Two days after the conviction of Johnson & Johnson to pay $ 572 million to the state of Oklahoma for the opiate crisis, other pharmaceutical companies could agree to pay to avoid a trial, as part of one of the most serious health crises in the United States.
The group Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of one of the main opioid pain medication, OxyContin, has reportedly already offered, according to some media, to pay between 10 and 12 billion dollars to close more than 2,000 complaints against him.
More than 47,000 dead
Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, which had already agreed in March a settlement in Oklahoma with a payment of $ 270 million to Oklahoma, has not confirmed these amounts.
The latter, on the other hand, agreed to negotiate "actively" an amicable agreement, explaining that it had "little interest to spend years in vain legal battles" and to wish "a constructive solution" to this crisis, which made 47,000 overdose deaths in the United States for 2017 alone.
Since then, other labs and drug distributors attacked in the Ohio case should now follow suit, after Johnson & Johnson was convicted for "deceptive marketing and opioid promotion", according to Carl. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, Virginia.
Overprescription of addictive drugs
Johnson & Johnson, Purdue and other pharmaceutical laboratories and distributors are accused of encouraging doctors to overprescribe these drugs. Medicines initially reserved for patients suffering from particularly serious cancers, but whose laboratories and distributors knew that they generated serious dependencies.
Since 1999, this dependence has led many consumers of these drugs to increasingly high doses, then to illicit drugs such as heroin or fentanyl, at high risk of fatal overdose.
For Carl Tobias, many of the companies attacked, especially in the Ohio case where many local authorities and states are among the plaintiffs, "should now think twice" before going to trial.
Although the "public nuisance" law relied on by the prosecutor in Oklahoma is broader than in other states, and although Johnson & Johnson has announced that it will appeal its conviction, the judge has clearly warned that pharmaceutical companies "could be held responsible for" the crisis and its ravages, according to this expert.
Societal cost: $ 453 billion over ten years
The assessment of the damage caused by this crisis, erected as a national health emergency by the Trump government in October 2017, continues to increase and could be another factor likely to accelerate the search for amicable agreements.
American politicians, including mayors of metropolitan cities such as New York or prosecutors in many states, seem more and more determined to make pharmaceutical companies pay for the expenses incurred by this scourge. Expenditures ranging from the mobilization of police or emergency personnel to overdoses, to medical care for the sick, through the prevention programs that have multiplied across the country.
In Oklahoma State alone, for example, the bill over the next thirty years had been costed at more than $ 17 billion.
If Johnson & Johnson was only condemned to pay 572 million - corresponding to one year of projected costs -, the judge considered insufficient the elements brought to justify the expenditure of the following years, the measures to be taken nationally to control this crisis could reach $ 453 billion over the next ten years, "says Caleb Alexander, Johns Hopkins University Specialist.
According to Elizabeth Burch, with such estimates, the battles to recover some of the compensation paid by pharmaceutical companies are also likely to intensify.
In Oklahoma, the agreement announced in March with Purdue Pharma predicted that the $ 270 million this laboratory agreed to pay would be largely used to fund an addiction research center at a local university.
But the parliament of that state voted soon after a law providing that the money would finally return to its coffers. The federal government has since asked Oklahoma for some of the money it has paid.
With AFP