The three largest drug traffickers in the United States have won a major court victory, with a judge ruling they were not responsible for record opioid addiction in one part of the state of West Virginia.
About 10 percent of Cabell County’s population is or has been addicted to opioids — with huge economic and social costs, Justice David Faber acknowledged.
But “although there is a natural tendency in such cases to assign blame, they must be decided not on the basis of sympathy but on the basis of facts and law,” he wrote in a decision released Monday night.
“Plaintiffs have failed to establish that the volume of prescription opioids distributed in Cabell/Huntington was due to improper conduct by defendants AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson,” Faber wrote.
The three companies tasked with supplying pharmacies shipped more than 51 million doses of pain relievers across the county between 2006 and 2014, and local authorities have accused them of turning a blind eye to suspicious order volumes.
But “there is nothing improper about distributing controlled substances to fulfill statutory prescriptions,” Faber said.
He blamed the manufacturers who “aggressively market prescription opioids,” not the companies that distributed them.
After becoming addicted to painkillers, many people increased their use and eventually turned to illicit drugs such as heroin and fentanyl, an extremely potent synthetic opioid.
The opioid crisis, which has caused more than 500,000 deaths in the United States over 20 years, has sparked a series of lawsuits from victims, as well as cities, counties and states affected by the consequences.
The lawsuit filed by Cabell County and the city of Huntington had become a symbol of the authorities’ efforts to make companies pay for the social and economic costs of the crisis.
Between May 3 and July 28, 2021, 70 witnesses testified as part of the lawsuit in federal court in Charleston, West Virginia.
With hearings ongoing, the three distributors and pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay $26 billion to end a series of court cases in a settlement that has yet to be finalized.
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