May 19, 2022
A San Francisco Fire Department official testified in a bellwether opioid bench trial Thursday that opioid abuse has become so prevalent in the city that emergency responders now treat an average of seven overdoses daily, whereas public overdoses were a rare occurrence in the early 2000s.
May 17, 2022
Teva unit Cephalon saw sales of its opioid lollipop Actiq soar after it began marketing the product for non-FDA approved off-label uses, a judge heard Tuesday in recorded testimony from ex-Cephalon employees in a bellwether trial over claims the drugmaker and others illegally fueled San Francisco's opioid epidemic.
May 17, 2022
Two Northeast Ohio counties on Tuesday deployed a lawyer known for his folksy trial persona to cross-examine two expert witnesses for three major pharmacy chains that are trying to minimize how much they will have to pay after a jury found them liable for their role in the opioid epidemic.
May 16, 2022
Walgreens tracked the prescription habits of doctors but didn't make the database available to stores because it might "cloud" the judgment of a pharmacist filling a prescription, a judge heard in recorded testimony Monday in a bellwether trial over claims that Walgreens and others illegally fueled San Francisco's opioid epidemic.
May 16, 2022
A Stanford University professor told a judge Monday that three pharmacy chains should pay a small fraction of the roughly $875 million that two Northeast Ohio counties seek for the role a jury found the pharmacies played in the opioid crisis, arguing that the plaintiffs' experts botched some calculations.
May 12, 2022
A former Walgreens pharmacist felt pressured to "fill, fill, fill" prescriptions while working at a pace that made her fear making fatal errors, a California federal judge heard in recorded testimony Thursday in a multibillion-dollar bellwether trial over claims Walgreens and others illegally fueled San Francisco's opioid epidemic.
May 11, 2022
The increasing numbers of opioids ordered by Walgreens pharmacies after 2010 felt like an uncontrollable "ticking time bomb," a former warehouse manager for the company said in recorded testimony screened Wednesday at a bellwether trial over claims the drugstore giant and others illegally fueled San Francisco's opioid epidemic.
May 11, 2022
An opioid trial to determine remedies after a jury verdict against CVS, Walgreens and Walmart commenced colorfully and combatively Tuesday as plaintiffs counsel floated metaphors involving spaghetti and cake, pharmacies encountered judicial pushback when challenging a key expert, and former jurors took Law360 behind the scenes of their deliberations.
May 10, 2022
The medical director overseeing San Francisco's health programs for the city's homeless population compared their "catastrophic" number of opioid deaths to the 1990s AIDS epidemic during testimony Tuesday in a bellwether federal trial over claims Walgreens, Allergan, Teva and Anda illegally fueled the public health crisis.
May 09, 2022
A Stanford addiction expert who's testified in numerous trials brought by governments blaming drugmakers and others for the opioid epidemic testified Monday in San Francisco that doctors, pharmacists and patients were exposed to a "massive misinformation campaign that downplayed the risks and overstated the benefits" of the addictive painkillers.