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Oklahoma’s top court...declined to delay a landmark trial set for May in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit accusing OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP and two other drugmakers of helping fuel an opioid abuse and overdose epidemic in the state...The Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision was a win for the state’s attorney general, whose case is set to be the first to face trial of roughly 2,000 lawsuits nationally seeking to hold opioid manufacturers responsible for contributing to the epidemic...Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter’s 2017 lawsuit accuses Purdue, Johnson & Johnson & Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd of engaging in deceptive marketing that downplayed the risks of addiction associated with opioid pain drugs while overstating their benefits...READ MORE

First lady Melania Trump is asking the public to look beyond the raw numbers and to see the opioid crisis as a "human story."...Mrs. Trump says that by thinking of the faces behind the statistics "we have the potential to not just reduce, but eliminate" the tens of thousands of deaths that are attributed to opioids annually. Federal statistics show that nearly 48,000 Americans died in 2017 after overdosing on the powerful painkillers...The first lady spoke Tuesday during a town hall-style conversation in Las Vegas on the opioid epidemic. She is using the event to close a two-day, three-state tour to promote her "Be Best" initiative, which includes a focus on babies born dependent on opioids...READ MORE

The judge presiding over all the federal cases had hoped to settle them by now. But the behemoth litigation is only becoming more bloated, contentious and difficult to resolve...Judge Dan Aaron Polster will preside over three consolidated lawsuits as a bellwether, or test case, in one of the most complicated legal battles in U.S. history...

Uncontested:The devastation from prescription opioids has been deadly and inordinately expensive

Contested: Who should foot the bill?

...litigation has ballooned to 1,548 federal court cases, brought on behalf of cities and counties, 77 tribes, hospitals, union benefit funds, infants with neonatal abstinence syndrome and others — in total, millions of people. With a potential payday amounting to tens of billions of dollars...

- Stunning evidence from D.E.A. records
- Going to trial is a win for plaintiffs
- The companies demand personal medical records
- Meanwhile, the plaintiffs pursue their own paper chase
- Drugstores could be held responsible for black-market fentanyl
- Why drug companies could have an upper hand
- But don't count out the plaintiffs
- But wait! There’s more!

A report from the majority staff of the House Energy and Commerce Committee found that distributors, which fulfill orders for prescription drugs to pharmacies, failed to conduct proper oversight of their customers by not questioning suspicious activity and not properly monitoring the quantity of painkillers that were being shipped to individual pharmacies...The committee also found that the DEA did not properly use a database that aims to monitor the flow of powerful prescription painkillers from manufacturers to sellers, something that could have allowed federal agents — in real time —...The agency also curtailed enforcement of distributors...and infighting inside the agency affected the way cases were handled...

Tasmania could become the first state in Australia to introduce pill testing, with the push gaining support from a maverick Liberal MP and the Dark Mofo festival, which may go it alone to offer a testing service...Festival organisers are meeting with Pill Testing Australia, which conducted the country's first pill testing trial in the ACT last year...Six people have died from suspected drug overdoses at music festivals across Australia this year, prompting renewed calls for testing to be rolled out nationwide...Australia's first pill testing trial was held at Canberra's Groovin the Moo festival last year after being approved by the ACT Government. A second trial will be held at the event this year...READ MORE

Purdue Pharma may file for bankruptcy to get out from under thousands of lawsuits blaming the opioid maker and its aggressive marketing for the addiction crisis...The drugmaker is battling a weight of litigation, including state claims that target its executives and founding family, claiming it misled doctors and patients and marketed its painkillers too aggressively, helping to create a nationwide opioid crisis. Now, the company is exploring bankruptcy as a way to cope with the amassing litigation...A bankruptcy filing would halt proceedings in the lawsuits and allow Purdue to negotiate with plaintiffs under the watch of a bankruptcy judge...READ MORE

Researchers are reporting a link between doctor-targeted marketing of opioid products and the increase in U.S. deaths from overdoses...In a county-by-county analysis, they found that when drug companies increased their opioid marketing budgets by just $5.29 per 1,000 population, the number of opioid prescriptions written by doctors went up by 82 percent and the opioid death rate was 9 percent higher a year later...“It really doesn’t take much marketing to increase the number of deaths,” lead author Dr. Scott Hadland...Jordan Trecki of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration warns that the new analysis only addresses part of the problem...“As the opioid epidemic grows, it is evolving beyond prescription medications and heroin to involve illicitly produced fentanyl, fentanyl-related substances and other opioids, either alone or in combination,”...

China...is the main source of the fentanyl coming into the United States...There are several reasons China is not helping…

First...China doesn’t do a good job of regulating its chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Producers have close relations with local Communist Party officials whose main focus is on keeping the economy humming, and not on the health and well-being of Americans thousands of miles away.

Second...no serious push from the top of the Communist Party to break this logjam. Fentanyl is hard to stop because most countries, including China and the United States, place specific chemicals on a control list. All you have to do to keep a fentanyl-like drug off the list is to tweak a few molecules...

Behind these bureaucratic snafus, however, lies something deeper...inside China’s system there’s no shortage of historical schadenfreude about the fact that the United States is dealing with a drug epidemic from China, almost two centuries after China dealt with an opioid crisis from the West...READ MORE

But in New Hampshire, Gov. Chris Sununu and some other state leaders are opposed. The problem, they say, is not just about pot. It’s about opioids — drugs that have ripped across this state, devastating thousands of residents and leaving New Hampshire in recent years with one of the highest per capita death rates from opioid-related overdoses. After so many deaths, so much misery and so much state money spent fighting opioids, the opponents say, how could anyone even think about easing access to some other drug?...Mr. Sununu called the debate over marijuana legalization “the next major battle” in the state’s response to the opioid crisis. He urged the commission, which includes medical and drug treatment experts, as well as the heads of various state departments, to take an official position opposing the legislation, which it did at its meeting last month...

Barbara McAneny, president of the American Medical Association, recently described a patient with metastatic prostate cancer who tried to kill himself after he could not get the medication he was prescribed for bone pain because...his insurer...denied coverage...my patient nearly died of an underdose...McAneny was talking about the suffering caused by government pressure to reduce opioid prescriptions, which has led to denials of treatment and arbitrary dose reductions...A Medicare rule that take effect on January 1 will compound that problem...