Orange County Sues Opioid Drug Makers: Suit Broadens Assault on Spiraling Opioid Abuse

Abstract

Southern California lawsuit, raising a legal theory that opioid drug Amakers engaged in a vast conspiracy of deception to increase prescribing and mask the harmful effects of their products, has opened a new front in the war on opioid abuse. Nearly 50 people die from an overdose of prescription painkillers every day in the United States. What’s more, the statistics documenting US opioid abuse continue to get worse. Sales of painkillers in theUnited States have increased more than 300% since 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the problem has permeated deep into US emergency departments (EDs), where more than 30 people are admitted daily because of opioid complications. Federal agencies such as the CDC and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) use terms such as “devastating” and “alarming” to describe this increase of opioid use, but so far their efforts to rein in abuse have met with mixed success. As a result, more local governments have begun stepping up to fight the problem. Most notably, officials at the city and county level have targeted the drug companies thatmake the painkillers by taking the battle into the courtroom. Lawyers in Southern California’s Orange County struck first in May 2014 by filing a 100-page complaint against 5