Testimony continued Monday in the trial of Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiaries, which are accused of helping cause the state’s opioid epidemic through false and misleading marketing efforts that allegedly understated the risks of opioids while overstating their benefits.
From 2000-2017, there were over 6,100 prescription opioid related deaths in Oklahoma, state officials have said. The attorney general has accused Johnson & Johnson of being a public nuisance.
Jason Beaman, chair of Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences, testified Monday and blamed Johnson & Johnson for helping cause the opioid epidemic through aggressive marketing efforts that downplayed the addiction and overdose risks associated with opioids.
“Had we known that the misinformation campaign was coming, then we could have planned for it,” Beaman said. “It’s going to take us 20 to 30 years to get out of this.”
Earlier in the day, there was testimony about payments to doctors and the influence those payments can have on doctors’ opinions.
“I do not believe a physician should be helping pharmaceutical companies market their products,” testified New York psychiatrist Andrew Kolodny, an expert on the nation’s opioid epidemic and one of the state’s key witnesses in the lawsuit.
Kolodny noted that some doctors kept advocating for the aggressive use of opioids to treat back aches and other non-cancer chronic pain even after it had become clear that overdose deaths had become a huge public health problem. Kolodny said he believes many of those physicians might have backed away from that position if they weren’t being paid by pharmaceutical companies.
Kolodny’s testimony came as he was asked to comment on documents showing that Johnson & Johnson directly paid certain doctors anywhere from $4,898 to more than $265,000 over a series of years to talk about the use of opioids in the treatment of chronic pain.
Johnson & Johnson attorney Michael Yoder attempted to turn the tables on Kolodny, asking him about the money he had received as an expert witness for the state and whether that had influenced his opinions expressed during the trial.
Kolodny testified previously that he was being paid $725 an hour to assist Oklahoma attorneys in preparing their case and to appear as an expert witness. He estimated he had received $300,000 to $500,000 from the state at the time of his pretrial deposition and said that he had worked a lot of hours since then preparing and testifying during the trial.
Kolodny said even before the state started paying him, he was publicly expressing his belief that aggressive marketing by opioid manufacturers caused the opioid crisis.
John Sparks, Oklahoma counsel for Johnson & Johnson and Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., disputed Kolodny’s testimony.
“There is a gap wide enough to drive a truck through between Dr. Kolodny’s far-reaching personal opinions and the facts: Janssen’s marketing practices complied with FDA regulations,” Sparks said.
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