Over the past month in a southeast Georgia courtroom, three generations of families testified about how their lives had been savaged by addiction to prescription opioids, the New York Times reported. It was the first lawsuit to come to trial brought by individual victims of the opioid epidemic against pharmaceutical companies. On Wednesday afternoon, the victims lost. After deliberating barely a day and a half, the jury found that the companies — two of the country’s largest medical distributors, McKesson and Cardinal Health, and a third regional one — were not liable. The plaintiffs — 21 relatives from six families — had filed suit under a rarely used state law that permits relatives of people addicted to drugs to sue drug dealers. The outcome of the case underscores a startling reality. The pharmaceutical industry has committed more than $50 billion so far to settle lawsuits over its role in the opioid epidemic, but the families of people who died or who still struggle with addiction have gotten almost none of it. The money pledged by manufacturers (like Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson), distributors (AmerisourceBergen as well as McKesson and Cardinal) and national pharmacy chains (like CVS and Walgreens) is earmarked for prevention and treatment programs in the states, municipalities and tribes that filed thousands of opioid-related cases. Those cases were propped up to a large degree by the suffering and statistics of families hit by the opioid crisis.
