Cuyahoga and Summit counties in Ohio and Johnson & Johnson have reached a settlement over opioids. The agreement is worth more than $20 million.
Johnson & Johnson Opioid Settlement
Agreement With 2 Ohio Counties Worth More Than $20M
By GEOFF MULVIHILL Associated Press
Johnson & Johnson on Tuesday announced it had reached an agreement worth more than $20 million with two Ohio counties, becoming the latest company to settle a lawsuit to get out of the first federal trial over the nation's opioids crisis.
The deal with Cuyahoga and Summit counties comes a little more than a month after an Oklahoma judge ordered the New Brunswick, New Jersey-based health care conglomerate to pay $572 million over its marketing of opioids in that state.
It was announced less than three weeks before the scheduled start of the first federal trial over the opioid crisis. Four other opioid makers also have reached settlements in recent months and will not be defendants in the trial, scheduled for federal court in Cleveland. Like most of the others, Johnson & Johnson still faces some 2,000 other lawsuits related to the nation's opioids epidemic.
The Ohio agreement calls for the company and its Janssen Pharmaceutical subsidiary to pay $10 million without admitting liability. The deal also includes provisions for the company to reimburse the counties up to $5 million for legal expenses and contribute another $5.4 million to nonprofit organizations that deal with the opioid crisis in northeastern Ohio.
"The settlement allows the company to avoid the resource demands and uncertainty of a trial as it continues to seek meaningful progress in addressing the nation's opioid crisis," Johnson & Johnson said in a statement. "The company recognizes the opioid crisis is a complex public health challenge and is working collaboratively to help communities and people in need."
Opioids, a class of drug that includes prescription painkillers as well as heroin and illicitly made fentanyl, have been linked to more than 400,000 deaths in the U.S. since 2000.
Johnson & Johnson has sold three opioids in the U.S.: Duragesic fentanyl patches; the oral opioid Nucynta; and an extended-release version of Nucynta.
The company said its products accounted for less than 1% of the opioid prescriptions in the country since they were launched. It sold marketing rights for Nucynta in 2015 and has not marketed Duragesic to patients or prescribers in the U.S. for more than a decade, although it continues to sell the drug.
In recent months, the drug companies Endo, Allergan and Mallinckrodt also reached settlements with the two Ohio counties. Purdue Pharma has struck a tentative deal intended to settle all its lawsuits — although about half the states say they will object to the settlement in bankruptcy court.
Teva is the only drugmaker that would remain in the Cleveland trial if Johnson & Johnson's settlement is finalized. The other defendants still in the trial are distributors AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, Henry Schein and McKesson, along with the pharmacy chain Walgreens.
With most drugmakers out of the initial trial, it could mean less focus on how they marketed powerful painkillers to doctors and more on whether distributors shipped opioid orders that they believed were suspicious.
With the trial approaching, more settlements are possible. In a statement Tuesday, Endo said it "continues to explore various global settlement mechanisms," including "a construct that could potentially be implemented through Purdue Pharma's recent bankruptcy filing."
___
Follow Mulvihill at http://www.twitter.com/geoffmulvihill
Hispanic Outlook is an education magazine in the US available both in print and digital form. Visit https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/education-magazine for information about our latest issue, including our new supplement Physician Outlook.
