Faced with the opiate crisis, Johnson & Johnson …

A court on Monday sentenced the Johnson & Johnson group to pay $ 572 million to the state of Oklahoma for its responsibility for the opiate crisis. This is the first civil judgment against a laboratory in the United States.

"The opiate crisis is an imminent danger for Oklahoma and its people," Judge Thad Balkman told a hearing Monday in Norman, after two months of trial. She has already made tens of thousands of deaths by overdose.

The judge said Johnson & Johnson's Janssen Lab, a pharmaceutical division of Johnson & Johnson, had adopted "misleading marketing and opioid promotion" practices, causing a crisis of dependence on these pain medications, overdose deaths and a rise in Neonatal abstinence syndromes in the state – that is, when a baby has been exposed to the drug during pregnancy and is born addicted to the drug.

"The opiate crisis ravaged the state of Oklahoma. It must be contained immediately, "continued the judge, basing his judgment on a law against" public nuisance. "

For acute pain

The half a billion dollars asked to Johnson & Johnson will be used to finance programs in the state to remedy the crisis. The group immediately announced that it would appeal.

"Janssen did not provoke the opiate crisis in Oklahoma," said Michael Ullmann, vice president and legal director of Johnson & Johnson. J & J believes that it has complied with the law and recalls that its drugs accounted for only 1% of the opiate market.

Janssen distributes the Nucynta tablets and the Duragesic patch, which contains fentanyl, one of the most potent synthetic opiates, that the lab has invented.

Initially, the patch was prescribed to cancer patients for acute pain. But the laboratory is accused of having created demand through a large campaign among doctors, through marketing means, research funding and "education" and training events.

"Pseudo-addiction"

The laboratory has over the years sought to convince them, apparently successfully, that its drugs did not create dependency.

The industry "used the term 'pseudo-addiction' to persuade doctors that patients who showed signs of addiction, for example by asking for higher doses of opiates or returning to the doctor before 'theoretical exhaustion of the previous order, did not really suffer from addiction, but in fact under-treatment of pain,' concluded the judge.

"The solution, according to the marketing of the defendants, was to prescribe more opiates to the patient," he wrote in his judgment.

Nearly 2000 other complaints

The trial was compared to lawsuits against tobacco companies that resulted in an agreement of more than $ 200 billion in 1998. Opiates were responsible for 47,000 overdose deaths in 2017 in the United States. But while the state had asked for $ 17 billion, the judge granted a more modest sum.

Beyond this procedure, nearly 2,000 other claims have been filed against opiate drug manufacturers in various jurisdictions in the United States.