Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter said Wednesday he believes evidence has shown that Johnson and Johnson was a “kingpin” in an opioid crisis that has killed about 7,000 Oklahomans as the midpoint was reached in a Cleveland County District Court trial.
“We’ve demonstrated that the defendant engaged in shadowy collaborations and conspiracies with other opioid manufacturers to … brainwash prescribers with pseudoscience and false studies and to suborn policy makers from addressing the epidemic in a decisive way,” Hunter said during a brief hallway news conference. “They’ve marketed … highly addictive opioids as safe, with a low rate of addiction, whenever their internal medical advisory board advised them not to do so.”
John Sparks, Oklahoma counsel for Johnson & Johnson and Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., issued a news release Wednesday that presented a far different opinion of the evidence presented in the case to date than the one offered by the attorney general.
“For four weeks, we have heard the State make vague, one-size-fits-all claims without any evidence that the company caused opioid abuse or misuse in Oklahoma,” Sparks said. “Facts matter, and as we have said from the beginning and look forward to showing again in our case, the company’s marketing was squarely within the regulations, and it did everything a responsible manufacturer and seller of opioid pain medications should do. The facts will also show the company’s medicines have helped patients with pain.”
After 22 days of testimony, the state essentially completed presenting its case Wednesday in a trial where Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiaries have been accused of creating a public nuisance through false and deceptive marketing efforts that understated the addictive properties of opioid painkillers while overstating their therapeutic benefits.
Johnson & Johnson attorneys are scheduled to begin calling their witnesses 8:30 a.m. Thursday, although attorneys for the state have been granted permission to present one additional witness later in the trial because that witness is on vacation.
The state is asking Judge Thad Balkman to approve a 30-year abatement plan that would require Johnson & Johnson to pay more than $17.5 billion.
Wednesday’s testimony contained plenty of fireworks as Johnson & Johnson attorney Stephen Brody questioned Oklahoma Mental Health Commissioner Terri White about several situations over the past 20 years where Oklahoma boards and agencies passed up opportunities to place limits on opioid prescribing.
Brody asked White if she thought state officials shared some responsibility for the opioid crisis.
“Absolutely not,” White said.
She then launched a tearful defense of efforts by state employees to combat the growing opioid epidemic while they were in the dark about a multi-million dollar marketing campaign by Johnson & Johnson and other opioid manufacturers aimed at increasing opioid sales in the state.
During other testimony Wednesday, it was revealed that Johnson & Johnson sales representatives were urging Oklahoma doctors who were high prescribers of opioids to prescribe even more at the same time those doctors were under investigation for over prescribing.
Johnson & Johnson’s attorney showed Commissioner White a series of reports regarding Oklahoma health professionals who were disciplined for over prescribing or mishandling opioid prescriptions and asked if any state agency had ever notified his company about suspicions they had about the doctors’ activities.
White said she didn’t know, but noted some of the documents she was shown were the results of undercover investigations. She also noted that Johnson & Johnson obtains its own prescribing data on physicians and said Johnson & Johnson never informed the state that it had targeted those doctors for sales calls.
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