By Randy Ludlow, The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS – Attorney General Mike DeWine is demanding that drug makers and distributors pay a not-insignificant price as restitution for what he sees as their role in enslaving and killing Ohioans with prescription opioids.
READ MORE: In The Columbus Dispatch
DeWine on Monday gave five drug makers and three distributors 30 days to begin negotiating a financial settlement to help the state improve opioid addiction treatment and prevention.
DeWine announced that he sent letters to drug companies he now is suing for damages and to distributors, including Dublin-based Cardinal Health, to pay their “fair share” for an opioid crisis that claimed 4,050 lives last year, a 33 percent increase from 2015.
“These drug companies have laid waste to our state as only the worst plague could do,” DeWine said. “They have destroyed families, they have made children orphans, they have weakened our economy and they have caused parents to do the worst thing they have to do, and that is to bury their own children.
“Despite making billions, billions of dollars, for these drugs, they have done comparatively little” to help fight and treat opioid addiction first fueled for many by pain-pill prescriptions, he said.
DeWine had not previously acknowledged that he would sue drug distributors for their alleged failure to police and report excessive, suspicious opioid orders, but he heavily hinted at such a move on Monday.
“We’re very close to a decision and announcement whether we file a lawsuit against” the drug distributors, including McKesson and Amerisource Bergen, for “flooding the state with pills that they knew far exceeded legitimate medical need,” DeWine said.
DeWine is a candidate for governor next year. He sent a letter to the drug companies Monday regarding settlement talks.
A message was left with the companies that have previously said DeWine failed to prove the their actions caused the alleged harm.