Wyandotte Co. sues opioid industry, joining other Kansas, Missouri localities
Wyandotte County joined the parade of local governments lining up to sue opioid manufacturers and distributors Tuesday, filing suit in federal court against 14 industry giants and their affiliates.
Wyandotte County is at least the 20th local government in Kansas and Missouri to file suit against the companies, accusing them of getting rich by hooking people on pain meds while costing citizens large amounts of money in health care and law enforcement to deal with drug addiction, diversion and overdoses.
“The manufacturers aggressively pushed highly addictive, dangerous opioids, falsely representing to doctors that patients would only rarely succumb to drug addiction,” the Wyandotte County suit says. “The wholesale distributors, along with the manufacturers, in turn intentionally and/or unlawfully breached their legal duties under federal and state law to monitor, detect, investigate, refuse and report suspicious orders of prescription opiates.”
More than 1,000 similar suits have been filed by cities and counties across the country. They’re all being gathered in a federal court in Cleveland, where a judge has urged the parties involved to reach a master settlement similar to one forged between states and tobacco companies in 1998. In October, the judge rebuffed the opioid companies’ request to dismiss one of the suits, and trials are scheduled to start next year.
In July, The Star published a list of 16 Kansas and Missouri cities and counties known to be participating in the litigation. Since then, Jackson County, Kansas City and Overland Park have added their names to the list. Most are represented by Wagstaff and Cartmell, the Kansas City law firm that filed the Wyandotte County suit.
The latest suit says that Kansas has an opioid prescription rate of 93.8 retail prescriptions per year for every 100 residents, which ranks 16th highest in the nation (though the rate was only 66.9 per 100 people in Johnson County). Wyandotte County’s rate was lower, at 71.5 prescriptions per year per 100 residents.
Kansas’ rate of emergency room visits due to opioid misuse in 2015 was 101 per 100,000 people, and there were 146 opioid-related overdose deaths in the state in 2016.
The top named defendant in the latest suit is AmerisourceBergen Drug Corporation, a Pennsylvania-based prescription drug wholesaler.
