Quite frankly this should send chills up your spine and maybe "Big Pharma" may have a pill for that! A company that makes and sells a legal product has just been ordered to pay the State of Oklahoma $572 billion in a landmark opioid case. It could have been worse--much worse--since the state was asking for $17 billion. The company is one of our icons, Johnson & Johnson which most of us know from their over-the-counter (OTC) products especially their bandages that are so popular we use their brand name for the generic term, Band-Aid. America loves J&J, until recently anyway, that showed itself 37 years ago when the way drugs and other products are packaged these days. Between September and October of 1982 banner headlines were made in what was dubbed the Chicago Tylenol Murders; a series of poisoning deaths resulting from drug tampering in the Chicago metropolitan area where the victims had all taken Tylenol-branded acetaminophen capsules that had been tainted with potassium cyanide. Seven people died in the original poisonings and several more in subsequent copycat crimes. Investigators cleared J&J and their manufacturing facility and employees almost immediately. The case has never been solved but Johnson & Johnson, which manufactures Tylenol, took immediate action by recalling every bottle nationwide (image the revenue loss!), The CEO took to the media--I remember him on ABC's Nightline and other programs profusely apologizing to the American public and assuring us that they were doing everything possible to keep this from ever happening again. They quit producing Tylenol in capsule form going instead to tablets which are far harder to compromise, they literally invented some of the things we have today making it so much harder to get into OTC products. Everything from the caps to seals on the bottles. The CEO was sincere and came across well on the air and America sympathized with him and the company.
Now Johnson & Johnson finds itself in this fight with Oklahoma and several other states with hundreds of cases yet to be heard. And while $572-million is a far cry from $17 billion...that ain't hay and there are if all the other suits have a similar settlement it could destroy one of the great pharmaceutical companies in the world. The war on "Big Pharma" is raging and it's costing us in more ways than one. One of the reasons it's so tough to get flu vaccines is because we've turned suing into a national pastime. When I was a kid I got pneumonia and a shot of penicillin saved my life. However, some people had a bad reaction--and perhaps some even died--taking it. But that was the early 50s and we didn't have as many "slip-and-fall" lawyers running around wanting to sue a manufacturer just because someone had a bad, or fatal, reaction. Our bodies are all different and we react differently to medicines, just listen to the disclaimers at the end of the drug commercials today. By the time they read all the possible reactions to controlled substances you get the feeling the cure is worse than the disease. It's been said that if aspirin were developed today, it too would be prescription-required.
The Oklahoma attorney general appeared today on Fox News claimed that J&J was almost completely responsible for the opioid crisis and deaths and addiction, not the people who take it. His (and the state's claim) that J&J was over-producing the product, providing other companies with the main ingredient from their poppy farm in Australia and were underplaying the addictive dangers of the drug. This is the world we live in today...it's not YOUR fault, it's the manufacturer. Cigarettes have had a cancer warning on the package since I was a sophomore in high school and believe me that's been awhile. Yet "Big Tobacco" has been targeted by the "ambulance chasing" crowd and have had to pay out tens of billions of dollars that we were told was going to pay for the health care of victims and reduce medical costs. So far as I can tell it's helped the attorneys get their Mercedes, BMWs, Jaguars and houses at the Hamptons and the like, but did the hospitals, doctors or nurses ever get any of that money? Anti-smoking campaigns were all over the airwaves and when it was discovered that kids were starting to smoke at earlier ages, the people who are so much smarter than you and I are, told us that the cartoon character Joe Camel on Camel cigarettes was the reason. There was no answer to our question of why kids continued to smoke even after Reynolds Tobacco sent ol' Joe to the cartoon graveyard. Then the radical anti-smoking do gooders decided that tobacco companies should start putting pictures of cancer-infected lungs on their packaging! So I suppose the gun makers should put pictures of mass shootings on their cases...and auto companies should make their dealers put pictures of car accidents in their windows.
Drug companies spend billions of dollars brining any product to market. It takes years and it has to go through years of testing and there's no guarantee it'll be approved for public sale. They have to recoup their costs even though it's sometimes pretty steep. They are not intentionally trying to get you hooked on their product but it happens and even the company involved may not know of the consequences somewhere down the road. I have a friend who needs one of these products and is having a heck of a time getting it now to the point where he has to resort to taking ten or more OTC products which are not good for his liver or kidneys. It's going to scare other companies from making some of these products just like the flu vaccine where we have shortages during the flu season because only two or three companies still make them when there used to be ten or twenty or more. And the "anti-vaccine" crowd isn't helping either. This is scary. It's going to make drugs cost more and research will decline as well and that could be fatal in more ways than one!