New York City Sues Drug Companies Over Opioid Crisis

NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday announced that New York City had filed a lawsuit against the manufacturers and distributors of opioid prescription drugs, joining a national campaign to hold the companies responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in costs related to the deadly opioid epidemic.

It was the second time this month — and the second time in his just-begun sophomore term — that de Blasio has held a news conference to herald legal action taken against corporate giants that he blames for problems that affect the city and beyond. On Jan. 10, he said the city was suing major oil companies, with the aim of collecting damages to cover the city’s costs in responding to climate change.

The lawsuits appeared to be a new favored tactic by de Blasio in his ongoing effort to take on issues with national scope, raising his profile outside New York City as he does so.

“It is a national tragedy,” de Blasio said of addiction to opioids. “It needs a national solution.” He spoke at a news conference at a community center in the Bronx where he was joined by a mother who said her son died of an overdose of opioids, and city officials charged with combating the worsening scourge of overdoses.

“It’s time for Big Pharma to pay for what they’ve done,” he said — an echo of two weeks earlier where he spoke of “big oil” during a news conference on the climate change lawsuit, and later in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post.

In announcing both suits, de Blasio and his staff likened the efforts to litigation targeting tobacco companies, and suggested that the goals were similar: compensation for city spending to address problems caused by the company’s products, and a change in future corporate behavior.

The city’s top lawyer, Zachary W. Carter, acknowledged that the city would look to take legal action in cases “when the target is an industry that’s causing harm.” But he rejected the notion that the two suits represented any new initiative in city government. “That really is a coincidence of timing,” he said.

Indeed, in 2000, under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the city sued gun manufacturers and distributors claiming they failed to properly monitor sales to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had more luck with a 2006 lawsuit that focused on dealerships in the South that had sold guns used in New York City crimes. Most of the dealers settled.

New York is far from the first to take drug companies to court over the opioid crisis. Chicago did so in 2014 and its case is continuing; city lawyers there have received 10 million pages of documents and conducted hundreds of interviews, according to a spokesman for the Chicago law department, Bill McCaffery.

In the years since, many municipalities have joined a growing legal movement among local leaders seeking to halt the cycle in which opioid analgesics — legal prescriptions — lead to dependence and death, either from the drugs themselves or after users begin to use illegal opiates such as heroin. Philadelphia and Delaware each filed lawsuits in recent days. A lawsuit filed by Oklahoma is expected to go to trial later this year.

In New York state, more than a dozen counties filed suit last year, represented by the law firm Simmons Hanly Conroy that is based in Alton, Illinois. The firm, which is representing localities in about 200 cases around the country, is representing New York City in its suit.

“There’s a new case getting filed every day,” Paul J. Hanly, Jr., who leads the law firm’s New York office, said of the national trend. “We could be in a situation a year from now when there are 1,000 or 2,000 cases.”

As opioids and heroin have claimed an increasing number of lives, New York City has been slow to respond to the crisis. Last year de Blasio announced a plan to reduce opioid deaths through a combination of outreach, treatment and law enforcement.

Though the final tally of overdose deaths from 2017 was not yet available, de Blasio said that more people died last year in New York City from a drug overdose, most involving an opioid, than the combined deaths from car accidents and homicides.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, alleges that the opioid crisis was caused by the deceptive marketing of drugmakers, and by distributors bringing large amounts of prescription painkillers into the New York market. All of this has caused the city to spend millions of dollars on substance abuse treatment programs, hospital services, emergency medical services and law enforcement.

The manufacturers named in the lawsuit include Purdue Pharma, Teva, Cephalon, Johnson & Johnson, Janssen, Endo, Allergan, Watson and various subsidiaries. The distributors include McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen.

“We maintain that the allegations made in these lawsuits against our company are baseless and unsubstantiated,” a spokeswoman for Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Sarah Freeman, said in a statement. “Our actions in the marketing and promotion of our opioid pain medicines were appropriate and responsible.”

A spokesman for Purdue Pharma, John Puskar, said the company was “deeply troubled by the prescription and illicit opioid abuse crisis, and are dedicated to being part of the solution,” and added that it “vigorously” denied the city’s allegations.