"Making drug-company shareholders foot the bill for a public health crisis is flaky and counterproductive.
The opioid addiction issue is headed for the next stop on what is now a well-worn path: from public health crisis, to subject for award-winning and heart-tugging journalism, to payday for trial lawyers.
The lawyers are poised to do to prescription drug companies, pharmacy chains, and drug distributors what they did to tobacco companies and asbestos manufacturers—wring from them a multibillion dollar settlement, with a sizeable chunk going to the lawyers themselves....On March 1, federal government lawyers filed a "statement of interest of the United States of America" before Judge Dan Polster of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.
Judge Polster is presiding over the consolidated cases known as In Re: National Prescription Opiate Litigation.
It is so vast that just the docket listing the names of the parties and their lawyers is 222 pages long.
...The targets of the suits instead are mostly large publicly traded companies—Abbott Laboratories, CVS Health, Costco, Express Scripts, Wal-Mart—whose shareholders will wind up paying the price of any settlement.
Also as usual, there is little consideration given to the potential unintended consequences.
The same issue of The New York Times that carried the news of the government's statement of interest before Judge Polster also carried a book review lamenting the "sluggish progress" and "dry pipeline" in developing new medicine to treat mental illness..."
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