Rebecca Haffajee and Michelle Mello: Drug Companies' Liability for the Opioid Epidemic

N Engl J Med. 2017 Dec 14;377(24):2301-2305. doi: 10.1056/NEJMp1710756.

Drug Companies' Liability for the Opioid Epidemic.

Haffajee RL1, Mello MM1.

Author information

1

From the Department of Health Management and Policy, University of Michigan School of Public Health, Ann Arbor (R.L.H); and Stanford Law School and the Department of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA (M.M.M.).

"Notwithstanding the $600 million federal settlement with Purdue in 2007 — one of the largest in history with a drug company — opioid litigation has yet to financially dent the $13-billion-a-year opioid industry. Moreover, opioid litigation victories have all taken the form of settlements, in which companies usually have not admitted any fault. Even when litigation costs have no prospect of exceeding the economic benefits of continuing to produce a dangerous product, though, litigation can have value as a public health strategy and may mitigate some harms of the opioid epidemic."