March 2021 Trial Date For Opioid Lawsuits In West Virginia

March 2021 Trial Date For Opioid Lawsuits In West Virginia

Introduction

A trial date of March 2021 has been set by a panel of judges from West Virginia for hearing the lawsuits filed by counties, cities, towns, and hospitals claiming the damages caused due to the opioid epidemic by the opioid manufacturers and distributors.

Last week a status conference took place, which was headed by Judge Alan Moats, who heads the panel of the lawsuits. The conference was to discuss and calculate the amount of damage caused by the drug manufacturers, as West Virginia is the most affected state with a higher rate of overdose death rate in the nation.

The lawsuits filed by the counties and cities claim that a large number of people got affected due to the opioid crisis, which was caused because of the negligence of manufacturers and lack of awareness of the use of opioid painkillers whereas, the company responded that the drugs were distributed only to the licensed pharmacies.

McKesson, Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen are the companies involved in the lawsuit, who have agreed to pay a combined settlement of $72 million to the states of West Virginia. Counties and cities have filed their separate lawsuits apart from the state.

Companies manufacturing opioids convinced the medical community that these medications were not addictive and were purely beneficial. This belief raised the number of prescriptions and sales unwarrantedly, resulting in a mass misuse of these drugs, to the extent that this was identified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a public issue and named it an 'opioid crisis'.