(New York) Pharmacies at Walmart, Walgreens and CVS have played a role in the opioid crisis in two Ohio counties by massively distributing painkillers, a jury in a federal court in that state ruled on Tuesday in a closely watched decision.
Members of the jury ruled that the three companies had acted illegally by filling without blinking important prescriptions for opiates in Lake and Trumbull counties, creating a “public nuisance”.
This is the first time that drug distributors, and not producers, have been held responsible for this health crisis, which has caused more than 500,000 overdose deaths in 20 years in the United States.
According to provisional figures from the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) released last week, there were still 100,306 fatal overdoses in the country between April 2020 and April 2021.
It is now up to a judge to determine the amount that each company will have to pay in reparation to the counties.
This verdict could encourage other plaintiffs to continue their legal actions as thousands of lawsuits have been initiated in connection with the opioid crisis, by individuals, local communities and states. Some parties have made agreements to end the lawsuits in exchange for financial payments.
The drugstore chains Rite Aid and Giant Eagle have thus entered into their own agreements with the counties of Lake and Trumbull.
The conviction of opioid producers on the basis of public nuisance laws recently had two setbacks, in California and Oklahoma, the Supreme Court of the State of Oklahoma in particular overturning in early November the decision to charge the laboratory Johnson & Johnson $ 465 million.
But lawyers for both counties in Ohio were able to convince the jury that the massive presence of opiates was indeed a public nuisance and that pharmacies had participated in it by ignoring red flags about suspicious prescriptions for years.
The three companies have already expressed their intention to appeal, considering in particular that the legal theory around public nuisance was not appropriate in this case.
“Pharmacists only fill legal prescriptions written by licensed doctors, which prescribe substances approved by (health authorities) to treat patients in need,” a CVS spokesperson said in a message to the AFP.