The opioid class action, created to help settle thousands of lawsuits, has been weakened after the local governments in regions affected by the opioid epidemic opted to move forward with individual lawsuits against the drug industries involved.
According to a Monday court filing, the 541 local governments that opted out include Florida’s Palm Beach County and counties in West Virginia, which are among the hardest-hit areas. Houston’s Harris County, one of the largest U.S. counties, also opted out and has agreed to not receive funds from a nationwide settlement.
Altogether, 98% of some 34,000 local governments agreed to move forward with the class action against drug distributor McKesson Corp, drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, and pharmacy chain Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc.
Companies manufacturing opioids convinced the medical community that these medications were not addictive and were purely beneficial. This belief raised the number of prescriptions and sales unwarrantedly, resulting in a mass misuse of these drugs, to the extent that this was identified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a public issue and named it an opioid crisis.
More than 2,600 lawsuits are alleging the defendants fueled the opioid crisis and contributed to 400,000 U.S. deaths between 1999 and 2017. U.S. District Judge Dan Polster is presiding over the opioid lawsuits consolidated under MDL No. 2804 (In Re: National Prescription Opiate Litigation).
