GOSHEN – Orange County
District Attorney David Hoovler has asked County Executive Steven Neuhaus
and the county legislature to study the fesibility of filing a lawsuit
against several manufacturers of opiate pain medication.
The lawsuit would allege that those companies used deceptive practices
in marketing opiate painkillers, resulting in significant over-prescription
of opiates, and leading to the addictionl of several county residents,
a number of overdose deaths, and significant costs to the county to combat
the consequences of those over-prescriptions.
Hoover said 65 county residents had died of opiate-related overdoses in
2016 with an additional 10 cases from last year awaiting toxicology results.
The Port Jervis area alone saw four overdose cases in the last week.
In 2014, Orange County had a rate of overdose deaths three times that
of several other upstate counties, Hoovler said.
So far in New York State, Nassau, Suffolk, Erie and Broome counties have
filed similar lawsuits and Schenectady County is considering filing one.
Counties in West Virginia; Orange County, California; Chicago, Illinois;
and Everett, Washington also filed lawsuits.
“It is no secret that the county and most of the United States are
in the midst of an opiate ‘epidemic’ involving thousands of
people being addicted to prescription opiates and often, as a later result,
to heroin,” Hoovler said. “Many sources suggest that the opiate
crisis is a result of aggressive and misleading advertising and marketing
that the opiate manufacturers use in order to create a large market for
their products.”
Hoovler said the conduct of those manufacturers “rivals that of
the tobacco companies, which resulted in past decades in large recoveries
in lawsuits, brought by individuals and government entities against those
companies.”
He told the county officials “we owe it to our citizens to join
in this litigation, in an effort to protect against future cases of addiction
and to recoup some of the significant funds that the county has expended
in combating the opioid epidemic.”
