New York (AFP)

The first trial against anti-pain drug manufacturers, accused of fueling the US-backed opiate overdose outbreak, opened Tuesday in Oklahoma, with Johnson & Johnson Laboratories alone on the bench of the accused.

Of the three laboratories initially charged in this state, Johnson & Johnson, better known for its baby powder than for the anti-pain drugs sold by its subsidiary Janssen, is the only one not to have reached an amicable agreement with the Attorney General of Oklahoma to avoid a lawsuit.

Purdue Pharma Laboratories, which became the # 1 enemy in the opioid crisis for making the flagship drug Oxycontin, reached an amicable agreement in March with Oklahoma agreeing to pay $ 270 million.

The Israeli laboratory Teva followed suit this weekend, and agreed to pay $ 85 million.

Johnson & Johnson intends to demonstrate that it has not knowingly minimized the risks of dependence of its opioid medications, nor pushed to an over-prescription accused of having contributed to the death of some 400,000 people by overdoses in the United States since 20 years.

Lab's lawyer, Larry Ottaway, said early in his opening argument on Tuesday that if Johnson & Johnson said in the late 1990s that opiates were "rarely addictive," it's because the Federal Drug The US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) said so too.

But Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter accused the lab of acting out of "greed", "cynically and misleadingly" opiates as a "magic medicine" for pain.

A deputy prosecutor has estimated that $ 870 million a year should be spent by this Midwestern state to end this health crisis.

This trial, often compared to the lawsuits against tobacco companies that resulted in a broad agreement of more than $ 200 billion in 1998, should serve as an example: nearly 2,000 complaints were filed at the federal level, supervised by an Ohio judge, and hundreds at the state level, including New York and Massachusetts.

The hearings, which take place without a jury before the judge of state Thad Balkman, should last about two months.

cat / AB

? 2019 AFP