(Bloomberg) — New York jurors concluded Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and some of its units helped create a public-health crisis through their marketing and distribution of opioid painkillers across the state.
The Israel-based firm now faces potentially billions of dollars in compensation claims from the state and two Long Island counties accusing Teva executives of flooding their areas with more than a billion opioids pills over nearly a decade and using misleading tactics to sell them.
Kelley Dougherty, a U.S.-based spokeswoman for Teva, didn’t immediately return an email seeking comment Thursday on the jury’s ruling. Teva’s American depository receipts fell as much as 5.3% in New York trading, the most intraday since Nov. 3.
Judge Jerry Garguilo will decide later how much the state and counties should get to beef up treatment and social-service budgets depleted by the U.S. opioid crisis, which has killed more than 500,000 Americans over the last two decades.
Thursday’s verdict is the second in the sprawling, four-year opioid litigation. Municipalities accuse opioid makers, distributors and sellers of downplaying the painkillers’ addiction risks and sacrificing patient safety for billions in profits.
The state-court jury found Teva and subsidiaries including Anda Inc. and Cephalon Inc. created a so-called “public nuisance” by marketing the opioid-based drugs in a misleading manner and not properly monitoring suspicious shipments of the highly addictive painkillers. The panel concluded the marketing “contributed to, or maintained a substantial and unreasonable interference with a public right that amounts to a public nuisance,” according to the verdict form.
The trial over the governments’ claims began in June with more than 30 companies as defendants. By the end, only Teva and its units, including Cephalon Inc., Actavis Pharma and Watson Laboratories Inc., were left to face the six-person jury.
That’s because other opioid makers, including Johnson & Johnson and Endo International Plc, drug distributors such as McKesson Corp. and Cardinal Health Inc. drugstore chains like Rite Aid Inc. and Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., settled to get out of the trial.
The six-month trial, held in Suffolk County on Long Island, featured internal sales-conference videos produced by Cephalon that the governments alleged showed the company pushed opioid sales to beef up bonuses and put profit over consumers’ safety.
The case is In Re Opioid Litigation, Index no. 40000/2017, Supreme Court of New York, Suffolk County.
(Updates with stock move in third paragraph.)
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