Credit: Tom Sofield/LevittownNow.com
In a late afternoon press conference on Tuesday, Bucks County officials announced they will be suing major manufacturers and distributors of prescription opioids.
The civil complaint, coming in at 159 pages, targets 14 corporate entities as defendants. The defendants include Purdue Pharma, the manufacturers of OxyContin, large distributors and individuals who have been previously charged on racketeering offenses in Boston.
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“The lawsuit alleges that the manufacturer defendants misled the public about the dangers of prescription opioids, and that the defendants responsible for distributing opioids into the community disregarded their obligation to monitor distribution and halt any “suspicious sales” to protect the community from an exorbitant flood of opioids,” a spokesperson for the county said in an email alert prior to the press conference.
Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub described this practice as “willful blindness” earlier in the year.
Weintraub said his office’s prosecutions “are dominated by drug-fueled crimes. We started a six-man Drug Strike Force, thanks to the commissioners, solely to combat this epidemic … This lawsuit, frankly, is about accountability.”
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It is estimated that 80 percent of all street level heroin users in the country began thanks to the use of prescription pain medication, the spokesperson said.
The complaint alleges that the epidemic fueled a meteoric rise in overdose fatalities within the county. In 2017, there were 232 deaths in the county due to overdoses, an increase of 89 percent over the previous year.
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The complaint describes prescription opioids as a gateway to using heroin. Before the mid-1990s, the complaint says, opioids were not used for long term care.
The defendants are accused of “upending medical orthodoxy and popular belief regarding safety and efficacy of long term opiate use.” The defendants falsely promoted highly dangerous products with no regard for the health of the public, the complaint states.
The causes of action as laid out in the complaint include the defendants creating a public nuisance, common law fraud, negligent misrepresentation, negligence, unjust enrichment and negligence per se. The county is requesting a jury trial for the case.
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“The collateral costs of dealing with such widespread addiction have left the county strapped on many fronts – from hiring additional coroner’s employees to creating a six-detective District Attorney’s Drug Strike Force, funding a $20 million prison expansion to handle the exploding inmate population, paying $4 million in outsourcing costs to house Bucks inmates in outside prisons, handling a 66 percent increase in opioid-related 9-1-1 calls, and managing the myriad costs of lost productivity, rising insurance expenditures, public health training and awareness programs, and skyrocketing social service needs,” the county spokesperson said.
“Just as nearly every citizen has been touched by the opioid epidemic, virtually every county office has been harmed and damaged,” said attorney Joshua D. Snyder of the law firm Boni, Zack and Snyder of Bala Cynwyd, which is acting as local counsel in the lawsuit.
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LevittownNow.com previously reported the county was pursuing this course of action.
In 2017, Bensalem Township announced that it was seeking legal action. In September, Middletown Township announced that it, too, was going to seek action against the opioid manufacturers and distributors. Local municipalities have been following this trend but many of those cases are still in the court system.
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The lawsuit will help to offset some of the cost of combating the prolonged epidemic, explained Commissioner Chairman Robert Loughery earlier this year.
“This is going to be a long battle but one we must pursue,” Loughery said.
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“While you can’t put a price or a value on human life … we, the county, do think we can put a price on the collateral costs of dealing with this epidemic right here in Bucks County,” Loughery said during the afternoon news conference announcing the lawsuit. “We want to take a stand against this epidemic, and this scourge on our families.”
“I believe the more that this pressure grows, that we will be victorious at some point,” he said. “How long that’s going to take, I can’t tell you. But doing nothing isn’t really an option for us.”
