An Oklahoma judge was dead wrong Aug. 26 in ordering Johnson & Johnson to pay $572 million to help fight the opioid crisis, and West Virginia attorney general Patrick Morrisey was equally wrong Aug. 23 to file lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson and Teva Pharmaceuticals.
In Oklahoma, Cleveland County District Judge Thad Balkman ruled that Johnson & Johnson somehow used deceptive and manipulative marketing practices to convince doctors to overprescribe addictive pain-killing medication. In West Virginia, Morrisey is making a similar claim.
The claims are bunk, on multiple levels.
Consider that Judge Balkman is holding J&J responsible not just for its own drugs, but for drugs manufactured by other companies after they bought mere ingredients for the drugs from J&J. Moreover, as the pharmaceutical company’s lawyers noted, “Never once, however, did the state identify a single Oklahoma doctor who was misled by a single statement” made by the company or its subsidiary.
In West Virginia, Morrisey at least detailed the supposedly misleading information promulgated by the drug companies or their agents. To a normal viewer, though, the information looks like standard marketing. For example, Morrisey cites an example from a “patient education guide” whereby a J&J subsidiary said that “many studies show that opioids are rarely addictive when used properly for management of chronic pain.”
Read that again. “Used properly.” What is false or misleading about that? Nothing. It’s basically a tautology, true by definition. If used properly, the drugs are not addictive. If used improperly, they can be. For Morrisey to call that statement deceptive is for Morrisey himself to be, well, extremely deceptive.
Meanwhile, the question about marketing should be all but irrelevant anyway. It is not the companies that prescribe the medicines or fill the prescriptions. Doctors and pharmacists, respectively, do those things. The states of Oklahoma and West Virginia, as plaintiffs, argue that the companies somehow preyed on the innocence of the least knowledgeable physicians. That’s poppycock. If the physician isn’t knowledgeable, why in heck is he practicing medicine in the first place? It is the doctors’ fault for prescribing things about which they (supposedly) knew too little.
Moreover, some responsibility must fall on a large subset of the patients who do not follow instructions. As reported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, “Roughly 21 to 29 percent of patients prescribed opioids for chronic pain misuse them.” Of those who misuse them, fewer than two-thirds actually were trying to alleviate pain. More than 30% of patients use the drugs for entirely illegitimate purposes such as “to feel good or get high,” to “relieve tension,” to “help with sleep,” or to “help with feelings or emotions.”
And that doesn’t even account for the active black market in opioid drugs. Again, doctors, pharmacists, and especially the black-market sellers and users, but not the manufacturers, are all at fault there.
Finally, and probably most importantly, remember that the drugs in question are legal, approved by the federal government, and extremely beneficial if used correctly. Serious pain can be debilitating. Opioid medicines, prescribed and used correctly, relieve horrendous pain for many tens of millions of Americans each year, and probably for almost every American at some point in our lives. For those who do not abuse them or innocently fall into addiction, these pharmaceuticals can be godsends, whether after serious surgery, for during cancer treatment, or for other severe but short-term injuries or illness.
To penalize the companies that manufacture these blessings of modern medicine, all because too many people misuse them, is to act both morally and legally backwards. These lawsuits, and the Oklahoma verdict, are outrages.
