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April 20, 2021The trial against drug companies Johnson & Johnson, Teva, Endo and Allergan for advertising opioid painkillers without warning of the risk of creating addiction has begun in the district court of Santa Clara, California.
The complaint was filed by the city of Oakland and the Californian counties of Orange, Los Angeles and Santa Clara, which are demanding billions of dollars in compensation.
The four companies are accused of minimizing the long-term risks of using opioids to increase sales.
The crisis resulting from the use of opioids is a real national emergency in the United States, where in the last twenty years, according to the Centers for Disease Controls and Prevention, almost 500,000 people have died from taking illicit opioids under prescription. In 2019 alone, there were 50,000 deaths from opioid overdoses. The profits made by companies from the sale of these drugs are equally enormous, the complaint reads, and amounted to 11 billion dollars in 2014 alone. The process comes at an already very delicate moment for Johnson & Johnson which, after the scandal of carcinogenic talc that contained asbestos, he hoped to remake an image with the coronavirus vaccine,which, however, was suspended in the United States following six cases of clots in six female patients who had been injected with the drug. There are over 3,000 cases filed in US courts for the opioid crisis. In 2019, an Oklahoma judge ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay a $ 465 million fine for minimizing the risks of opioids. The company appealed.