The city of Virginia Beach and its sheriff’s office are suing companies like Johnson & Johnson, Wal-Mart, Inc., and Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. for the “costs and financial impacts resulting from the opioid epidemic,” according to a city news release.
These costs include money paid by the locality to provide medical care to those suffering from addiction, including infants born with opioid-related medical conditions. The costs also include money spent on drug treatment, counseling and rehabilitation services, according to the federal lawsuit. Read Virginia Beach’s lawsuit against opioid manufacturers “The addictive nature of prescription opioids are the reason Congress in 1970 designed a system to control the volume of opioid pills being distributed in this country,” Deputy City Attorney Christopher S. Boynton wrote in a press release. “In exchange, those companies agreed to do a very important job - halt suspicious orders and control against the diversion of these dangerous drugs to illegitimate or illegal uses,” Boynton continued. “But in recent years they filed to do that, and today Virginia Beach is among the communities that are paying the price.” More than 520 people have overdosed on opioids in Virginia Beach since 2016. City officials believe that their overdoses are part of a national public health epidemic linked to “the increasingly widespread misuse of powerful opioid pain medications,” the lawsuit states. “The manufacturers aggressively pushed highly addictive, dangerous opioids, falsely representing to doctors that patients would only rarely succumb to drug addiction,” the lawsuit states. “These pharmaceutical companies aggressively advertised to and persuaded doctors to prescribe highly addictive, dangerous opioids, turning patients into drug addicts for their own corporate profit.”
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