Opiate crisis: Johnson & Johnson sentenced to pay 572 million in Oklahoma

The opiate crisis is an imminent danger for Oklahoma and its inhabitantsJudge Thad Balkman said at a hearing Monday in Norman, after two months of trial.

The judge ruled that the Janssen laboratory, a pharmaceutical division of Johnson & Johnson, had adopted misleading marketing and promotion of opiates, causing a crisis of addiction to these pain medications, overdose deaths and an increase in neonatal abstinence syndromes in the state – that is, when a baby was exposed to the drug during pregnancy and is born with a drug addiction.

The opiate crisis ravaged the state of Oklahoma. It must be contained immediately.

The judge bases his judgment on a law against public nuisances.

The half a billion dollars requested from Johnson & Johnson will be used to fund programs in the state to address the crisis.

The group immediately announced that it would appeal.

Janssen did not cause the opiate crisis in Oklahomasaid 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 Nucynta tablets and the Duragesic skin patch, which contains fentanyl, one of the most potent synthetic opiates, invented by the lab.

Initially, the patch was prescribed to cancer patients to relieve acute pain. But the lab is accused of creating the demand through a major campaign to doctors, through marketing, research funding and activities education and training.

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

The industry used the term "pseudo-dependence" 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 exhaustion Theoretical of the previous order, did not really suffer from dependence, but in fact of under-treatment of the painconcluded the judge.

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

Several laboratories were pursued by the state, but the others preferred to settle the case amicably, especially the group at the heart of the epidemic: Purdue Pharma, seller of the notorious Oxycontin.

Purdue settled for 270 million US dollars, before the trial. Another laboratory, Israel's Teva, has also negotiated a $ 85 million settlement.

The lawsuit was compared to lawsuits against tobacco companies that resulted in an agreement of more than 200 billion US dollars 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 gave a smaller sum.

As a result, Johnson & Johnson's stock was up 2% on Monday at 4:00 pm during the electronic trading following the close of the market. The market was already closed when the judgment was announced.

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