MORGANTOWN — The town of Granville is one among more than 1,400 towns, cities, counties and hospital systems across the country suing the opioid industry for damages in response to the national opioid epidemic.
Granville filed its case in March 2018 and on April 12 this year added 41 new defendants.
All the cases, known collectively as National Prescription Opiate Litigation, are before a single judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.
Granville’s original suit, filed in the Southern District of West Virginia and transferred to the Ohio court, targeted seven wholesale drug distributors, including Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen and Wal-Mart Pharmacy Warehouse No. 45.
This month, the suit added opioid manufacturers, such as Purdue Pharma, Endo and Mylan; and pharmacies such as CVS, Rite Aid and Walgreen’s, in order to bring it in line with similar suits.
In targeting the distributors, Granville argued that they have a duty under the federal Controlled Substances Act and the state Wholesale Drug Distribution Licensing Act to take appropriate measures to prevent illegal diversion of the drugs they distribute.
Under the CSA, distributors “’must design and operate a system to disclose to the [distributor} suspicious orders of controlled substances’ and in turn disclose those orders to the DEA. … ‘Suspicious orders include orders of unusual size, orders deviating substantially from a normal pattern, and orders of unusual frequency.’”
The suit points out that a suspicious order is not required to fit all three of the criteria; any one of them constitutes a suspicious order. And the DEA requires distributors to conduct an analysis of suspicious orders before completing a sale to determine of the drugs are likely to be diverted to illegal uses.
The suit reports opioid distribution data to the state’s 55 counties provided by the DEA to the state attorney general and first reported by the Charleston Gazette.
It specifically notes that from 2007 to 2012, suppliers shipped 10.35 million doses of hydrocodone and oxycodone to pharmacies in Granville and Monongalia County. Mon County’s population was just 98,189 according to the 2010 census.
Topping the list was Cardinal Health, shipping 3.29 million doses to Mon County during that period; followed by McKesson, with 1.94 million doses; and AmerisourceBergen with 1.7 million.
“The sheer volume of prescription opioids distributed to pharmacies in Granville and surrounding areas is excessive for the medical need of the community and facially suspicious,” the suit says. “Some red flags are so obvious that no one who engages in the legitimate distribution of controlled substances can reasonably claim ignorance of them.”
The suit observes that the defendants deny any duty beyond reporting some types of suspicious orders to the DEA. The defendants offer a number of reasons for that, including: “There is simply no practical way for distributors to look over the shoulder of pharmacists and double-check the validity of each prescription in light of an individual patient’s circumstances.”
Granville alleges: “”The epidemic still rages because the fines and suspensions imposed by the DEA do not change the conduct of the wholesale distributor industry. They pay fines as a cost of doing business in an industry which generates billions of dollars in annual revenue.”
When one distribution center’s license is revoked, suspended, the suit reports, the distributor simply ships form a different one. And the industry was able to successfully lobby Congress to raise the threshold for license revocation from imminent harm to immediate harm. “The DEA slowed enforcement while the opioid epidemic grew out of control.”
The original suit seeks from the distributors, among other things, reimbursement for the costs associated with past efforts to eliminate public health and safety hazards and money to permanently eliminate the hazards.
The addition of the drug makers and the pharmacies earlier this month wraps in other suits allegations that the drug makers used marketing campaigns and compensated physicians to promote opioid use for long-term, chronic pain and underplay the drugs’ addictive qualities.
This suit, along with many others, is in its early stages, with no responses from the approximately 80 defendants. Mylan is named in as a defendant in about 298 of the 1,400 cases, but not this one.
The town of Granville referred comment to its city attorney, who is not involved in the case and referred comment to the Charleston attorney who filed the case. That attorney could not be reached in time for this report.
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