City seeks compensation for costs of ‘deadly proliferation’

The Metro Nashville Government has joined a long list of municipalities and other governments suing prescription opioid distributors and manufacturers in an effort to recoup money spent battling the effects of opioids on residents.

Plaintiffs’ firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein filed the suit late last week on behalf of Nashville, alleging a number of opioid companies employed “misleading promotion and over-supplying,” in turn costing the city in lost productivity, increased social services and additional drug abuse treatments costs.

“Our city has been devastated by opioid addiction and all its related harms,” Mark Chalos, Nashville managing partner at Lieff Cabraser, said in a release. “What we have seen in Nashville and throughout our region, is millions of pills being sold in communities where there aren’t millions of people. It is time the opioid manufacturers and distributors are held accountable for their wrongful conduct that has destroyed families and cost untold millions of taxpayer dollars in Nashville, across Tennessee, and throughout the U.S.”

In November, Metro selected Lieff Cabraser to handle the litigation after considering proposals from five groups of law firms. Nashville Mayor Megan Barry’s 22-year-old son, Max, died of a drug overdose, in part caused by opioids, this summer, after the administration had already begun considering the litigation.

“Every day, the opioid epidemic costs our community in lives lost, families destroyed and financial burdens on city services," Barry told the Post last month. "Outside counsel has been requested in order to determine what role prescription drug companies have played in causing this epidemic. While financial awards do not bring back the lives of those lost, they can hold companies accountable and result in positive change when federal or state regulations fall short.”

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, seeks damages and the creation of an abatement fund as compensation for racketeering, public nuisance, negligence, unjust enrichment, violations of the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act and civil conspiracy.

The defendants include Purdue Pharma, Johnson & Johnson and McKesson Corp., among several other opioid manufacturers and distributors. Representatives for Purdue and McKesson could not immediately be reached for comment, though Sarah Freeman, a spokesperson for Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals, said the company disputes the claims made in the suit.



"We believe the allegations in the lawsuits against our company are both legally and factually unfounded," she said in a statement provided to the Post. "According to independent surveillance data, Janssen opioid pain medicines consistently have some of the lowest rates of abuse among these medications, and since 2008 the volume of Janssen opioid products always has amounted to less than one percent of the total prescriptions written per year for opioid medications, including generics. Addressing opioid abuse will require collaboration among many stakeholders and we will continue to work with federal, state and local officials to support solutions."



Lieff Cabraser added Nashville law firm Manson Johnson Conner as co-counsel on the case after concerns about diversity of the litigation team slowed the Metro Council’s approval of the firm’s engagement for the suit. Metro will not pay Lieff Cabraser up front, but the firm will receive a cut of any damages awarded in the case.



Lieff Cabraser filed a similar suit on behalf of Smith County, Tennessee, earlier in the week. Three district attorneys general in northeast Tennessee filed suit against a number of the same pharmaceutical defendants earlier this year.

Some of the plaintiffs in the Nashville suit recently have been the subject of intense media scrutiny, including a New Yorker investigation into the family behind Purdue Pharma and a 60 Minutes/Washington Post investigation of a dropped prosecution of McKesson.

“Defendants in this lawsuit caused the epidemic,” the plaintiffs write in the lawsuit. “As a result of the conspiracy, Nashville taxpayers have spent tens of millions of dollars and countless resourced to fight the opioid crisis and deal with its effects on their community.”

