In case you missed, judge Thad Balkman dropped his verdict on the Johnson & Johnson trial like it was hot on Monday afternoon.
The ruling received swift and massive national media coverage. Via the New York Times:
A judge in Oklahoma on Monday ruled that Johnson & Johnson had intentionally played down the dangers and oversold the benefits of opioids, and ordered it to pay the state $572 million in the first trial of a drug manufacturer for the destruction wrought by prescription painkillers.
The amount fell far short of the $17 billion judgment that Oklahoma had sought to pay for addiction treatment, drug courts and other services it said it would need over the next 20 years to repair the damage done by the opioid epidemic.
Yes, Oklahoma wanted to $17-billion and only got $572-million. That appears to be a $16,428,000,000 difference in between what was asked for and what was received. How awful is it for a corporation like Johnson & Johnson to pay out half a billion dollars, and then suffer the repercussions that come with being a peddler of deadly, addictive, and abusive drugs?
The answer is: Not so bad. The company’s market capitalization is $345-billion. I’m a writer, not an economist who specializes in math, but that tells me the verdict accounted for .001% of Johnson & Johnson’s worth. You can see how it shook the stock market:
Johnson & Johnson surges more than 4% after being ordered to pay less than expected in landmark opioid trial https://t.co/ZpWeyReH5d pic.twitter.com/ZODCmHgDkG
— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) August 26, 2019
Despite the surprisingly less than favorable verdict, and the fact the J&J is going to appeal, Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter stood in front of the camera and declared some sort of victory. It still caught him into some trouble:
#BREAKING @SCJohnson CEO Fisk Johnson is demanding a retraction from Oklahoma AG Mike Hunter over the use of the tagline, "A Family Company." @scjohnson & Johnson & Johnson are 2 different companies – not connected in any way. @kfor
Read More Below: pic.twitter.com/Z5CyXMUhrk— Patrick Spencer (@made4tv) August 27, 2019
Ah shit, now Oklahoma’s gonna get sued by the Windex company! I hope we don’t have to give all the money we made from a company that poisons people to the one that makes chemicals to kill bugs. Also, please admit that you thought they were the same company.
Anyways, when I see news like this, I think about my friends who became addicted to painkillers because of injuries, or fell off even deeper into heroin abuse. The ones who had bright eyes and beautiful faces and creative plans for their futures, and became smothered underneath the pillow of addiction. Their wild eyes closed, their faces turned skeletal, and their futures erased as they exhaled their last breaths.
Pharmaceutical corporations are the most vile pushers on the planet, and if America wants to continue its ill-founded ‘War On Drugs,’ vampire corporations like Johnson & Johnson need to be punished the hardest. They’ve legitimized serious substance abuse in a way that can allow your grandmother, younger brother, dad, whoever, fall into true despair and death. We can’t settle for pennies on the dollar like Oklahoma just did, yet again, when lives are at stake.
Big pharma, tobacco, guns and oil own this country. Glad our little state could do something to help out three of these four industries recently. We’ll cash in our brownie points soon, right? Wonder what we can do to suck up to big tobacco. Issue Juuls to each baby born in the state? Put Nicotine in the water supply?
That $572 million was just for the first year. Read the order!
Please elaborate. I see where the order covers only one year of mitigation of the nuisance, but not where it says that we can go back to the judge year after year for more.
Paragraph 64. “The Court will enter such further Orders pertaining to the implementation of the Abatement Plan as necessary and in due course.”
The State will have to go back and ask for money at the end of each year and show what effects they have had. And the legislature will have to set up some sort of commission to oversee the expenditure of funds. But they can keep going back to the well until the abatement plan is no longer ruled to be needed.
Thank you for that. But the wording is a bit vague in terms of the State getting additional money in the future.
I haven’t heard our esteemed AG bragging about anything like more money later, and J&J is sure to fight paying out any additional money to their dying breath – if they have any money left after other states get through with them.
So I’m not counting our chicks until they hatch.
I see that the bones of the Sackler empire are being picked over, even as we speak. Hope Oklahoma gets more from them. They are truly evil.
,..but do great museums.
Exactly! It stuns me that no one in the media or stock market has actually ready the findings. The judge just ruled that Oklahoma had not shown how many years of abatement were necessary, so he gave them the estimated cost of YEAR ONE and held open the possibility of entering future orders. Read page 41 of the judgment at paragraphs 59 and 60.
You can read it yourself on OSCN(dot)net. Look under Court Records and search for Cleveland County Case No. CJ-2017-816. You will have to scroll down the horrendously long docket sheet to the entry on 8/26/2019 and download the pdf.
Is it just me, or are the physicians that prescribed these drugs to addicted people getting off awful easy in this mess.
Dr. Regan Nichols is presently charged with second degree murder/manslaughter in Oklahoma County based on her over prescription of opiods. Not all of the doctors are getting off scot-free.
