New York Attorney General Letitia James slapped the Sackler pharmaceutical family and pill distributors with a 269-page lawsuit over the opioid crisis Thursday, declaring “today, my friends, we turn the tide.”
The state’s top prosecutor said the suit’s focus on pharmaceutical distributors was “groundbreaking.”
“They failed to exercise their most basic duty to detect and report the diversion of opioids because of poorly designed, poorly resourced, and poorly executed (monitoring) programs,” James said.
“Simply put, they put profit over patients.”
The case, which James called the “nation’s most extensive lawsuit,” comes one day after Oklahoma reached a $270 million settlement with Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family over the opioid epidemic. It is a major expansion of a lawsuit filed by the state last year. The case was filed in Suffolk County, which has been hit particularly hard by the opioid crisis. State statistics show that 344 people in Suffolk County died of an opioid overdose in 2016 — more than any of the five boroughs.
The previous suit only named Purdue, which is owned by the Sacklers. The amended suit adds five new manufacturers, four pharmaceutical distributors and new claims against the Sackler family that they’ve tried to hide money in offshore accounts.
“Expanding this baseless lawsuit to include former directors of Purdue Pharma is a misguided attempt to place blame where it does not belong for a complex public health crisis. We strongly deny these allegations, which are inconsistent with the factual record, and will vigorously defend against them,” the Sackler family said in a statement.
“Solving this complex public health crisis will require collaboration and focus on the real problems our nation needs to address. Government data makes clear that the opioid crisis is growing rapidly because of illicit fentanyl smuggled in from China and Mexico — and headline-seeking lawsuits like this only distract from the important task of identifying real solutions to that crisis.”
More than 130 people in the country, including about nine people living in New York, die as a result of opioid-related overdoses each day. More than 3,200 New Yorkers died from opioid overdose in 2017.
The suit charges manufacturers with filing false claims. James said the companies had “duped” the state into paying for unnecessary prescriptions for opioids through Medicare and Medicaid claims. She also slammed the manufacturers for “poorly designed, poorly resourced, and poorly executed suspicious order monitoring programs.”
“Distributors must have robust internal compliance systems, yet the named defendants in our complaint knowingly had insufficient systems to detect, prevent and report suspicious orders.” She said they “incentivized sales representatives to sell as much product as possible.”
If manufacturers and distributors did not institute stronger controls over the powerful drugs they would be banned from operating in the state, James said.
Among the companies named in the suit was Cardinal Health, which is the top opioid distributor in New York. The company has flooded the state with 780 million oxycodone pills since 2010 and ignored red flags about shady pharmacies, according to the suit.
“Cardinal Health is an intermediary in the pharmaceutical supply chain that plays a limited and specific but important role: to provide a secure channel to deliver medications of all kinds from the hundreds of manufacturers that make them to our thousands of hospital and pharmacy customers that dispense them to patients, and to work diligently to spot, stop and report suspicious orders of medications,” the company said in a statement.
“Our people operate in good faith and our goal is to get it right, and we have stopped suspicious orders for the shipment of hundreds of millions of dosage units of controlled substances over the last decade.”
Justin Sangeorge, of Staten Island, spoke alongside James about his struggles with opioid addiction after he first was prescribed Vicodin by a dentist.
“We hold accountable drug dealers, drug traffickers, but pharmaceutical companies hide behind this legitimate enterprise. And as far as I’m concerned, they’re just as guilty as a trafficker or a drug cartel,” Sangeorge, 41, said.