Riddle me this: If states are suing pharmaceutical companies for billions of dollars to help fight the opioid epidemic, but the payouts don’t actually go to individual, innocent opioid addicts, then who, pray tell, actually benefits?
Holy shakedown, Batman! The answer is obvious. It is the lawyers, who don’t even need the help of the Riddler or the Joker for them to laugh all the way to the bank.
First, let’s be clear: As the Wall Street Journal explains, the entire legal ruse upon which these suits are built is “dangerous” to the system of justice and the commonweal. The ambitious state attorney’s general misuse of so-called “public nuisance” laws to assess huge financial penalties, when the actual, intended remedy for even true nuisance violations is usually to merely “enjoin or correct [the] nuisances.” Worse, they make the manufacturer liable for a “nuisance” that occurred only after the actions of several intermediaries, over which the manufacturer has no control.
This isn’t how things are supposed to work.
“I don’t care what the court says,” said Victor Schwartz, author of the colloquially known “Schwartz on torts” textbook that for decades has been one of the most widely used on law school campuses across the country. “The seller, once it’s out of his hands, doesn’t have control of the nuisance — not in the way of someone who puts a bar across the street and blocks traffic.”
Schwartz, who gave the quote to Legal Newsline, is right. Furthermore, even in the highly dubious lawsuits against the tobacco industry two decades ago, the product in question then was not approved by the government, as a legal and valuable medicine, for beneficial purposes.
Just as with the tobacco lawsuits, though, there is no reason to expect that many individual addicts will benefit from any payoffs the drug-makers end up forfeiting. Eighteen years after the multi-state tobacco settlement, the American Lung Association complained that states on average spend “less than two cents on the dollar,” of all the ongoing tobacco payments for the intended “tobacco prevention and cessation programs.”
Likewise, there is almost no way to guarantee states will use money from the legal drug companies in ways that directly benefit actual sufferers from opioid-related ills.
The private attorneys hired as outside counsel by state attorneys general, however, make a killing: $90 million from Oklahoma’s judgment (if it withstands appeal), plus $80 million from settlements reached with two other pharmaceutical manufacturers this past spring.
Oh, and wonder of wonders: Legal Newsline reports that “Oklahoma Ethics Commission records show the lawyers picked by Oklahoma and their families gave more than $95,000” to the campaign of Oklahoma attorney general Mike Hunter, who hired them.
It’s an age-old game: Lawyers donate to candidate, candidate wins, candidate gives state contracts to lawyers, lawyers’ bank accounts grow exponentially.
Meanwhile, true opioid victims get nothing, and drug companies, even if they avoid being bankrupted, are deprived of probably billions of dollars that could otherwise go to research and development of more life-saving medicines — not to mention being dissuaded, even if they can afford the research, by the knowledge that they can easily be punished for developing even legal, ordinarily helpful cures.
It all sounds like a bad joke, but in truth it’s a sickening reality. The healers pay billions, while the shysters get filthy rich.
