While the crisis originated in the overprescribing of painkillers in the 1990s, prescription rates have fallen drastically and most opioid deaths are now caused by illegal drugs like heroin and fentanyl, a synthetic that can be over 50 times more potent than heroin and is often imported from China by way of Mexico. In 2017, synthetic opioids caused more than 28,000 of the 47,600 opioid overdose deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Going after American pharmaceutical executives, Mr. Lehman writes, will do little to reduce the number of overdoses:

Prosecuting bad actors in the pharmaceutical industry is reasonable for correcting past injustices. But we cannot allow it to blind us to where the real problems now lie. … Today drug-enforcement and public-health officials need to spend their energies controlling the border; pushing China and Mexico to crack down on drug cartels; and providing expanded treatment, harm reduction and education.

Bringing opioid companies to court is a moral and strategic necessity

Barry Meier , one of the first journalists to expose the overprescribing of opioids, writes in The Times that court trials, rather than settlements, may be needed to get to the truth. By settling for money, government officials forfeit the ability to gather information that drug companies have fought to keep secret, like when executives knew about the public health crisis they were causing. Mr. Meier writes:

There is little question that settling the current wave of opioid-related lawsuits could bring much-needed addiction treatment to communities nationwide. But in taking the industry’s money quickly, the public will lose its last opportunities to find out about the reckless ways that makers and distributors of opioids acted in pursuit of profit.

Many also believe that pharmaceutical executives should face criminal charges, not just civil ones. “I will tell you as a former prosecutor, I do think of this as being a matter of justice and accountability because they are nothing more than some high-level dope dealers,” Senator Kamala Harris said during last week’s Democratic presidential debate when asked if opioid executives should go to prison.

Criminal prosecution, some say, may deter companies from profiting from similar disasters in the future. In Vox, German Lopez notes that the Sacklers, the family behind the OxyContin producer Purdue Pharma, will most likely pay billions of dollars in fines but walk away from the crisis still billionaires.

Keith Humphreys, a drug policy expert at Stanford University, told Mr. Lopez:

If [the Sacklers] have the perception — and it’s the correct perception — that “people like us just don’t go to jail, we just don’t, so the worst that’s going to happen is you take some reputational stings and you’ll have to write a check,” that seems like a recipe for nurturing criminality. … It would be a powerful deterrent within that group that yes, in fact, no matter how many country clubs you belong to and how many museums you endow, you can still end up behind bars.

The opioid crisis is a symptom of a larger problem

The conservative Times columnist Ross Douthat is one of many observers who have taken a broader view of the opioid epidemic, presenting it as part of the deeper crisis of “deaths of despair” — a term for the rise in deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug abuse since the turn of the century.

In Mr. Douthat’s estimation, the plague of meaninglessness afflicting the country is in all likelihood a product of profound, interlocking social deficiencies that will resist targeted, technocratic cures. He writes:

If we’re going to answer whatever is killing tens of thousands of our countrymen, it’s as important to pay attention to the would-be cultural healers — from the old churches to the New Agers, the online Nietzscheans to the neo-pagans, Jordan Peterson to Marianne Williamson — as it is to have the policy conversations about what’s possible in the next presidential term.

In a similar vein, Anne Case, professor of economics and public affairs emeritus at Princeton, and Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics, write in The Washington Post that “opioids are like guns handed out in a suicide ward; they have certainly made the total epidemic much worse, but they are not the cause of the underlying depression.” They add:

We suspect that deaths of despair among those without a university degree are primarily the result of a 40-year stagnation of median real wages and a long-term decline in the number of well-paying jobs for those without a bachelor’s degree. Falling labor force participation, sluggish wage growth, and associated dysfunctional marriage and child-rearing patterns have undermined the meaning of working people’s lives as well.

These are not arguments against litigation per se, but rather a recognition that despair — whether one locates its causes in secularization, as Mr. Douthat is perhaps inclined to, or in economic stagnation, as Ms. Case and Mr. Deaton do, or in something else entirely — is not a problem that society can sue itself out of.

WHAT’S NEXT

Hours after the Ohio settlement was reached on Monday, a bipartisan group of four state attorneys general proposed an updated version of a nationwide deal to settle with major drug companies for $48 billion.