Plus, if you look into the evidence from the trial you will see that J&J and the other drug companies went on a massive ‘education’ spree for physicians telling them that ‘pseudo addition’ (patients asking for more and more drugs) was not caused by addition, but buy under prescription. The drug companies answer if someone came in asking for more drugs? Give them more! And they selectively cited some flawed studies in their promotional “education” program.
you are 100% correct…but drug companies have deeper pockets…I bet there will be a day when the people who wrote the scripts will be held accountable…
I agree, I ‘ve posted this before I think, but my dentist I saw maybe twice a year would always write a script for 30 of these. Even it was a routine cleaning. They were handed out like candy. It seemed there was some kind of incentive involved. I rarely took any of them and they didn’t do much for me. I had a small collection before I stopped even filling the scripts.
Maybe he was mislead by the pharma adverting or had a dog in the race, who knows.
Great job screwing cancer and chronic pain patients over! This ruling just increased the difficulty for those patients to get needed medicine to be able to function and not suffer! Legitimate patients again pay the price! Here comes the price increase of pain prescriptions for legitimate patients! I am both a chronic pain patient and have stage 3b cancer. Great job Oklahoma- NOT!
Has your cancer or chronic pain patient tried medical marijuana?
Seriously – check it out. It helps my wife immensely with her back pain.
Nobody is getting screwed, except the tax payer. This in no way affects prescribing painkillers rather (if you skim over the highlights) is about big pharma pushing painkillers too much and making them too easy to get. Digging deeper this goes to corruption, lobbying, and under the table dealings that lead to more advertising. It’s a big cycle that generates lots and lots of money.
I had kneed surgery in one knee, then the other knee, and only because it was paid for I filled all my scripts. This was years ago. I still have over 300 pills of oxy, lortab, of different strengths.
I have them because after the first few I did not need them any more , but they are so generous.
I agree. Patients are in a tough spot because they went to the doctor like they were supposed to do. If the doctors believed that the medications were safe, the patients also believed it. I am also a chronic pain patient, and the more I read various studies, I am convinced that my pain may be the same with or without the pills. (I won’t say that it may be the same for anyone but me.) After the crackdown in 2017, and now that the Unity Bill will hopefully help protect us from job discrimination, medical cannabis is a solution. I have been able to cut the pill dozes in half, having been taking for almost 20 years, but again, I can only speak about my experience.
The most disappointing part about all of the money is that people like you and I are caught in the middle. We basically get nothing. Sure, there will be those who will mention treatment or rehab facilities or something, but it shouldn’t be assumed that we need those. We’re collateral damage.
If I were running this company I wouldn’t ship any pain meds to Oklahoma. There crippled people with severe anatomical derangement, eat that you addicted SOBs. Also those who get comfort and have a pain free death on hospice, take that!!
I love the fact the best our AG could do was win a public nuisance lawsuit. Justin Bieber is a public nuisance. The opioid Crisis is a healthcare epidemic killing hundreds of thousands over the years.
Oklahoma Attorney General should sue manufacturers of cameras next because people take “selfies” on the edge of cliffs and other areas causing bodily injury
The opioid epidemic made millions for the big pharmaceutical companies and destroyed thousands of lives. Not only the people who became addicted but there families too!!! How ever much money they have to pay will never be enough to make up for the harm they have done to our society!!!
Always easy to second guess but remember this. In 2017, when General Hunter began the process of preparing the lawsuit no one had won a suit like this against Pharma. An identical case, using nuisance as the basis for the suit, was thrown out in South Dakota and a nuisance only suit in Oklahoma had actually never been filed let alone won. So most smart people thought Hunter was just way out of his league with the filing including J&& and Janssen.
I either attended in person on watched on line the entire nearly 300 hours of testimony and Pharma was outsmarted, outworked and out organized at every step. A couple of their witnesses turned out to be terrific for the state including Dr. Fong from California and the doctor from Michigan who was paid $10,000 a day to testify and he was terrible. Said there wasn’t a crisis and the state found a tape where he said there was. Good grief.
Judge Balkman was superb and he’s the same guy I always tried to beat when we were both in the legislature. He is still in control of the case and if anybody tells you the issue is over on how much additional money may be ordered in the future I suspect they work for Pharma.
Finally the little woman in the deal outsmarted the smarties who were trotted out by J&J. They tried to demean her with their reference to her as Ms White when in fact she is the senior mental health and substance abuse commissioner in the country. Terri White is her full name. I have known her for over 20 years and she is outstanding.
Next they will be suing Little Debbie for making Oklahomans fat..
Yeah, but we don’t have medical professionals proscribing people Little Debbie snacks.
Prescribing, rather. It is too early in the morning to be commenting on TLO.
Hmmmm, let me see:
If I deal heroin on the streets, and get caught doing so, then it’s off to the slammer with me!
But if a big pharma company does it, they’re fined a few pennies (relative to their net worth) and nobody does any jail time at all! “Hell, we wuz just provid-ifyin’ what the people wanted, which was pain relief! YEEEEEEEEEEEEE-HAW! And this is how ya’ll repay-ify us? By makin’ us pay a few pennies?”
Win (Big Pharma) – Win (State of Oklahoma, kind of) – Lose (opioid addicts)
I hope they make more medication-assisted treatment (suboxone, methadone) available at low or no cost available to opioid addicts with this. It is not readily available in this state now for people without the means (money) to get it.