To be sure, multiple actors are responsible for the opioid crisis in the US, some are finally being held to account, others not. Last month, we reported on a federal jury that found three chain pharmacies partly responsible for the opioid crisis in Ohio. More recently, StatNews reports that a jury found Teva Pharmaceuticals partly responsible for the opioid crisis in New York.
The New York State Attorney General brought the case against Teva and several other pharmaceutical companies. The other pharmaceutical companies settled. The jury found that Teva misled the public about the real threats of opioids and engaged in a “public nuisance” with deadly results. Are you surprised? We still don’t know what Teva will be expected to pay in damages, if anything.
Teva is protesting, unwilling to take responsibility for its acts and saying it will challenge the verdict. It thinks that New York State should have needed to prove a more direct link between the tens of thousands of deaths from opioids and Teva. It must believe that pushing opioids on people and claiming they were neither addictive nor potentially deadly is kosher. It must think that it is OK to instruct doctors to prescribe high level doses of their opioids as a painkiller.
Of course Teva claims it did nothing wrong. How could its executives and marketing people sleep at night if they deigned to admit that the untold profits they earned for the company from massive opioid sales cost so many thousands of people their lives? In addition, it cost New York State taxpayers millions of dollars in health care treatments for people who became addicted to opioids.
Make no mistake. Our federal government is also to blame for the opioid crisis, along with the insurers that approved payment on opioid prescriptions when they were unnecessary, knowing that they were addictive and potentially dangerous. With a single public health care plan such as Medicare for All, the government could have restricted coverage of opioids, limiting access to the drug. That’s what Germany did, and it was able to avoid an opioid crisis.
Here’s more from Just Care:
