Jury finds drug companies liable for Baltimore opioid crisis

Two drug traffickers are liable for their roles in Baltimore's deadly opioid crisis and must pay more than $260 million in damages, a civil jury found Tuesday. In doing so, she gave the city a crowning legal victory in a public nuisance lawsuit that began six years ago.

The McKesson and AmerisourceBergen companies will split more than $266 million in past and future damages if the verdict survives a likely appeal – about $6 million more than the city asked the jury.

The verdict means the jury of three men and three women found the two companies almost entirely responsible for a public nuisance caused by prescription opioid abuse in Baltimore.

The jury returned the verdict after deliberating for almost two days.

The city's lawsuit alleged that McKesson and AmerisourceBergen failed to monitor and stop suspiciously large opioid orders, allowing the pills to be diverted to an illicit market.

Although Baltimore made progress in reducing the heroin overdose rate in the early 2000s, the city claimed that the flood of readily available painkillers wiped out those gains and then pushed a new generation of opioid users to street drugs as the number grew the number of prescription drugs decreased.

In total, half a billion opioids were delivered to the city and county of Baltimore between 2006 and 2019, the years for which federal drug distribution data are available. McKesson and AmerisourceBergen together were responsible for about 60% of that amount, or 320 million opioids.

The companies countered that they were simply filling orders for legal opioids and shipping the drugs to licensed pharmacies that filled legitimate prescriptions. Their defense lasted only a few days after the fall of the city, which lasted several weeks.

Baltimore chose a risky legal strategy to raise as much money as possible for opioid cleanup. Most of the companies sued by Baltimore chose to settle, netting the city more than $400 million from pharmaceutical giants like Walgreens and Johnson & Johnson.

That's more than the entire state of Maryland will receive under a massive “global settlement” with Johnson & Johnson and the “big three” opioid distributors McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health. Baltimore refused to participate in this settlement and pursued its lawsuit alone.

Drug distributors act as intermediaries between drug manufacturers and pharmacies and hospitals that dispense medications to patients and customers. The city's lawsuit originally targeted companies from other parts of the opioid supply chain, such as drug manufacturers.

Baltimore's lawsuit focused on a small group of pharmacies that the city alleged had clear warning signs of opioid diversion that the drug distributors should have recognized. A city expert, DEA veteran and former interim Baltimore Police Commissioner Gary Tuggle, estimated that the companies should have classified thousands of orders as “suspicious” instead of shipping them to Baltimore pharmacies.

“I saw very little due diligence and the due diligence that I did see was woefully inadequate,” Tuggle said during his testimony.

“Aside from regulation, I believe there is an inherent responsibility to exercise due diligence in ensuring public safety,” he said.

The city sought more than $260 million in damages for past and future costs related to the opioid epidemic, including policing, emergency medical services and public health measures. Punitive damages, intended to punish defendants for particularly rough behavior, were taken off the table at the start of the trial.

There will also be a second phase of the trial to determine how much abatement money drug companies may have to pay. That money would be in addition to the city's regular costs for everyday problems related to the opioid crisis, such as needle cleanups in public parks, and would go toward addiction treatment and other programs to stem the epidemic.

This is a developing story.

Madeleine O'Neill is a freelance journalist based in Baltimore.