BRUNSWICK, Ga. (Legal Newsline) - Just three days after it started, a trial in Georgia accusing three distributors of oversupplying prescription opioid pills and recklessly causing public harm was shut down because of an outbreak of the COVID virus in the courtroom.
Lead attorneys in the case as well as Glynn County Superior Court Judge Roger Lane declined to elaborate who was affected. The trial was expected to last four weeks and was being streamed live courtesy of Courtroom View Network.
The civil case was a first because it was filed by 21 individual residents against opioid distributors McKesson, Cardinal Health and JM Smith---not by a state or local government as in past trials. The trial was being closely followed for the precedent-setting outcome that could result.
No word was given on when the trial might resume.
The plaintiffs included adults and their children who claimed the oversupply of available prescription opioids had caused the death of a family member or caused them physical and mental harm. In the case of the Miller family, Kim Miller, a mother became addicted to the pills after a surgery, and family members became addicted including the husband who lost his construction business and a daughter (Kloie Miller) who attempted suicide.
The family ended up living in hotel rooms and selling drugs to continue their addiction, court records said.
Another family - the Guest family - was devastated by the death of the father Michael who died from drug use in 2011 after taking pills to deal with the pain from a car accident. Court testimony said Guest received up to 300 hydrocodone pills in a day.
In one case, a baby born addicted to an addicted mother smothered when the mother (under the influence) rolled over on top of the baby in a bed.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs said tens of millions of pills were distributed in the period of the early 2000s through 2019 through facilities they called “pill mills.” They said 99% of individual doctors were behaving responsibly.
In opening remarks, lead plaintiff attorney Jim Durham with the Atlanta-based Griffin, Durham, Tanner, Clarkson law firm said the three companies knew full well their oversupplying of opioids was harming the public but ignored it to make profits.
“These distributors knew what was going on,” he said. “As opioid supplies go up, so do deaths. It correlates. They (companies) swore to protect public health and safety, but profit was king.”
Defense attorneys, as they have in other trials, countered the illegal abuse of street drugs like heroin and fentanyl were the cause of the problem and not companies legally supplying requests for orders of pain-killing drugs that came from pharmacies.
The attorney for McKesson, Randy Jordan with the Savannah-based firm of HunterMaclean, said his client was being blamed for the misbehavior and bad parenting habits of others.
"McKesson doesn’t make drugs or prescribe them,” Jordan said. “It’s a delivery company, a conduit. Some of the parents (plaintiffs) did drugs and some had criminal records and these were serious crimes, theft and assault. There are instances of physical abuse, a mom beaten up (by husband) in a home where there are children.”
Jordan said in effect the plaintiffs and their attorneys were calling the three companies “drug dealers.”
The three days of the trial saw witnesses called by plaintiff lawyers including Dr. Arwen Podesta, a Tulane University addiction psychologist, and Howard Loshin, a computer science specialist at the University of Maryland. In addition, James Rafalski, former DEA special investigator from 2002 to 2017, told the court the anti-drug diversion programs of the three companies were “fatally flawed.”
“There was not a comprehensive reason (for increased dispensing),” Rafalski said, adding that requests to release more drugs from distributors were made almost “automatically,” and that threshold amounts of pills were increased.
Rafalski said the anti-diversion programs of Cardinal Health and McKesson had not prevented diversion (drugs getting into the wrong hands).
Pharmacies including the Darien Pharmacy in the town of that name and the Altama Pharmacy in Brunswick were both accused of dispensing too many pills. According to the Brunswick News, the Altama Discount Pharmacy upped its prescription of opioids by three times from 2008 to 2010.
In 2019, a pharmacist at the Darien facility pleaded guilty to lying about filling prescriptions to high-volume-opioid doctors.