A Missoula City Council committee agreed to join the opioid lawsuit filed by other governments in Montana, including Great Falls and Lake County, against the manufacturers and distributors of prescription opioids.
Mayor John Engen said, "what this retention agreement allows us to do is to pursue some of those damages and receive direct benefit from the suit rather than joining the Montana attorney general, for example, and being in a position of sharing that pot of money in a way that’s largely out of our control.” According to a report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the opioid litigation costs about $55.7 billion annually. About 45% is assigned to health-care costs, 9% is allocated to criminal justice costs, and 46% goes to workplace costs, such as productivity loss. The multidistrict litigation (MDL) would be transferred to a federal court in Ohio where it would be handled by a law firm there, Simon Greenstone Panatier.
More than 1,600 opioid lawsuits filed by opioid affected individuals are consolidated into a multidistrict litigation MDL No. 2804 (In Re: National Prescription Opiate Litigation) overlooked by Judge Polster in the Northern District of Ohio. The first bellwether trial in the litigation has been set for September 2019, involving lawsuits filed by Cleveland and the Ohio counties of Cuyahoga and Summit.
