10-2-19 Johnson & Johnson and two Ohio counties have reached a tentative $20.4 million settlement that removes the corporation from the first federal lawsuit against opioid manufacturers, scheduled to begin later this month. In a statement released Tuesday the health care giant said the agreement with Cleveland's Cuyahoga and Akron's Summit counties allows it "to avoid the resource demands and uncertainty of a trial." However the terms stipulate that Johnson & Johnson makes "no admission of liability."...
In August, the drugmaker was ordered to pay $572 million in a case in Oklahoma, which blamed Johnson & Johnson for helping fuel the opioid crisis in the state. The company has appealed the ruling. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/02/766332253/in-opioid-settlement-johnson-johnson-agrees-to-pay-ohio-counties-20-million
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It wasn’t long before drug distribution companies, some of the largest firms in America among them, were delivering millions of opioid pills a year to Tug Valley. Millions more were shipped to another pharmacy, Hurley’s Drug Store, four blocks away--
Photograph: Chris McGreal
Twenty minutes’ drive to the north, the Sav-Rite Pharmacy in the village of Kermit, population 280 and falling, was outstripping them both.
Drug distributors delivered more than 30m opioid pills just to those three pharmacies in one of the poorest counties in America. Ballengee and the other drug store owners kept escalating the orders, and the distributors filled them without flinching. They shipped more narcotic painkillers to Mingo county per head of population than to any other place in the US.
Opioid makers such as Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson shaped the medical culture that drove the surge in prescribing of narcotic painkillers that caused today’s drug epidemic. Doctors wrote the prescriptions. But at the front end were thousands of pharmacies dispensing the pills, and among the pharmacists were profiteers.ll in a town of fewer than 3,000 people....
Each day, hundreds of people lined up outside an old animal feed store where a group of doctors were set up by a former pimp, just out of federal prison for running a gay prostitution ring in Washington DC, to churn out opioid prescriptions faster than West Virginia’s major hospitals.
Before long, people in town were calling the Williamson Wellness Center a “pill mill”.
The doctors were careful to insist their prescriptions were filled only at pharmacies that would take the money and not ask questions. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/02/opioids-west-virginia-pill-mills-pharmacies
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