Hispanic Outlook’s Job Board allows applicants to search for jobs by category, by city and by state. Both Featured and Latest Job Positions are available at https://hispanicoutlookjobs.com/
And for employers, Hispanic Outlook’s Job Board offers a wide variety of posting options. Further information is available at https://hispanicoutlookjobs.com/employer-products/
Other articles from Hispanic Outlook:
Health Simplified And Expanded Back To School
I couldn’t resist the urge to join in on this cultural trend and post my OWN tongue-in-cheek “first day” picture as I celebrate starting what I hope to be my new forever job as the medical director at St. Bonaventure University’s Center for Student Wellness. After spending a year on the road as a locum and Urgent Care Physician, it feels good to set down roots. Prior to July of 2018, I had been struggling with Physician burnout. For every 15 minutes I spent with a Patient, I often spent an additional 30 minutes (sometimes more) on my work laptop, clicking away in an EHR that created a pages-long document that didn’t tell my Patient’s story, and that very few read. I was trained to be a medical detective, and my documentation style is very different from the “note bloat” produced by most systems. EHRs are designed to comply with complicated and…
Read full article here
America Can’t Kick The Habit
Drug abuse has always been part of the American landscape since the founding of this country. And it all follows a familiar pattern – introduce a drug with great fanfare and promise, but with little warning about its habit-forming indications or possible side effects. Predictably, people become addicted, and this is followed by restriction and regulation creating criminal enterprise and a criminal class of addicts. Access to illicit drugs like opium, cocaine, marijuana and heroin, as well as prescribed and Physician administered legal drugs such as amphetamines, oxycodone and morphine, continue to make America the world’s leading marketplace per capita for drug use. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. How many times do we have to live through this…
Read full article here
Hispanics’ Deadly Response To Opioid Bias
Opioids are sometimes necessary to treat Patient pain, but Physicians are now being cautioned about prescribing them. In an article entitled “How Racial Inequity Is Playing Out in the Opioid Crisis,” by Jenae Addison for Health Magazine, it is noted that the stereotyping of Patients of color influences the number of prescriptions dispensed. Addison quotes Kenneth Leonard, director of the Clinical and Research Institute on Addictions at the University of Buffalo explaining, “There is a bias issue there in terms of either believing [minorities are] more likely to be substance abusers or they can endure more pain.” The result is while overprescribing opioids is the most recent scourge in America’s war on drugs, under prescribing opioids to Hispanics is contributing to more and more addiction and death in those communities of…
Read full article here
Chi-Chi Rodríguez’s Youth Foundation
As another academic year begins at his public-private school in Clearwater, Florida, this 83-year-old golfer often thinks about his childhood friend. They both grew up in Puerto Rico. As teenagers, they became very close and eventually played on the same amateur, baseball team on the island. One was a talented, right-handed pitcher while the other – a pinch-runner – was an agile ballplayer who always hustled around the base path. The pitcher’s name was Juan Antonio Rodríguez, who one day became an acclaimed golfer where millions around the world still recognize him by his childhood nickname: “Chi-Chi.” Growing up in Puerto Rico, the pinch-runner also had a nickname too. His family and close friends called him “Momen.” But today, millions around the world recall his extraordinary life and legacy. He was called “The Great One,” “Arriba” and “Humanitarian,” but…
Read full article here
La Feria Del Libro En Madrid
More than 400 youngsters began lining up at 8 a.m. and remained in line until noon as the heat descended upon the Retiro park in Madrid, Spain. They weren’t waiting for some concert or latest video game on sale. Instead, they were on line to meet one of more than 1,800 authors who were signing books at Madrid’s historic book fair, La Feria del Libro de Madrid, in late spring from May 31 until June 16. “We are super happy to be able to have the success that we have had. The book has returned, and the people are very happy,” the fair’s director Manuel Gil told me in Spanish with a contagious passion. “The weight of paper is important, and, in the end, people want something physical, and they want that direct relationship with the author.” As an author myself, with my own novel, “NIÑA DUENDE: UN VIAJE DEL ESPÍRITU,” translated to Spanish and with…
Read full article here
5 Latino Authors You Should Be Reading Now
(AP)(THE CONVERSATION) You likely recognize that the depiction of Latin American immigrants in politics today – as a menacing mass of recalcitrant Spanish-speaking invaders – is overwhelmingly negative. What you may not know is that stereotypes suggesting that Latin Americans represent a threat to United States culture are not just morally repugnant – they’re also historically inaccurate. Spanish-language literature actually predates the Puritans’ writing in English by nearly a century. As my research reveals, many renowned Latin American writers actually produced some of their finest work while living in the United States. Latina and Latino writers have made exceptional contributions to American literary history. For a fresh take on what it means to be a Latina or Latino in the U.S. today, check out these five…
Read full article here
