New York (AFP)

Johnson & Johnson Convicted to Pay $ 572 Million for Opiate Crisis in Oklahoma, Other Pharmaceutical Groups Could Agree to Pay Significant Amounts to Avoid Trial at One of the Most Serious Health Crises the United States.

According to some media, the Purdue Pharma group, manufacturer of one of the main opioid pain medications, OxyContin, has already offered to pay between $ 10 and $ 12 billion to close more than 2,000 complaints against him in a sprawling file planned to go to trial October 21 before a federal judge of Ohio.

The pharmaceutical group, owned by the Sackler family, which had already agreed in March a settlement agreement in Oklahoma with a payment of $ 270 million to the state, did not confirm these amounts.

But he admitted to negotiate "actively" an amicable agreement, explaining that he had "little interest in spending years in vain legal battles" and wish "a constructive solution" to an opiate crisis that has made 47,000 deaths by overdose in the United States, just in 2017.

Other laboratories and drug distributors attacked in the Ohio case should now be placed in this logic, after an Oklahoma magistrate said Monday that Johnson & Johnson bore his share of responsibility for adopting practices " misleading marketing and promotion of opiates, "according to Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

Johnson & Johnson, Purdue and other pharmaceutical laboratories and distributors are accused of encouraging doctors to overprescribe these drugs - initially reserved for patients with particularly serious cancers - even though they knew they were generating serious addictions.

Since 1999, this dependence has led many consumers of these drugs to increasingly high doses and to illicit drugs such as heroin or fentanyl, at high risk of fatal overdose.

For Carl Tobias, many of the companies attacked, especially in Ohio where many local authorities and states are among the plaintiffs, "should now think twice" before going to trial.

Even though the public nuisance law relied on by the prosecutor in Oklahoma is broader than in other states, and if Johnson & Johnson announced that he would appeal his conviction, the judge clearly felt that pharmaceutical companies "could be held responsible" for the crisis and its ravages, according to this expert.

- Societal cost -

The Oklahoma trial, the first on this crisis set up as a national health emergency by the Trump government in October 2017, has also highlighted "an astonishing amount of evidence", which can be used before other courts says Elizabeth Burch, a law professor at the University of Georgia.

Another factor that could accelerate the search for amicable agreements: the assessment of the damage caused by this crisis continues to increase. And the American elected officials, including the mayors of metropolises like New York or the prosecutors of many states, seem more and more determined to make pharmaceutical companies pay for the expenses induced by this scourge: since the mobilization of the police or emergency staff in the face of overdoses, medical care for the sick, and prevention programs that have proliferated across the country.

Thus, for the state of Oklahoma alone, the note over the next 30 years had been quantified to more than 17 billion dollars.

The judge sentenced Johnson & Johnson to pay only $ 572 million, corresponding to one year of projected costs, as he found insufficient evidence to justify spending in subsequent years.

According to Caleb Alexander, a Johns Hopkins University scholar quoted in the Ohio file, nationwide measures to control the crisis could reach $ 453 billion over the next 10 years.

With such estimates, the battles to recover some of the compensation paid by pharmaceutical companies may also intensify, says Elizabeth Burch.

In Oklahoma, for example, the agreement announced in March with Purdue Pharma stipulated that the $ 270 million this laboratory agreed to pay would be used primarily to fund an addiction research center at a local university.

But the parliament of that state voted soon after a law stipulating that money should return to its coffers. And the federal government has since asked Oklahoma for some of the money it has paid.

© 2019 AFP