Reuters is reporting that on Wednesday, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine filed a lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies Purdue Pharma LP, Johnson & Johnson's Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc unit, a unit of Endo International Plc, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd's Cephalon unit and Allergan Plc.
DeWine said the companies helped unleash the crisis by spending millions of dollars marketing and promoting such drugs as OxyContin and Percocet, overstating their benefits and trivializing their potential addictive qualities.
"These companies continue to mislead the public," DeWine said at a press conference in Columbus.
Janssen emailed Reuters to tell them that the lawsuit was “unfounded.”
The suit, filed in Ross County, in Southern Ohio, where addiction has hit hard, alleges the drug companies violated the Ohio Consumer Sales Practices Act, committed Medicaid fraud, and created a public nuisance by disseminating false and misleading statements.
Ohio continues to have one of the worst rates of opioid addiction in the country and this is not going to go away by doing nothing, let alone cutting healthcare budgets. DeWine says that almost a fifth of Ohio’s population was prescribed opioids last year. That’s in one year. And while Trump clearly lied about his interest in doing anything to regulate big pharmaceutical’s unchecked greed, politicians of both parties have let down our country.
