while his father Rummed around the house for pills with a shotgun. A mother described holding her granddaughter while her drugged daughter crashed a car into her home. A young woman recounted her rape at the age of 14 by a drug dealer while her mother nodded off.
They listed overdose deaths: grandparents, parents, siblings, spouses. And a baby whose mother injected Dilaudid throughout her pregnancy and who shook uncontrollably for her entire month-long life.
It was the first lawsuit brought by individual victims of the opioid epidemic against pharmaceutical companies. On Wednesday afternoon, the victims lost.
After barely a day and a half of deliberation, the jury concluded that the companies — two of the nation’s largest medical distributors, McKesson and Cardinal Health, and a third regional company — were not liable. The plaintiffs – 21 relatives from six families – had filed a lawsuit under a rarely used state law that allows relatives of drug addicts to sue drug dealers.
The outcome of the case underscores a terrifying reality. The drug industry has so far allocated more than $50 billion to settle litigation over its role in the opioid epidemic, but the families of people who have died or are still struggling with addiction have gotten almost nothing.
The money pledged by manufacturers (like Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson), distributors (AmerisourceBergen and McKesson and Cardinal), and national pharmacy chains (like CVS and Walgreens) is earmarked for state, community, and tribal prevention and treatment programs ranging from thousands of cases in the country related to opioids. These cases have been supported in large part by the suffering and statistics of families affected by the opioid crisis.
“It’s been so hard over the years to explain to families why it’s so hard to win a lawsuit against the manufacturers, let alone the distributors,” said Jayne Conroy, an attorney who joined Purdue Pharma in 2007 settled 5,000 people took OxyContin as prescribed but became addicted and is now one of the leading advocates for many local governments in the nationwide opioid litigation.
The Georgia trial provided a brutal and often unbearably intimate picture of prescription opioids — and eventually heroin, meth and fentanyl — destroying entire homes. However, the proceedings also showed how difficult it is to draw a direct line between a company in a complex distribution chain and the unhappiness of individuals.
Georgian law states that relatives of drug users can sue drug dealers for harm they have suffered from “individual drug addicts”. Still, distributors’ defenders often turned the case into a referendum on addiction, saying that loved ones suffered at the hands of people who chose pills over family.
F. Lane Heard, III, a Cardinal attorney, noted that Brandy Turner, mother of four daughters, took methadone from her mother as payment for chores and watched her father sell drugs. Ms. Turner stole from her children and often left them with her great-grandmother, who would beat them until the blood ran down their legs.
“How do you blame a wholesaler for such a story and activity?” Mr. Heard asked the jury.
During cross-examination and in closing arguments, he and others repeatedly stressed personal responsibility.
“Brandy Turner always had a choice,” Mr Heard said, noting that her daughters, aunt and sister, who faced the same turmoil, had specifically stated on the witness stand that they had chosen not to use drugs.
The trial took place in Brunswick, Georgia, a small coastal town surrounded by farmland and small towns, in an area that has become known as a hotspot along the “Blue Highway” — so named for the color of oxycodone 30 milligram tablets.
The lawsuit, first filed in 2019, alleged that for over a decade, the distributors had been busily supplying to five local pharmacies, which had ordered vastly outsized quantities of opioids for the tiny communities, often dispensing them in dangerous combinations . The lead plaintiff was Joseph Poppell, a paramedic fire captain whose parents died of drug overdoses and who rescued his nieces from foster care while his sister, their mother, remained an addict.
Under Georgia’s Drug Dealer Liability Act, plaintiffs faced a high bar to establish, through clear and compelling evidence, that the dealers violated state and federal laws regulating controlled substances. They then had to show that a “lone drug addict” in a family had filled opioid prescriptions at pharmacies to which the distributors shipped. Finally, they had to prove that the relatives had been harmed by the drug user.
Plaintiffs’ lead counsel, Jim Durham, a former acting US Attorney for the Southern District of Georgia, argued that all three companies circumvented their regulatory obligations.
“They chose this community to dump and flood their drugs,” Mr. Durham said in his closing argument. “They found willing pharmacies and turned on the faucets. Why? Because there was a turnover in the millions.”
Distributors, he continued, are ignoring fiery red flags: infamous “Trinity” prescriptions – like OxyContin, customers who pay cash; Pharmacy parking lots full of people swapping and selling pill bags.
For example, Mr Durham said Cardinal sold 290,000 oxycodone pills to Darien Pharmacy in 2011. Darien, Georgia has a population of about 1,700.
Although companies presented increasingly stringent surveillance guidelines to the DEA, they had not implemented them, Mr Durham said.
The companies’ lawyers argued that the opioid limits were set by the DEA each year. Companies are forbidden from checking a pharmacy’s prescription data for obvious problems. In hindsight, they added, given what is now known about the highly addictive nature of opioids, distributors may have been much quicker in turning down pharmacies’ outsized requests. But for years, doctors have been pushed to aggressively treat pain with prescription opioids. And, the lawyers say, it’s not the wholesalers’ responsibility to question prescribing doctors or track down bad doctors.
The company’s lawyers cited many other factors responsible for the families’ undeniable suffering: street drug dealers; Alcohol; other drugs; the Sacklers, owners of Purdue Pharma; the Food and Drug Administration; greedy pharmacists and doctors. (Before the trial, the independent pharmacies settled for an undisclosed amount. Many of the doctors at the pill factory lost their licenses and were serving federal sentences.)
And the lawyers emphasized each family’s own dysfunctional patterns, including intergenerational drug abuse, sexual exploitation, domestic violence, mental disorders and the terrible choices women make in male society.
In a statement, McKesson called the jury’s verdict “the correct finding based on the law and the evidence presented at trial.” Cardinal said the decision “confirms that a law intended to apply to street drug dealers cannot be used in a misguided attack on DEA-registered wholesalers of FDA-approved drugs.”
The plaintiffs’ attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.
Elizabeth C. Burch, a mass crimes expert at the University of Georgia School of Law, said plaintiffs are taking great personal risks to stand trial. She praised her determination and that of her lawyers.
“Without a study, you wouldn’t have known how many pills are getting into the area, nor would we have known about this really sad part of people’s lives,” she said.
She found that individuals paid a price themselves for submitting their lives to such public scrutiny. “But I think it’s important for the public to understand the scale of the opioid eradication and for it to go down in history.”
