Over the past month in a southeast Georgia courtroom, three generations of families testified about how their lives had been savaged by addiction to prescription opioids: A young man recounted huddling in a locked room with his brothers, while his father, waving a shotgun, ransacked the house for pills. A mother described holding her granddaughter, while her dopesick daughter rammed a car into the house. A young woman told of her rape at age 14 by a drug dealer, while her mother nodded out.
They ticked off overdose deaths: grandparents, parents, siblings, spouses. And a baby, whose mother injected Dilaudid throughout her pregnancy and who shook uncontrollably throughout his monthlong life.
It was the first lawsuit to come to trial brought by individual victims of the opioid epidemic against pharmaceutical companies. On Wednesday afternoon, the victims lost.
After deliberating barely a day and a half, the jury found that the companies — two of the country’s largest medical distributors, McKesson and Cardinal Health, and a third regional one — were not liable. The plaintiffs — 21 relatives from six families — had filed suit under a rarely used state law that permits relatives of people addicted to drugs to sue drug dealers.
