What Are Current Opioid Lawsuits About
The opioid litigation is not one lawsuit. It is several thousand lawsuits, involving hundreds of defendants, pursuing claims under state law, federal law, and the False Claims Act, in courts across the country and in a federal multidistrict litigation that has produced settlements measured in tens of billions of dollars.
The scale of the litigation reflects the scale of the crisis it addresses. The opioid epidemic has killed more than five hundred thousand Americans since 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mortality data. The litigation is the civil system’s mechanism for allocating responsibility for those deaths among the entities whose conduct the plaintiffs contend contributed to them. The defendants include pharmaceutical manufacturers, pharmaceutical distributors, pharmacy chains, and, to a growing extent, individual healthcare practitioners.
Pharmaceutical Manufacturer Litigation
The litigation against pharmaceutical manufacturers was initiated most prominently against Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, whose marketing practices, internal communications, and knowledge of OxyContin’s abuse potential became the subject of state and federal investigations that produced criminal guilty pleas, civil settlements, and ultimately Purdue’s bankruptcy reorganization. The Sackler family, which controlled Purdue, reached settlements with state attorneys general and with the federal government that involved billions of dollars in payments and conditions on the family’s future conduct.
Other pharmaceutical manufacturers including Johnson and Johnson, Mallinckrodt, Allergan, and Endo Pharmaceuticals have settled opioid-related litigation for amounts ranging from hundreds of millions to several billion dollars. The legal theories underlying the manufacturer claims include deceptive marketing practices, misrepresentation of the addiction risk of prescription opioids, and failure to maintain adequate controls against diversion of their products. The manufacturer litigation has largely been resolved through settlements, though the terms of those settlements continue to be litigated in state courts assessing the adequacy of the compensation provided to affected communities.
Distributor Litigation
The three largest pharmaceutical distributors in the United States, AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson, settled opioid distribution claims for a combined twenty-one billion dollars in 2022, in a settlement that required payments to state and local governments over an eighteen-year period. The claims against the distributors focused on their alleged failure to maintain effective controls against diversion, as required by the Controlled Substances Act, and their continued shipment of opioids to pharmacies and practitioners whose prescribing and dispensing patterns indicated likely diversion.
The distributor litigation produced evidence of extraordinary quantities of opioids shipped to communities that could not plausibly have needed them for legitimate medical purposes. The quantity data, revealed through litigation discovery, documented that some pharmacies in small West Virginia communities received millions of oxycodone pills over a period of years, quantities that could only have been absorbed by illicit distribution markets rather than legitimate patient populations.
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(212) 300-5196Pharmacy Litigation
Civil litigation against pharmacy chains has concentrated on the pharmacies’ alleged failure to fulfill their independent duty not to fill prescriptions they knew or should have known were not for legitimate medical purposes. The pharmacy litigation has proceeded alongside criminal investigations of pharmacy operators and has produced settlements from Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, and Rite Aid that collectively exceed several billion dollars.
The pharmacy litigation raises the same legal theory that animates the DEA’s criminal enforcement of pharmacist diversion: the pharmacist’s professional obligation not to fill a prescription that is not for a legitimate medical purpose. The civil litigation applies that obligation to the institutional decisions made by pharmacy chains about staffing, quotas, compliance programs, and the data systems that pharmacists had available to assess the legitimacy of the prescriptions they were asked to fill.
Municipal and State Government Claims
The majority of the civil opioid litigation has been brought by state and local governments seeking compensation for the public costs of the opioid crisis: emergency response costs, addiction treatment costs, law enforcement costs, and the costs of social services demanded by communities affected by the epidemic. These claims have generally proceeded under state public nuisance law, negligence, and consumer protection statutes, with the litigation consolidated in the federal multidistrict litigation in the Northern District of Ohio.
Todd Spodek
Lead Attorney & Founder
Featured on Netflix's "Inventing Anna," Todd Spodek brings decades of high-stakes criminal defense experience. His aggressive approach has secured dismissals and acquittals in cases others deemed unwinnable.
The civil opioid litigation is not a substitute for criminal enforcement, and settlement of a civil claim does not provide protection from criminal prosecution. The pharmaceutical executives who agreed to civil settlements involving their companies’ opioid marketing practices have in some cases subsequently faced criminal charges arising from the same conduct. The civil and criminal proceedings are parallel tracks, and resolution of one does not foreclose the other.
The Future of Opioid Litigation
The opioid litigation continues to evolve as new defendants are identified and as the legal theories developed in early cases are applied to entities whose conduct has not yet been the subject of major settlements. Consulting firms that advised pharmaceutical companies on marketing strategies, financial institutions that processed transactions associated with pill mill operations, and professional associations that issued clinical guidelines used to justify aggressive opioid prescribing have each been identified as potential defendants in subsequent phases of the litigation.
The settlement funds generated by the opioid litigation are being allocated to opioid abatement programs by state and local governments, and the oversight of those allocations has itself become a subject of litigation and political dispute. The framework for distributing and monitoring the use of settlement funds will occupy courts and public administrators for years, alongside the ongoing enforcement activity that the underlying crisis continues to generate.
