SEATTLE — Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson on Thursday continued his legal offensive against companies that have profited from opioids, announcing a new lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson and a subsidiary.
The 78-page complaint, filed Thursday in King County Superior Court, asks that Johnson & Johnson pay the state the amount of money the company has made from selling opioids in Washington, in addition to civil penalties and damages. That precise dollar figure is unknown (it would surface during the discovery period of the lawsuit), but Ferguson said he’s confident it’s in the millions. Any money the state receives would be put toward opioid addiction prevention and treatment, Ferguson said.
The lawsuit is part of Ferguson’s legal strategy to bring cases he believes the state can win against companies that either manufacture or distribute prescription opioids such as oxycodone.
Johnson & Johnson, along with its subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceutical, not only is a manufacturer of prescription opioids but also has developed and sold the raw ingredients for the medications to other manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma, Ferguson said. The state’s top lawyer brought a complaint against Purdue Pharma in 2017. A trial date next month was superseded by Purdue filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
In a press conference announcing the lawsuit, Ferguson — flanked by his legal team and two mothers who lost children to opioid addiction — ticked off a litany of grim statistics, such as two Washingtonians die every day from opioid overdoes and between 2006 and 2017, 8,000 people in Washington died from opioid overdoes, a number greater than people killed from car accidents or firearms.
“Opioids are devastating our families,” he said. A 2018 survey of staff from the AG’s office who work on child-neglect cases say opioids are involved in approximately half of cases of children being removed from their parents, he added.
The state’s latest lawsuit is one of many being brought by local governments across the country. In October last year, Johnson & Johnson reached an agreement for more than $20 million with two Ohio counties. About a month before the Ohio agreement an Oklahoma judge ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $572 million because of its marketing of opioids in that state.
More needs to be done to support people struggling with opioids, said Lisa Janicki who is a Skagit County Commissioner and on the county’s board of health. Janicki explained how the youngest of her five children, who was a college graduate, an Eagle Scout and Rotarian, struggled with opioids after a back injury at 20-years-old. Patrick Janicki died from opioids in 2017.
Patrick had health insurance and support, yet still died from opioids, Janicki said. She said her son’s treatment and death highlight the need for more to be done on the prevention, treatment and support end of the opioid problem.
“It has instilled in me a resolve to bring back to our community the funding, the programs, the people so that families do not have to go through this,” she said. “When we are losing our children we are failing.”
A lawsuit Ferguson brought last year against three opioid distributors — McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen Drug — is set for an October trial.
The new complaint explains how in the 1990s Johnson & Johnson subsidiaries, including Janssen, set out to develop a new variety of poppy —a necessary component to manufacture opioid drugs —to meet the anticipated demand for the growth of oxycodone. The resulting raw products were then shipped to U.S. opioid manufacturers.
