Baltimore opens trial on opioid lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies – Baltimore Sun

Two pharmaceutical companies at one point controlled 60 percent of the Baltimore-area prescription opioid market and shipped millions of addictive painkillers there without much thought to the devastating consequences they could cause, a prosecutor said in opening remarks at the long-awaited trial in the city's opioid lawsuit.

Bill Carmody showed images on screens in a Baltimore Circuit Courtroom of arms outstretched on sidewalks, paramedics tending to them and empty houses with syringes lying around. He said the companies McKesson and AmerisourceBergen had looked the other way while fueling “the worst opioid epidemic in America.”

Carmody said the companies ramped up opioid sales in the Baltimore area, overlooking “suspicious orders” from “pill mill” doctors as the city grappled with the heroin overdose crisis. In doing so, he said, they created a new generation of addicts, people who died in unprecedented numbers when their subscriptions ran out and they turned to an illegal drug market flooded with deadly fentanyl.

“You have flooded this city with hundreds of millions of oxycodone pills. … You have destroyed the public health and safety of this city,” Carmody told a panel of six jurors and six alternates chosen Tuesday night after two days of jury selection.

The city is asking the jury to find that McKesson and AmerisourceBergen's actions constituted an “unreasonable interference with a public right,” which it defined in this case as residents' right to health and safety, and to award the defendants “millions and millions” of dollars in damages at the end of a trial that is expected to last until November.

Lawyers for the opioid dealers are expected to preview evidence in the case Wednesday afternoon before the city begins presenting evidence Thursday. Carmody said he expects the defense will blame doctors and pharmacies for large pill orders, as well as criminal elements for importing heroin and fentanyl into Baltimore.

“It doesn't matter if you have a bad pharmacy,” Carmody told the jury. “It doesn't matter if you have a bad doctor. If the drugs don't get into town, what are you going to do?”

Before the trial began this week, other opioid manufacturers, distributors and pharmacy chains reached settlements with the city for at least $402.5 million. The terms of the city's latest agreement with opioid maker Johnson & Johnson are being kept secret until the trial against McKesson and AmerisourceBergen is over.

Carmody said the traffickers made millions of dollars pumping opioids into the Baltimore area. Between 2006 and 2019, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen sent 320 million oxycodone pills to the area, he said.

“With the right to make money selling opioids comes a responsibility. The responsibility is to comply with drug laws,” Carmody said, referring to a federal law that requires drug distributors to monitor suspicious drug orders and report those cases to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Carmody said McKesson and AmerisourceBergen went to great lengths to avoid reporting contracts to the DEA. He showed portions of emails and company policies.

In 2008, McKesson agreed to a $13.3 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice for drug violations. Shortly thereafter, a senior McKesson compliance official wrote in an email that employees should “refrain from using the word 'suspicious' in communications.” This phrase was later included in a company policy manual.

“McKesson's policy, as you will see in this case, was, 'If we see something, we don't say anything so we don't have to report it,'” Carmody told jurors.

McKesson did not report any suspicious orders in Baltimore between September 2008 and March 2012, Carmody said.

McKesson's “largest customer nationwide” was the independent Drug City Pharmacy in Dundalk, Carmody said. He claimed the company knew the pharmacy filled prescriptions from distant drug factories and that drug dealers sold the drugs in the parking lot.

McKesson settled again with the Justice Department in 2017 for violating federal law, this time paying $150 million. That money went to the DEA, Carmody said, “it didn't help the city of Baltimore.”

When the DEA began cracking down on other companies' opioid trafficking into Baltimore around 2012, AmerisourceBergen saw “an opportunity” to increase its market share, Carmody says.

He accused the company of “mocking” its federal responsibility to prevent opioids from falling into the wrong hands, and supported his argument with emails from company representatives.

In one of the emails, which Carmody showed to the jury, an AmerisourceBergen employee reworked the lyrics of Jimmy Buffet's “Margaritaville” into a song with the chorus “Wasted away again in Oxycontinville.” Another email, with the subject line “Oxycontin for Kids,” included a fake cartoon of a children's cereal box with the brand name “Killogs” and the name of the cereal “Smack.”

Carmody said a former Baltimore police and DEA official will testify as an expert for the city and tell jurors about suspicious orders that McKesson and AmerisourceBergen should have reported.

This article is being updated.

Originally published: September 18, 2024 at 1:53 p.m.