The Supreme Court of Oklahoma reversed a $465 million opioid ruling against drug manufacturer Johnson & Johnson, finding that a district court wrongly interpreted state law on public nuisances.
The court ruled in a 5-1 decision Tuesday that District Judge Thad Balkman was wrong in 2019 when he found that the pharmaceutical company violated the state’s public nuisance statute, as he erroneously interpreted public nuisance claims to address “discrete, localized problems, not policy problems,” according to a written opinion by Justice James Winchester.
“J&J had no control of its products through the multiple levels of distribution, including after it sold the opioids to distributors and wholesalers, which were then disbursed to pharmacies, hospitals, and physicians’ offices, and then prescribed by doctors to patients,” the decision said, also noting that New Jersey-based J&J and its Belgium-based subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals had no control over how patients then used the products.
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The decision is a major setback for states and local governments seeking to hold drug companies responsible for a drug abuse crisis, which the U.S. government claims has resulted in nearly 500,000 opioid overdose fatalities in 20 years.
“J&J no longer promotes any prescription opioids and has not done so for several years” since 2015, Winchester wrote. “Even with J&J’s marketing practices these … medications amounted to less than 1% of all Oklahoma opioid prescriptions.”
The state Supreme Court also rejected an appeal to increase the damages award, previously requested at $9.3 billion.
The Tuesday ruling comes just days after a California judge issued a tentative ruling stating that local governments have not sufficiently proven J&J used deceptive marketing tactics for its painkillers, thereby rejecting that a public nuisance had been committed.
Similar cases tied to alleged public nuisance law violations are ongoing in federal court in Cleveland and state court in New York, both of which have juries. A ruling over a similar matter is also expected soon in a trial before a West Virginia judge.
J&J agreed earlier this year to pay $5 billion to settle similar lawsuits in the country. “We recognize the opioid crisis is a tremendously complex public health issue, and we have deep sympathy for everyone affected,” J&J told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.
The pharmaceutical company said the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision on Tuesday “appropriately” reversed the 2019 verdict, calling it a “misguided and unprecedented expansion of the public nuisance law as a means to regulate the manufacture, marketing, and sale of products, including the Company’s prescription opioid medications.”
In October, Maricopa County in Arizona signed a national opioid settlement with manufacturers and distributors of the drug, which is expected to bring approximately $80 million in relief money to county residents, as well as approximately $580 million dollars to the state. The settlement agreement was with J&J, AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson.
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Oklahoma statistics show that from 2007 to 2017, there were over 4,600 people in the state who died from opioid overdoses, including from prescription painkillers and illicit types such as heroin and illegally produced fentanyl.
The Washington Examiner contacted the Oklahoma attorney general’s office but did not receive a response.
