The City of Burns Flat last week filed a civil lawsuit against 38 individual and corporate defendants involved in the manufacture, distribution, and prescription of opioid-class medications. The suit alleges the defendants were willing participants in a broad conspiracy to enrich themselves by creating a nationwide addiction to their drugs without concern for the health and safety of the patients thus addicted.
The suit, filed July 19 in Washita County District Court, alleges five separate causes of action, including public nuisance, actual and constructive fraud, negligence and negligent misrepresentation, civil conspiracy, and unjust enrichment. The suit divides the defendants into three categories: pharmaceutical defendants, distributor defendants, and medical provider defendants, and claims the defendants havfe caused an epidemic across the country and caused direct harm to the people of Oklahoma, Washita County, and Burns Flat in particular “as a result of corporate greed.”
“Opioids are highly addictive and, historically, medical professionals have prescribed them in limited circumstances to patients with cancer, terminal illnesses, or acute short-term pain,” the suit alleges. “Defendants manufacture and distribute opioids and, therefore, the limited uses for which medical professionals prescribed opioids undermined Defendants’ ability to maximize profits. Thus, Defendants sought to maximize their profits by selling more opioids. Defendants accomplished this goal by expanding the market beyond the limited circumstances of medically necessary opioid use and successfully convinced medical professionals to prescribe opioids to a broader range of patients for longer periods of time.
“Defendants chose to falsely downplay the rsik of opioid addiction and overstate the efficacy of opioids for more wide-ranging conditions, including chronic non-cancer pain, in a willful effort to maximize their profit at the expense of human life. Over several years, Defendants implemented unprecedented and largescale deceptive marketing campaigns that misrepresented the risks of addiction from their opioids and pushed unsubstantiated benefits. Defendants were extremely successful in increasing the sale of opioids. For example, sales of OxyContin rose from roughly $48 million in 1996 to roughly $3 billion by 2009.”
According to the case filing, the three largest distributor defendants, AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal, and McKesson, hold 85 percent of the prescription opioid market share and “each has been investigated and/ or fined by the DEA for the failure to report suspicious orders.” The filing announced the city’s intention to pursue private documents and data, including information from the Drug Enforcement Agency’s confidental ARCOS database.
The suit also names five medical provder defendants, two in Oklahoma, two in Utah, and one in New York. The suit alleges Dr. William Valuck, who entered a guilty plea as part of an agreement with the State of Oklahoma on eight murder charges in 2014, routinely prescribed hundreds of opioid pills per patient visit. Similar allegations were made in the suit against Dr. Harvey Jenkins, who also resides in Oklahoma and against whom more than 20 felony counts have been filed in regards to what the suit calls his “pill mill.”
“Patients would be briefly seen by Dr. Jenkins and then prescribed large amounts of pills, mostly opioid painkillers,” the attorneys wrote in the suit. “Moreover, the prescriptions were so large that there were not any procedures in place by Dr. Jenkins to guard against the diversion of narcotics.”
The other three medical provider defendants, Dr. Perry Fine of Utah, Dr. Lynn Webster of Utah, and Dr. Russell Portenoy of New York, were all accused of receiving benefits from the other defendants for “promoting the use of opioids for longterm chronic pain and downplaying the risks of addiction of opioids.”
In addition to unspecified actual damages and attorneys’ fees, the suit also seeks unspecified punitive damages, claiming the “Defendants acted with malice, purposesly, and intentionally. At a minimum, Defendants engaged in the conduct alleged herein with a conscious disregard for the rights and safety of other persons, even though that conduct had a great probability of causing substantial harm.”
As of press time, none of the defendants had filed responses to the suit. Messages left with the attorneys of record and with the City of Burns Flat were not returned.
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