America’s opioid addiction, which creates an economic burden of $78.5 billion annually and kills more 115 people a day, is responsible for at least 523 of Ohio’s 4,854 deaths by drug overdoses last year.
Lorain County alone saw 130 deaths from opioid overdose in 2016, more than double the year prior.
Summit County, meanwhile, is closing in on 2,000 opioid-related deaths in the past three years.
Deaths were heaviest there a couple years ago, said Summit County spokesperson Greta Johnson. The state’s mobile morgue had to be stationed in the county for an extended period of time in 2016 and 2017 because there was no space for bodies. She added that the leveling off in deaths is due to improvements in treating addiction, not the causes of it — such as drugmakers and distributors pumping pills into communities.
“We were losing three to five citizens per day,” she said. “Now, we’re down to three to five per week. Addiction is raging and we have not cured that.”
To what extent Big Pharma actually is responsible for the national health crisis caused by opioids is currently playing out in Cleveland. The battleground is U.S. District Judge Dan Polster’s courtroom at the Carl B. Stokes United States Court House.
It’s been a year since the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) consolidated what now amounts to nearly 1,500 cases there, cases filed by a combination of government entities, Indian tribes, hospitals, third-party payers and individuals across the country.
Plaintiff groups charge that a variety of companies — from manufacturers like Purdue Pharma to distributors such as Ohio-based Cardinal Health to retailers like CVS — are liable for the immense costs the opioid health crisis has caused and will continue to cause.
While Polster originally pushed for fast settlements with some 30 Big Pharma defendants, it has always been unclear exactly how long it could take to reach resolution or whether any of the myriad cases will be remanded and tried at the local courts in which they originated.
Polster has set a “very active” settlement track, as he describes it, but said he can’t talk much about elements of the case today. Neither can counsel for plaintiffs or defendants because of a gag order Polster put in place and which the judge said he’s abiding by himself.
But Polster did acknowledge in April court filings that creating a litigation track could actually make settlement more likely.
So he changed course in the spring, moving from the auspicious goal of quickly settling a large number of cases to setting a combined trial for Cleveland, Cuyahoga and Summit counties next September (cases were originally set for March but were pushed back at the request of the defendants). Those cases will serve as bellwethers for how other trials could play out.
Although what Polster can say right now is limited, he certainly isn’t taking his role in the most challenging and high-profile matter he’s ever adjudicated lightly.
“In Ohio, you pull a random 100 people into a room, I don’t think you’d have anyone who doesn’t have a person or friend or childhood friend who hasn’t been affected by overdose or addiction,” said Polster. He himself has a friend whose daughter died of an overdose. “That’s what makes these cases so unique and challenging. We have an ongoing social crisis.”
He added, “I hope everyone’s objective would be to turn the curve of addiction and death down instead of up, up, up. I said that at the beginning and that’s still my objective.”
Why Cleveland?
The JPML ultimately makes the call on whether cases can or should be combined as multidistrict litigation (MDL) and in what region that’s all centralized.
The intent of the MDL process is to streamline pretrial procedures and then send the separate cases back to the courts in which they originated, explained Cleveland-Marshall College of Law professor Chris Sagers. About 90% of MDL cases end up settled, though.
Ohio being among the states hit hardest by the opioid health crisis was certainly a factor in the JPML’s decision, as evidenced by court documents.