Prescription opioid crisis: Johnson & Johnson, Purdue Pharma, and Teva Pharmaceuticals

# I. How the opioid crisis unfolded

The opioid epidemic is a national crisis affecting public health in the US and Canada. It stems from the misuse of opioid painkillers, including prescription drugs such as oxycodone, fentanyl, and morphine, which can cause feelings of euphoria, but are chemically similar to heroin and considered to be highly addictive.

The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention alleges that 400,000 deaths in the US resulted from opioid overdoses between 1990 and 2017, and estimates that opioid misuse costs the United States USD 78.5 billion a year. According to the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), more than 130 people die every day in the US as a result of the accidental misuse of opioids, equivalent to one person every 11 minutes. NIDA further reports that nearly 80 percent of heroin addicts reported using prescription opioids before they started using heroin.

Numerous US cities and states have brought litigation accusing companies such as Endo Health Solutions, Insys Therapeutics, Janssen Pharmaceuticals (Janssen Pharma), a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, Purdue Pharma, and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries (Teva) of deceiving doctors and the public for more than 20 years about the safety and benefits of opioids while downplaying the associated risks.

Plaintiffs to the lawsuits alleged that the companies also allowed excessive amounts of the drugs to be distributed, selling far more opioid painkillers to communities than their residents could safely consume. For example, a December 2018 US congressional report reported that McKesson Corp, a pharmaceutical distributor that has also been the target of lawsuits, over a span of just ten months shipped over 3 million prescription opioids, i.e. almost 10,000 hydrocodone pills daily, to a single pharmacy in Kermit, West Virginia, a town with only 400 residents ¹.