America’s opioid epidemic will go down in history alongside the Spanish flu, typhoid, polio and AIDS as one of our worst public health disasters. Between 1999 and 2017, almost 218,000 people in the United States died from overdoses connected to prescription opioids, and almost as many more died from overdoses connected to illicit opioids. Of the 70,000 drug overdose deaths in 2017, two-thirds of them were opioid-connected. Deaths continue at the rate of 130 a day.

The impact on our health care system and our hospitals has been staggering. Since 2001, it is estimated that the opioid epidemic has imposed more than $216 billion in health costs, with more to come, as people continue to live with addiction and the lingering health effects of opioid abuse. This has directly affected our nation’s hospitals, which provide billions of dollars of unreimbursed care.

A generation ago, states responded to the public health costs of smoking with lawsuits, leading to a $246 billion settlement in 1998 with tobacco companies. Today, state and local governments across America are seeking compensation in court from those at the heart of the opioid epidemic: the drug companies that made and marketed opioids and their distributors.

The manufacturers of prescription opioids are alleged to have grossly misrepresented the risks of long-term use of those drugs for people with chronic pain, and distributors allegedly failed to properly monitor suspicious orders of those prescription drugs. Many of these lawsuits have been bundled together into the National Prescription Opioid Litigation in federal court in Cleveland.