5-17-19 wi joins lawsuit against oxycontin manufacturer

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Five more state attorneys general announced legal filings Thursday seeking to hold the company that makes OxyContin responsible for an opioid addiction crisis that has become the biggest cause of accidental deaths across the country and in many states.  The company, Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma, blasted the claims. “The states cannot link the conduct alleged to the harm described, and so they have invented stunningly overbroad legal theories, which if adopted by courts, will undermine the bedrock legal principle of causation,” Purdue said in a statement.  The new filings in Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, West Virginia and Wisconsin mean 45 states have now taken legal action in recent years against Purdue. Michigan announced last week that it’s looking for law firms to help it sue the industry, too.  All the new filings but the one in Kansas also named Richard Sackler, a former company president and a member of the family that owns the Connecticut-based firm, as a defendant. Maryland named other members of the Sackler family in its administrative action.  Some states have also sued other drugmakers or distributors as the fallout from the crisis moves increasingly to courthouses.   “There’s far too much senseless death in West Virginia and many ruined lives,” that state’s Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said Thursday. “We cannot and will not tolerate companies that allegedly use false and misleading information to deceive medical personnel and patients.”   States’ suits are among the highest-profile claims in flood of litigation over the crisis. Opioids, including prescription painkillers and related drugs such as heroin and fentanyl, were involved in nearly 48,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2017 — more than AIDS killed at the peak of that epidemic and more than auto accidents kill annually. The death toll since 2000 is 391,000.  The states and about 2,000 local and tribal governments that have sued assert that Purdue and other companies downplayed the addiction dangers of the drugs and used sales representatives to encourage doctors to prescribe even more of them.