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 The argument came at the start of a trial in the state's bid to
recover more money from distributors McKesson Corp, Cardinal Health
Inc and AmerisourceBergen Corp than it would have received in a $26
billion nationwide settlement.
Lawyers for the state, led by Attorney General Bob Ferguson, said
the companies fell short of their legal obligations to operate
systems to prevent the diversion of pain pills from legitimate uses
and to stop suspicious orders of opioids from going to pharmacies.
They did so while shipping 3.8 billion opioid doses into Washington
from 2006 to 2018, the state's attorneys told King County Superior
Court Judge Michael Scott in Seattle, who is hearing the case
without a jury.
The state's lawyers argued the companies' failures contributed to a
crisis that led to 10,800 opioid overdose deaths in Washington since
2006.
"Indeed, we know they were aware of the harms flowing from their
conduct because in private correspondence company executives mocked
individuals suffering the painful affects of opioid dependence,"
Ferguson said in his opening statement.
As one example, the state's lawyers displayed a 2011 email in which
an AmerisourceBergen employee shared a parody theme song to that of
"The Beverly Hillbillies" TV show that described how people drove to
obtain drugs at Florida pill mills.
"A Bevy of Pillbillies!" the email said.
Defense lawyers acknowledged the epidemic was serious but said the
companies bore no responsibility for it, saying opioid misuse was
instead usually due to drug traffickers and unused opioids sitting
in medicine cabinets.
Enu Mainigi, Cardinal Health's lawyer, said shipments grew not
because of any corporate misconduct but instead due to a rising
number of opioid prescriptions as the medical community and
regulators, starting in the 1990s, embraced opioids to treat pain.
"The consensus was that pain needed to be treated more aggressively
and opioids were the right way to do it," she said.
'NO CONNECTION'
AmerisourceBergen lawyer Robert Nicholas, citing a government
watchdog report, said the company reported all suspicious orders to
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration but that agency failed to
act on them.
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 "They're acting as if our
reporting suspicious orders would have stopped
the crisis in its tracks," he said. "That's
simply not the case. There's no connection."
Washington is seeking $38.2 billion to fund
treatment and other programs and billions more
in penalties and forfeited profits. The
distributors, who deny wrongdoing, say the state
wants a "wildly inflated recovery" of more than
$95 billion. More than 3,300
lawsuits by largely state and local governments have been filed
seeking to hold those and other companies responsible for a drug
abuse crisis the U.S. government says led to nearly 500,000 opioid
overdose deaths over two decades.
Washington state would have been eligible for $527.5 million if it
had joined a proposed $26 billion global deal, under which the
distributors would pay up to $21 billion and drugmaker Johnson &
Johnson would pay $5 billion.
Ferguson, a Democrat, has criticized the settlement as "not nearly
good enough," saying the nearly $30 million on average the state and
its communities would receive annually was insufficient to address
the devastation caused by the epidemic.
The state became one of eight not to participate in the
distributors' nationwide accord and opted to proceed to trial.
Plaintiffs in some of the other opioid cases have recently faced
setbacks pursuing nuisance claims.
Oklahoma's top court on Tuesday overturned a $465 million judgment
against J&J, and a California judge this month ruled in favor of
four drugmakers in a case brought by several large counties.
Closing arguments were delivered Monday in an opioid trial in Ohio
involving three pharmacy chains.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Noeleen Walder,
Jonathan Oatis and Dan Grebler)
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