The complaint by Kentucky Attorney General Andy Beshear was filed in
a state court and was one of a flurry of lawsuits by states and
local governments against opioid manufacturers and distributors
seeking to hold them accountable for the U.S. epidemic.
McKesson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It
has denied knowingly supplying opioids to rogue pharmacies and has
said it is working to enhance its programs to detect suspicious drug
orders.
Beshear's lawsuit accused the San Francisco-based company of filling
suspicious orders of prescription opioids and then shipping massive
quantities of the drugs to Kentucky pharmacies without reporting
them to authorities or stopping the shipments.
The complaint said McKesson, one of the country's largest wholesale
pharmaceutical distributors, ignored red flags that the drugs were
being diverted for illegal uses in order "to reap a windfall off of
the wave of addiction."
Beshear said in Kentucky's Floyd County alone, which has an average
population of 38,638, McKesson from 2010 to 2016 distributed more
than 18.4 million doses of opioids, enough for 477 pills for every
adult and child living there.
"Kentuckians can finally put a name to a major reason for the pill
mills, drug epidemic and overdose deaths in our state,” Beshear said
in a statement.
Opioids were involved in over 42,000 overdose deaths in 2016,
according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A wave of lawsuits by states, counties and cities have accused
drugmakers of pushing addictive painkillers through deceptive
marketing and wholesale distributors of failing to report suspicious
drug orders.
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A group of state attorneys general have been conducting a multistate
investigation into whether companies that manufacture and distribute
prescription opioids, including McKesson, engaged in unlawful
practices.
The lawsuit by Beshear, who is not part of that multistate probe,
came after McKesson in January 2017 agreed to pay $150 million to
resolve a federal investigation into whether it failed to report
suspicious orders of addictive painkillers.
McKesson also faces lawsuits by attorneys general in West Virginia,
Delaware and New Mexico.
In November, Beshear sued Endo International Plc, claiming it
contributed to the opioid epidemic by deceptively marketing its
painkiller Opana ER, which it has withdrawn from the market.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by Chizu Nomiyama and
Jonathan Oatis)
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