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Tag: johnson & johnson opioid lawsuit

  • Johnson & Johnson Fined $107M Too Much In Opioid Settlement

    Johnson & Johnson Fined $107M Too Much In Opioid Settlement

    “That’s the last time I use that calculator,” an Oklahoma judge said, according to CNN.

    The judge who ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $572 million said that he made a mathematical error that resulted in the settlement being $107 million too much. 

    Bad Math

    As part of the settlement, Judge Thad Balkman allotted $107,683,000 to help treat babies born dependent on opioids. However, Balkman said this week that he came to that sum by misguided math. He unintentionally added an extra three zeros. In reality, he only meant to assign $107,683 for the treatment of babies. 

    “That’s the last time I use that calculator,” Balkman said, according to CNN.

    Because of that, the landmark judgment against Johnson & Johnson will be reduced by nearly a quarter. 

    Lawyers for Johnson & Johnson were the first to notice the error. 

    “No evidence supports this higher amount, which appears simply to reflect a mistaken addition of three zeros to the calculation of the annual average, yet the state’s proposed judgment fails to account for this discrepancy,” the lawyers wrote in court paperwork. 

    Drugmaker Requests Further Reduction in Payout

    Johnson & Johnson also requested that Balkman reduce the amount that the company will be required to pay to account for the fact that Purdue Pharma and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries will be contributing $355 million to the state. That amount was decided on during a pretrial settlement. 

    Balkman has not yet said whether he will amend the Johnson & Johnson fine because of the settlement with Purdue and Teva. However, he will reduce the fine to account for his math error. The settlement amount will be updated, but Johnson & Johnson has said that it plans to appeal the ruling regardless. 

    The state of Oklahoma had asked for $17 billion in damages from Johnson & Johnson. Christopher Ruhm, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia, helped the state decide how much to ask for. He said that $17 billion would have allowed Oklahoma to address the opioid epidemic over the next 30 years. 

    Opioid Settlements Pale in Comparison to Big Pharma Profits

    “It is a lot of money. It’s also a major public health crisis,” Ruhm said.

    Balkman used that plan to allot $572,102,028, roughly the amount that the state asked for per year. 

    “The state did not present sufficient evidence of the amount of time and costs necessary, beyond year one, to abate the opioid crisis,” he wrote in his ruling. 

    Although settlements around the opioid lawsuits can seem large, many people argue that they pale in comparison to the profits that companies made from opioids that were allegedly marketed in misleading ways. The settlement amounts are also small compared to the money that cities, counties and states spend to address the epidemic. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • What To Expect After The Johnson & Johnson Verdict 

    What To Expect After The Johnson & Johnson Verdict 

    The Oklahoma ruling has changed expectations for how other opioid trials will be resolved. 

    When an Oklahoma judge ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $572 million for its role in contributing to the state’s opioid epidemic, he made history by holding an opioid-related company accountable for damages in court for the first time. 

    With thousands of similar cases pending across the country—including 1,600 consolidated lawsuits slated to go before a federal judge in Ohio this October—the Oklahoma ruling has changed expectations for how other opioid trials will be resolved. 

    “It’s the first time that any of these claims have been trial tested,” Joe Khan, an attorney representing municipalities from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Mississippi in opioid-related cases, told TIME. 

    The Aftermath

    Khan said that following the verdict in Oklahoma, more drug manufacturers and distributors may be apt to settle their cases. In the Oklahoma case, Purdue Pharma settled for $270 million, while Johnson & Johnson chose to proceed to trial. All other defendants in the case made smaller settlements. The fact that Johnson & Johnson had to pay so much more than Purdue could prompt other companies to err on the side of caution. 

    This “sends a very strong signal to defendants [that] rolling the dice (and going to trial) was not the winning strategy,” said Khan. 

    Professor emeritus of law at George Washington University, Peter Meyers, said that the Oklahoma case was a “game-changer” that strengthens the cases for other municipalities. Even if the judgment were overturned on appeal, that would not happen before the federal cases begin in October, so the impact of the Oklahoma case will be large, he said. 

    He compared the current litigation to lawsuits from the 1990s against Big Tobacco. Ultimately, all 50 states reached a massive settlement, that saw the top five tobacco companies paying $9 billion a year in perpetuity. 

    Meyers said, “The world changed when all states began bringing cases on behalf of their constituents.”

