The court on a 5-1 vote ruled that the state’s public
nuisance law does not extend to the manufacturing, marketing and sales of
prescription opioids and that a trial judge went too far in holding the company
liable under it.
“However grave the problem of opioid addiction is in
Oklahoma, public nuisance law does not provide a remedy for this harm,” Justice
James Winchester wrote.
J&J had no immediate comment. A spokesperson for
Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor did not immediately respond to a
request for comment.
The decision marked the latest setback for states and local
governments pursuing lawsuits seeking to hold drug companies responsible for a
drug abuse crisis the U.S. government says led to nearly 500,000 opioid
overdose deaths over two decades.
The Oklahoma lawsuit was the first of the more than 3,000
cases against pharmaceutical manufacturers, drug distributors and pharmacies to
go to trial.
A similar trial in California pitting several large counties
against J&J and three other drugmakers resulted in a judge on Nov. 1 ruling
in the companies’ favour and concluding the epidemic could not be considered a
public nuisance.
J&J and the three largest U.S. drug distributors –
McKesson Corp (MCK.N), Cardinal Health Inc (CAH.N) and AmersourceBergen – have
been working to finalize a proposed deal to pay up to $26 billion to settle the
thousands of cases against them.
In the Oklahoma case, Cleveland County District Judge Thad
Balkman concluded that J&J engaged in misleading marketing about the
benefits of painkillers, and that their addictive risks caused a public
nuisance in the form of the opioid crisis.
But in Tuesday’s ruling, Winchester said that the state’s
public nuisance law only applied to discrete, localized problems involving
criminal or property-based conflicts, not policy problems.