Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd fueled opioid addiction in New York state, a jury found on Thursday, a setback for a company still facing thousands of other opioid-related lawsuits around the United States.
The verdict, which followed a nearly six-month New York state court trial in a case brought by the state and two of its counties, does not include damages, which will be determined later.
The judge in the case is still considering a request Teva made for a mistrial after a lawyer for the state cited an inaccurate statistic about opioid prescriptions in his closing argument. If the verdict stands, it could put pressure on Teva to reach a nationwide settlement with other states and local governments over opioid claims.
New York and Nassau and Suffolk counties had accused the Israel-based drugmaker of engaging in misleading marketing practices that fueled opioid addiction in the state, including by pushing drugs for off-label use.
They focused on Actiq and Fentora, cancer pain drugs made by Cephalon Inc, a company Teva bought in 2011, as well as generic opioids sold by Teva.
The evidence at trial included a parody video made for a Cephalon sales meeting in 2006 in which the villain, Dr. Evil from the "Austin Powers" films, talks about promoting the drugs for non-cancer pain, and another video, based on a courtroom scene in the film "A Few Good Men," in which a Cephalon employee tells a lawyer played by Tom Cruise that he "can't handle the truth" about what sales representatives need to do to meet quotas.
Teva argued at trial that it complied with federal and state regulations and denied engaging in deceptive marketing. It attributed a surge in opioid prescriptions to a change in medical standards of care emphasizing pain treatment beginning in the 1990s.
U.S. officials have said that by 2019, the health crisis had led to nearly 500,000 opioid overdose deaths over two decades. More than 100,000 people died from drug overdoses during the 12-month period ending April 2021, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-drug-overdose-deaths-top-100000-annually-cdc-2021-11-17 in November, a record driven in large part by deaths from opioids like fentanyl.
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