In the legal battle to hold drug companies responsible for the country’s raging opioid epidemic, media attention largely has focused on a national lawsuit set for a late October trial in federal court in Cleveland, Ohio.
But it may be upstaged by a lesser-known opioid case: Oklahoma v. Purdue Pharma, scheduled for trial in May in the Cleveland County Courthouse in Norman, Oklahoma.
The Ohio case, known as the National Prescription Opiate Litigation[1], is a consolidated case that includes federal lawsuits brought by more than 1,500 counties, municipalities, hospitals and others, and features a brief from the U.S. Department of Justice.
But attorneys general in most states have opted to file independent lawsuits against drug companies, rather than share the stage with hundreds of other cases. In total, at least 330 opioid-related cases are pending in lower courts in at least 45 states.
Oklahoma’s case is slated to be the first to go to trial.
With similar legal concepts and evidence, the Oklahoma trial could presage many of the arguments the jury may be presented in the national case in the fall. And if the drug companies in Oklahoma offer a settlement, the proposal could precipitate a national settlement, some legal experts said.
At a minimum, the Oklahoma trial would for the first time give the press and the public great access to evidence and arguments aimed at showing that drug companies flooded local markets with opioid painkillers for more than a decade while knowing that the pills were highly addictive.
In the case, which was filed in 2017, attorneys representing Oklahoma will present evidence and expert testimony to support the state’s claim that OxyContin, Vicodin, Percocet and other prescription pain medicines that drugmakers falsely claimed were safe led to the deaths of thousands of