Opioid distributors cleared of responsibility for Georgian families ravaged by drug addiction

This case illustrates the enormous difficulties victims of the opioid crisis face in obtaining compensation from the pharmaceutical industry, despite its promise of billions of dollars to state and local governments.

Over the past month, in a Southeast Georgia courtroom, three generations of families have testified about how their lives had been wrecked by addiction to prescription opioids: a young man recounted huddled in a locked room with his brothers, while his father, waving a shotgun, ransacked the house looking for of pills. A mother described holding her granddaughter, while her dopesick daughter rammed a car into the house. A young woman recounts her rape at the age of 14 by a drug trafficker, while her mother falls asleep.

They check off overdose deaths: grandparents, parents , siblings, spouses. And a baby, whose mother injected Dilaudid throughout her pregnancy and who shook uncontrollably throughout her one month life.

After deliberating barely a day and a half, the jury concluded that the companies - two of the largest medical distributors in the country, McKesson and Cardinal Health, and a third regional — were not responsible. The plaintiffs — 21 parents from six families — had sued under a rarely used state law that allows relatives of drug addicts to sue drug dealers.

The outcome of the case highlights a startling reality. The pharmaceutical industry has so far pledged more than $50 billion to settle lawsuits over its role in the opioid epidemic, but the families of those who have died or are still struggling with addiction have almost none got nothing.

The money promised by manufacturers (like Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson), distributors (AmerisourceBergen as well as McKesson and Cardinal) and national chains of pharmacies (like CVS and Walgreens) is for prevention and treatment programs in states, municipalities and tribes that have filed thousands of opioid-related cases. These cases have been supported in large measure by the suffering and statistics of families affected by the opioid crisis.

"It's been so hard to explain to families over the years why a lawsuit against manufacturers, let alone distributors, is so hard to win," said said Jayne Conroy, an attorney who reached a settlement with Purdue Pharma in 2007 for 5,000 people who took OxyContin as prescribed but became addicted, and is now lead counsel for numerous local governments in the national litigation on opioids.

ImageJoseph Poppell, a paramedic fire captain and the lead plaintiff of the ' case, testifying in court on February 3, as seen in a screenshot of a live stream of the proceedings.Credit...Courtroom View Network

The trial in Georgia provided a stark and often unbearably intimate picture of how prescription opioids are ance — and eventually, heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl — destroyed entire homes. But the proceedings also showed how difficult it is to draw a direct line between a company in a complex distribution chain and the misfortunes of individuals.

Law Georgia states that relatives of drug addicts can sue drug traffickers for harms they have suffered from "individual drug users". Even so, the distributors' defense attorneys often turned the case into an addiction referendum, claiming loved ones were suffering at the hands of people who chose the pills over the family.

F. Lane Heard, III, a cardinal attorney, noted that Brandy Turner, a mother of four, took methadone from her mother as payment for household chores and watched her father sell drugs. Ms Tour...