    Still, following the ruling, Johnson & Johnson’s stock price rose, indicating that the company’s investors were relieved by the result. The state was asking for billions in damages. 

    Analyst Joshua Jennings told The New York Times, “As silly as it sounds, a $600 million decision was, relative to expectations, a positive outcome. It was less onerous than many had expected.” 

    Setting a Precedent

    In addition, other legal precedents could compete with the Oklahoma ruling. The Oklahoma case was based on public nuisance laws: the state essentially argued that drug manufacturers and distributors had created a nuisance with their aggressive and misleading sales tactics.

    Although that line of reasoning worked in this case, University of Georgia law professor Elizabeth Burch pointed out that similar cases have failed against gun manufacturers, which could indicate trouble for future opioid lawsuits. 

    She said, “You can draw an analogy there, mainly because once you sell a gun, it is no longer in the control of the gun manufacturers.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Johnson & Johnson Ordered To Pay $572 Million For Role In Oklahoma Opioid Crisis

    Johnson & Johnson Ordered To Pay $572 Million For Role In Oklahoma Opioid Crisis

    According to the ruling, the pharmaceutical company “engaged in false and misleading marketing of both their drugs and opioids generally.”

    In a decision that may have far-reaching implications for pharmaceutical companies across the United States, an Oklahoma judge has ruled that Johnson & Johnson must pay more than $572 million for its alleged role in helping create the state’s opioid crisis. Cleveland County District Judge Thad Balkman wrote in his ruling that the company and its pharmaceutical subsidiary, Janssen, “engaged in false and misleading marketing of both their drugs and opioids generally,” which he deemed a “public nuisance.”

    Johnson & Johnson denied the allegation and plan to appeal Balkman’s verdict, which observers on both sides of the argument have been closely monitoring to determine its impact on a federal trial involving nearly 2,000 cases against opioid manufacturers slated for the fall of 2019.

    Deceptive Marketing Practices

    As both NBC News and CNN noted, final filings submitted earlier this month and statements in court by Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter and other attorneys for the state argued that Johnson & Johnson had aggressively pursued medical professionals to prescribe opioid medication while minimizing the potential risk of addiction and/or overdose death through deceptive marketing practices.

    Testimony from some of the relatives and friends of the more than 6,000 Oklahomans who died from opioid overdoses underscored Hunter’s assessment that the company had ignored scientific research in pursuit of a “magic pill” that would produce major profits.

    The result, as Hunter said, was the “worst man-made public nuisance this state and our county has ever seen: the opioid crisis.”

    Attorneys for Johnson & Johnson argued that the state failed to prove any elements of its case, from Janssen’s specific role in contributing to the opioid crisis to the impact of their marketing promotions. They added that the public nuisance accusation was nothing more than “potshots taken from promotional statements” and a misinterpretation of a law initially employed in property cases.

    But Judge Balkman sided with the state, noting that the allegedly misleading marketing was “more than enough to serve as the act or omission necessary to establish the first element of Oklahoma’s public nuisance law.”

    Major Public Health Crisis

    The state initially asked for an abatement plan of approximately $17 billion, which would be applied to addiction treatment and prevention programs over a period of 30 years. The plan, calculated by Christopher Ruhm, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia, included the costs of addiction treatment, physician education plans, care for babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome, prescription tracking programs, grief support and more over the next three decades.

    “It is a lot of money. It’s also a major public health crisis,” Ruhm said.

    Balkman’s verdict called for an abatement program of $572,102,028 – about one year’s worth of payments under the state’s proposals. In his ruling, he wrote that “The state did not present sufficient evidence of the amount of time and costs necessary, beyond year one, to abate the opioid crisis.”

    Johnson & Johnson Plan to Appeal

    Johnson & Johnson’s executive vice president and general counsel, Michael Ullmann, said in a statement that his company was innocent of any wrongdoing and planned to appeal.

    He also wrote “The unprecedented award for the State’s ‘abatement plan’ has sweeping ramifications for many industries and bears no relation to the Company’s medicines or conduct.”

    But as CNN noted, the case could also have considerable impact on the numerous lawsuits filed against drugmakers by states, cities and communities across the country. Carl Tobias, a professor of law at the University of Richmond in Virginia, said in early August that attorneys have been “watching and learning from the case Oklahoma has assembled, while defendants have been watching for vulnerabilities.”

    View the original article at thefix.com