The attorneys general for West Virginia, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland and Wisconsin announced Thursday that they are suing Purdue Pharma and former director Dr. Richard Sackler for their role in the opioid crisis, saying that they marketed drugs illegally.
“Enough is enough,” Republican West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in the morning press conference. “Our states will not go down quietly.”
The suit brought forth by West Virginia says Purdue promoted its products “through a deceptive narrative” that the drug OxyContin was safe, and unfairly targeted populations such as the elderly.
Morrisey said that while West Virginia is including Sackler as a defendant, the other four states announcing suits today have each decided on their own whether to include him in addition to Purdue Pharma in their respective complaints.
[Read more: Met museum nixes donations from Purdue Pharma’s Sackler family amid opioid uproar]
Morrisey also said his office may revise the complaint to add more individuals as the investigation continues. “We reserve the right to add other board members,” Morrisey said. “We are open-minded to continually add additional defendants.”
West Virginia has the highest rate of overdose deaths involving opioids, almost 50 deaths per 100,000 people. In 2017, West Virginia physicians authorized over 80 opioid prescriptions for every 100,000 persons.
Morrisey’s predecessor, Darrell V. McGraw Jr., sued Purdue Pharma in June 2001, accusing the OxyContin manufacturer of aggressively marketing to doctors and downplaying OxyContin’s addictive qualities. West Virginia received $10 million in a settlement from Purdue in 2004.
Purdue then reformulated the the original OxyContin to create what they called a “tamper-resistant” version of OxyContin, which debuted in 2010. They advertised the newly formulated opioid just as aggressively and, Morrisey said Thursday morning, “continued its role driving addiction in West Virginia and our country.”
In the Thursday announcement, Morrisey said, “the state does not violate the 2004 settlement by bringing today’s action against the defendants for its new violations of state law in its marketing and sale of this new drug.”
[Related: Big Pharma laments opioid epidemic but says it’s not to blame]
