Now they do.

For the time being, the judge will not release the data to the public. But a passage from a congressional report gives a sense of the granular information in the data: during 10 months in 2007, one distributor, McKesson, shipped three million prescription opioids to a single pharmacy in a West Virginia town with 400 residents.

The data has turned out to be a modest help to some of the defendant companies, too: because the D.E.A. reports show that certain medications were not sold in large quantities in some communities, companies that make and distribute them have been dropped from a few cases. In the Cuyahoga County, Ohio lawsuit, for example, the Kroger Company, which owns grocery stores that include pharmacies, was dropped because they turned out not to have a location in the area.

Going to trial is a win for plaintiffs

In a 39-page decision last month, Judge Polster shot down the drug industry’s efforts to dismiss the Ohio trial. Instead, h e gave the lawyers the go-ahead to test just about every legal theory the plaintiffs raised.

They include: that the companies conspired; committed fraud; were negligent; violated public nuisance laws — this last being a relatively recent, novel way for communities to redress health crises.

Of course, legal theory is one thing. Next comes the hard part: the plaintiffs will actually have to prove those allegations to a jury.

The companies demand personal medical records

Typically, patients who sue for medical malpractice or product liability must turn over their own medical records as proof. They forfeit conventional privacy rights.

Here, the overwhelming majority of plaintiffs are government entities, not individuals. They are seeking to be reimbursed for the accumulated costs of drug addiction and its collateral damage. The defendants want them to produce precise evidence showing how those costs are calculated, including the chain of events — for example, from a drug’s development, to its delivery, to a pharmacy-filled prescription to, eventually, bills from hospitals and others.