For the first time, a pharmaceutical company responsible for contributing to the opioid health crisis in the United States has been found in a courtroom. According to a jury for a trial that has been underway in New York since June, the US division of Teva Pharmaceuticals, an Israeli company, deliberately underestimated the potential risks of commercially available pain relievers and did not take sufficient measures to prevent their excessive spread. Population of New York State.
the opiates These are medicines that are used to manage pain. It began to be manufactured in the early twentieth century, but its great popularity dates back to the 1990s. At that time, US drug company Purdue began selling oxycodone, marketed as OxyContin, executing a very aggressive marketing campaign to persuade doctors to prescribe the drug to their patients, claiming that it could be used to treat chronic pain without addiction problems. In the United States, many physicians abused prescriptions for oxycodone, and in many cases patients began to prolong their intake even beyond recommended conditions: but both oxycodone and other opioids caused serious addiction problems, and caused death from a dose trailing hundreds of thousands. of people over the past twenty years.
However, Purdue isn’t the only pharmaceutical company that has played a role in the spread of opioids. Teva Pharmaceuticals, like other pharmaceutical companies, is involved in many thousands of lawsuits related to the opioid addiction epidemic in the United States.
One underway in New York is the second a ruling has been reached (last month, in Ohio, another ruling has acknowledged responsibility for large-scale distribution chains CVS, Walgreens and Walmart) and the first pertains to the two drug companies and the large-scale distribution chain they sell. In the coming months, the amount of compensation owed by “Teva” and other responsible companies will be determined.
The trial relates in particular to the opioid crisis in Nassau and Suffolk counties. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the most important public health watchdog in the United States, between 2010 and 2018, the number of deaths from opioid overdose doubled in the two counties, reaching, respectively, more than 1,600 deaths and more than 3,000 in 2019. According to the jury, the New York state government is also partly responsible for contributing to the crisis because it should have regulated the handling of materials more stringently.
Shortly before the trial began, Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals announced that it would pay $230 million to New York State as part of an agreement to resolve its legal disputes over the opioid crisis. A few weeks later, the three major distributors of opioids in the United States, Cardinal Health, McKesson Corp and AmerisourceBergen, settled in, with New York State offsetting a total of More than 1 billion dollars.
A year ago, however, Purdue — which ended in bankruptcy in 2019 — pleaded guilty to the charges in an agreement with the US Department of Justice, which included a fine of $8 billion and $225 million, and established that there was no director or shareholder in the company going to Prison. On December 17, a court declared the settlement illegal, but Purdue is expected to appeal.
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